Anecdote: I got my first programming job while in the middle of a SpaceChem run (previously, I was just a hobby coder). I quit the game in a few days after starting that job, as I found it required the same "brain juices" I had already depleted at the office.

Yes, my greatest lament about life is that “brain juice” appears to be a limited resource

But I believe, there are different types of "brain juice".

I run out of the one required for nasty bug finding, very soon, but when that one is gone (and after a short break to clear the mind) I can go on creating new code/architecture for hours.

I didn’t really see these nuances until I was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed stimulant medication. It basically gives me a large tank of “rainbow juice” that works for any task and lasts 4-6 hours.

Going back to the parent comment, one remarkable effect of this is that I rarely desire to play video games like I used to. It seemed like I always had enough juice for video games but rarely for other life obligations, but with the rainbow juice I am just as motivated to do all that other stuff as I am to play video games.

I would not feel comfortable needing a drug to be productive.

I do struggle a lot at times with focus, but I rather try to balance it with good and healthy livestyle. Lots of sleep. Exercise, meditation ..

But I have a toddler boy, who can mess with sleep and rhythm a lot, so having the possibility of a "rainbow juice" is definitely tempting.

Have you noticed bad side effects? Do you allways take ritalin(?) for work? Or just on special occacions?

I’m probably on a very similar drug to OP. I take it monday-friday.

Common side effects of ADHD drugs are loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping, and increased heart rate. It basically puts you into fight or flight mode for 6 hours a day. More blood to your brain + muscles, less to everything else (digestion, immune system for example).

One weird thing about it is the first few times you take it you’ll get a feeling of euphoria, like you’re on cocaine. This is _not_ the way the drug is supposed to feel, it goes away if you stick with the same dose for a while. Some people keep going up because they think the euphoria is part of it, and that’s really dangerous.

It really does work incredibly well for me. Especially for programming, where you’re most productive when you’re not pulled out of a flow state. I went from a B average to straight A’s when I started taking it in college. It made it so easy to oranize my schedule, I just worked/studied from 8-6 every day. No late nights, no procrastination.

Personally, I have no feeling of withdrawal when I go off of it for weeks at a time. Though I have developed a bit of a psychological dependency around work, where I kind of tell myself I won’t work well without it, which becomes self-fulfilling.

It’s not all good, not all bad. Hopefully this helps!

Yes, that was a really helpful shared experience, thank you!

Basically, it enforced my point of view to only try it out, if I really think it is neccecary.

I never done cocaine, but weed.

With the right time and settings it can help me get into a flow lasting for 10+ hours. But weed really does not help mid or long term, my productivity goes into steady decline after couple of days.

And coffeine I never liked, so I prefer the natural rhythm, with varying success.

I most definitely have mixed feelings about it. Granted, I wasn't diagnosed until my mid-30s, and I like to think I accumulated a respectable pile of life accomplishments beforehand (along with some dramatic failures) so I have a pretty thorough understanding of my own performance baseline. By the time I had a career and family, my problem was no longer failing to be productive, but rather failing to be productive at the right things at the right times. The modern world is built around consistency, planning and schedules and these things cause major problems for me, as for most of us with ADHD.

Stimulants (Vyvanse in my case) are blunt instruments; they alleviate the specific behavioral problems that plague those of us with ADHD but also enhance performance in general. The biggest danger that I see in my own behavior is the tendency to forget about all the self-management practices I learned before my diagnosis. With stimulants, you can do irresponsible things like stay up late for no good reason, get four hours of sleep, and still be fairly productive once the medication kicks in. I have to be really honest with myself on a daily basis about whether I'm using it to overcome a deficit caused by ADHD, or a deficit caused by bad behavior.

The second biggest danger is developing unrealistic expectations about what I am capable of accomplishing. For example, I am currently pursuing a PhD in computer science, and the decision to do so was made by the medicated version of myself. I don't regret the decision one iota, and it's a goal I've had for many years, but I already had a long list of projects and goals when I signed up for this and I definitely deluded myself about just how many of those other commitments I'd have to set aside for a while (or forever) in order to get a PhD.

"my problem was no longer failing to be productive, but rather failing to be productive at the right things at the right times. "

That is my problem right now, too. I am just scared, that medication really does not help me long term, for all the reasons you mentioned.

