When you’re addicted to easy winning in a game that’s getting steadily harder, at some point you’ll likely switch to an easier game that you’ll then try to reshape to deliver the same sort of dopamine hit.
Most adults > 25 have no surplus attention. In fact they’re usually overcommitted. Due to sunk costs, even big new opportunities/threats rarely shake people out of high-inertia overcommitment equilibria. So big attention redeployments usually signal commitment collapse elsewhere
People sometimes explicitly retire from one game to try another, but usually there’s a life-stage transition or clear ambition ratchet involved. And it’s usually well managed with succession etc. It is undeclared attention redeployments that are interesting to analyze.
Undeclared *downwards* redeployments. Upwards resets and more leisure are normal.
With isolated individuals there is often a specific provocation (diagnostic question: “who hurt you?”). When a bunch of people start doing it, a bigger game somewhere else is in trouble.
At a basic level, something that took X attention last week to manage doesn’t suddenly require 0.75X. Either someone is backfilling or the game is collapsing in a way that means it can absorb less attention.
An example is the Kashmir terrorist movement that suddenly appeared in the early 1990s. The newly unemployed 1980s Afghan conflict energy had to go somewhere. A lot of it went to Kashmir. The geopolitical issue there didn’t suddenly become more or differently important.
Multiple large-scale collective attention redeployment patterns going on right now remind me of this. They are not a response to new opportunities or threats. They represent migrations of players from games that got too hard in their late phase.
Expect a shit load of this phenomenon as old games either end or get too hard faster than suitable new games emerge to absorb the energy at an impedence matched level. So the energy will flow into lower-powered games and blow them up, driving domino effect collapse chains.
A version of this plays out in Carlotta Perez model in the transition phases of tech revolution when easy returns evaporate but you’re addicted to high returns for low efforts and you turn to frauds and scams instead. Same idea but generalized to dopamine returns over $ returns
Old frontiers — financial, political, tech, social, cultural — have all shifted, shrunk, or shut down suddenly in the last 5 years. Those not prescient enough to skate to where the puck’s gone, or young enough to skate after it, are downsizing their games or retiring.
Many Wild West types like Buffalo Bill transitioned from soldiers/frontiersmen to entertainers as the frontier shut down 🤔
It’s an interesting pattern, kinda like downcycling
When history pivots suddenly, leaving no way for aging powerful people to turn into revered elders with secure legacies, they tend to turn into stranded elders in historical cul-de-sacs whose only hope for continued relevance is to invade a weaker neighboring country
Heh “dopamine grift” is a good way to think of this whole phenomenon. The biggest scams tend to be the ones people pull on their own endocrine systems.
Another way to think of it is competition degradation. As healthy games get harder, players who have hit their max ability can no longer grow with the old game. So they shift attention to games at their level which are uglier Spoils, Darwinist, or Looting games. Winners gotta win
Trying to define “healthy competition” via 2x2
Afaict all natural competition is somewhere between unhealthy and fatal for the loser so if possible at all, “healthy” is a function of a) artificial rules b) the “prize” having high societal surplus
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