The reason I decided to opt-out of caffeine is that I thought was abusing it to force myself to do work I didn’t actually want to do. I also had the hypothesis that the human body should be fine without it, as we’ve had most of our biological evolution without it. A wolf doesn’t drink an espresso before chasing a deer, after all.
This excerpt made me stop taking this seriously. Using caffeine or any other stimulant for the purposes of doing work one isn't comfortable with doing is a character flaw (or an act of desperation, however mild), not a fault of the substance one chooses to lean on. Justifying abstinence from such substances on grounds that the substance isn't intrinsic to human biochemistry is both a naturalistic fallacy and a bizarre rejection of human social history of tool use (substances are just another tool).
What's even more interesting is if the author had ventured into mu-opioid agonists, those substances will make you happy to do work you didn't want to do before. Modification of task based dopamine response by mu-opioid agonists is a fascinating topic.
Modulating different signaling systems can vastly change our perspectives, whether good or bad is a different question. One that may not have objective answers.
Comments
This excerpt made me stop taking this seriously. Using caffeine or any other stimulant for the purposes of doing work one isn't comfortable with doing is a character flaw (or an act of desperation, however mild), not a fault of the substance one chooses to lean on. Justifying abstinence from such substances on grounds that the substance isn't intrinsic to human biochemistry is both a naturalistic fallacy and a bizarre rejection of human social history of tool use (substances are just another tool).
What's even more interesting is if the author had ventured into mu-opioid agonists, those substances will make you happy to do work you didn't want to do before. Modification of task based dopamine response by mu-opioid agonists is a fascinating topic.
Modulating different signaling systems can vastly change our perspectives, whether good or bad is a different question. One that may not have objective answers.
Is there anywhere I can read more about this? I don't want to try it myself but self-modification is a topic I'm very interested in
Absolutely! Most of these focus on social motivation in particular.
https://www.nature.com/articles/mp20141
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09637214177355...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958027/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4482114/