Thank you, for sharing.

I see comments like this and seriously start to wonder if I'm an almost 40 year old man with undiagnosed ADHD.

If only my insurance covered mental health...

There are online tests you can take. If you score high enough, its worth the few hundred dollars to get an official diagnoses. This is coming from someone who was diagnosed ADHD as an adult.

I feel the same way!

Seeing this comment makes me think that I should consider talking to a doctor about ADHD. I can't even focus on playing a video game for more than 30 minutes most of the time.

Sometimes referred to as Spoon Theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory

We've been calling it mana among my group.

What is it?

I'd tell you all about it, but I'm currently all out of it ;)

Look into Ego Depletion. There's academic disagreement over just how "consumable" willpower is. My assessment of SOTA is:

- ego/willpower is finite/depletable

- Most people have more or less the same amount of it as the average. People with "more willpower" typically are more efficient with it

- non-neurotypicals and those that "don't fit in society" (ADHD, ASD, bipolar, trans, nonbinary, anxiety, OCD) often spend much willpower on "passing"

- it's linked to everything from blood sugar levels, insulin levels, brain blood flow, dopamine levels, D1/D2 activation ratios, and probably gut microbiome

maybe replenish "brain juice" by drinking it from another brain?

If you're into that kind of metaphors, you may like the game 'Carrion'; warning, lots of pixel blood. It launched not long ago and does a great job in creating an 80s horror atmosphere. At the same time it's a relatively easy metroidvania platformer, so I find it a genuinely good activity to recover "brain juice" after coding.

Thank you for recommending this. I just bought the game and I’m most certainly going to be spending a few weekends on this : )

It helps to balance out the stress on different faculties. If you write code for 14 hours a day you're gonna burnout but if you balance a variety of activities it is possible to be very productive while not feeling exhausted.

Emotional, mental and physical energy are all limited resources.

I found with "Opus Magnum" that, yeah, it was programming of a sort, but since it was all these wacky physical devices, that it was enough unlike coding that it switched back to being a fun puzzle.

But, yeah, with "TIS-1000" it was just programming, and sort of unnecessarily (and unpleasantly) difficult programming at that.

I really enjoyed TIS-1000, possibly because of the constraints the machine and assembly language posed. Finding clever ways to work within those constraints was fun. Same sort of fun I get when writing 6502 ASM for ROM hacks on my Atari 2600.

In my day job at the time the game came out I was doing node.js microservices. So it was refreshing to work at the bit level again.

Wow never saw SpaceChem before. Thanks for the unintended recommendation :)

I hope I didn't sound too negative, it's a good game and can be quite a bit of fun.

Kind of how all games are.

I could sit here and get virtual levels and virtual money... or go raise my actual human fitness level, or go work on my actual business for actual money.

Games are an easy win to feed you nuggets of feeling like you did stuff, but a poor substitute for real life.

Nonsensical argument unless you generally spend time you should be working gaming or spend time you could be relaxing working.

If you want to be a workaholic and spend your free time working, go right ahead.

But you will end up like my father, mid 70s with no real relationships with your family, obsessed with "completing your legacy" and a general inability to enjoy anything that isn't "work".

If that sound like fun to you, go right ahead.

Me, I'll continue to work at work and spend my free time on relaxation.

You only get one life, spending it chasing dollars and dimes is a poor life plan

I work on programming projects I find fun. What makes it recreation is that it's something I want to work on, I don't have others imposing deadlines or requirements.

A mechanic can enjoy working on his own project car in the off time.

Both of these things are productive in a way that playing games isn't, but they're still recreational. It's not spending your life chasing dimes. It's looking at the different recreational things you could be doing, and choosing the ones that also intersect with being productive and have a side-effect of helping you professionally.

Games and play -- of the "unproductive" kind -- are a fundamental and valuable human activity. Not everything has to produce something beyond mental well-being. Plus, of course, children learn by playing.

We can keep learning by playing as we get older, we just change the scope. You have to tend to your curiosity to keep it fit and capable.

Sure. You don't have to convince me of this! I'm already a believer :)

Nobody said your hobbies must be productive. But some people prefer it to be, and I don't think it's right to shame those people as if they're just chasing dimes or denying part of what it is to be human.

