A case for extreme realism – Santi Aranguri
It’s powerful: to appreciate that you are alive and clearly see your duty. I don’t have a smartphone, I close my eyes when I see an ad in the street, and I barely listen to music. Why is it that I relentlessly ask for a low-stimuli life? It’s the only way to deal with the acceleration of addictiveness: to withdraw from it. So, instead of buying the last phone each year, you stay with the same low-quality phone. I make up my mind about X only after the addictiveness of X is well-known. The point is to avoid distractions, and by distraction I mean a digression from your goals in life. A distraction is like going to a suboptimal local maximum, instead of working hard to go to the global maximum. But, think for a second: why would the brain reward us in this second for doing something that is not good for us in the long term? It doesn’t make evolutionary sense. The reward metric is just the expected benefit of an action. Deviating from what is expected to benefit you is unfit behavior. But
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