Productive is all relative anyway. Children learning by playing is productive, the productive part is the learning that is a byproduct. Working on a project car is fun in itself. It doesn't become less fun if the person doing it is a professional mechanic. Would you tell a person who plays games professionally in an e-sports league that they must do something else for fun?

I think it is a sign of good life when you find a way to get paid for doing what you enjoy. And if you enjoy it, then it is still fun when you do it outside of work. The productive benefits of it do not make it less fun.

I agree with both of you, to a degree. Playing a single player video game is unlikely to help you build relationships with others. And yet never stopping to enjoy life in all its variation leads to a pretty empty life, too.

> Playing a single player video game is unlikely to help you build relationships with others

I disagree. I have fond memories of discussing Zelda on the playground as a kid. Similarly, online communities are formed around basically every notable single player game. It's still a shared experience, even if it's not shared at the same moment.

Your father got a child, so he's clearly not obsessing enough about work.

Recreation is important and one form is not more "real" than another. Notwithstanding the fact that some games feel like work (and therefore suck, in my view), for those that are enjoyable, that provides value, whether it be chess, team sports or a video game.

Maybe there's something to be said for opting to lead a more creative rather than consumptive lifestyle. Ultimately though, something only matters if you think it does. My work is largely bullshit, and I can't think of a business I'd want to get into that also wouldn't feel like bullshit. I think the value I'd extract would precisely be in the connections made and the problem-solving itself. How important is another piece of enterprise software to extract money from people that no one thought they wanted until it exists?

Have you considered changing your line of work, and perhaps seeing if you can use your existing skills to help you in a new career?

I'm eyeing off a few avenues, I wouldn't mind not writing software for money anymore but it would also be cool to use my hard earned experience to my advantage. One avenue I thought of was music composition, because there are ways to automate some of it with code that I could use to provide some extra value, but it's also enough of a leap from my current career that it would be a wildly new endeavor.

What about a B2C app that solves a real problem for real users in a new or better way than existing apps? That seems like an easy way you can deliver real value. That's what's gotten me moving on all my personal projects so far—though granted, I haven't published/monetized them yet, just shared them with friends and family. But I get value from them and my friends and family get value from them, and that makes me feel good.

Value to someone, sure. I wouldn't necessarily see the value in it.

I do have personal projects, one to do good, others out of curiosity. Mostly out of an urgency to be creative. I don't think this carries more meaning than pure leisure.

Eh. Time and place. People need downtime and even though I don't game much these days, I think fondly of all the hours of Starcraft and Starcraft 2 I played. And beating Xan on Godlike in Unreal Tournament 2004 (and totally cleaning up when we had lan parties) was just so fun.

Real life is fun too. But games are part of life.

But there is only so much time that you can be effective at running a business or running. Some people need to relax from the stress of work and tiredness of exercise by playing games for example.

But is it all that relaxing to build and run a complex virtual factory? Sometimes if the level of difficulty is too high it can become stressful.

I understand that there's satisfaction in it. That satisfaction can be hard to get at work sometimes. At work, you can be asked to work on things you don't like, that sometimes feel even more pointless than a game.

Part of the reason why I have programming side-projects at home is because they're an outlet to get the satisfaction of building software the way I want to.

The consequences of messing up a make believe factory is essentially nothing except one’s own time loss. The consequences of messing up a real factory are obviously substantial. What games or side projects let us do sometimes is to explore and enter a more diffuse mode of thought which has some tangential benefits to other activities. Spending too much time “being productive” can be counterproductive because one can get tunnel vision too busy executing tasks instead of reimagining or optimizing those tasks. Too much time questioning the work and nothing materially important gets done either.

Would you say the same thing about fictional books? They're generally regarded as being worth the time, but aren't they also "a poor substitute for real life." You could be having your own experiences instead of reading made-up ones. I don't see why games should be different. Certainly not all games are created equally, and some exist only to suck away time and money, but it's obvious when that's the intention.

There is more to games than videogames where you raise levels or virtual money (which are, in turn, a very specific class of videogames).

Eww, games trying to substitute 'real life'. Realism is boring. Games should be ART. Something you CAN'T experience in real life.

Yeah, most games should stay in a fantasy land... Like where you mostly kill your enemies.