alt Hacker NewsI don't think listening to or watching something entertaining while doing something unpleasant or boring or uncomfortable is an example of dopamine stacking. It's just a distraction technique that helps you take your mind off the aspects of it that you don't want to think about or be aware of.
Listening to music or a podcast while you work or exercise is a completely normal, non-dopamine stacking, thing to do. In the past, before radio and recorded music, people daydreamed or sang to accomplish the same goal.
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Daydreaming and singing to yourself is not entertaining. It's just something that an unstimulated brain does. To get to that destimulated place is the object imo - where what you're doing is so habitual that every step seems like a breath, and you only notice the ones you miss.
I remember before I learned the basics of cooking how hard everything was, and how much I had to concentrate. These days I'll spend 20 minutes cooking something, plate it and go to the bathroom, and have forgotten what I cooked before seeing it again. I remember when I was learning Spanish, and every successful paragraph I read merited a celebration, and now I sometimes can't remember whether something I read was in Spanish or English an hour after I've read it.
My biggest improvement in writing came after I stopped listening to music while doing it. Get it over with, then listen to music. Once you get into the habit, it's like taking a nap not having a party. I remember a factory I worked at in my 20s where I got up to doing 76 hour weeks with no days off because I was so good at what I was doing, I entered a timeless place. There was no time to get bored in. I'm sure I might have hummed, but I wouldn't remember. I certainly wasn't thinking about anything important; those machines could have ripped my hands off.
> In the past, before radio and recorded music, people daydreamed or sang to accomplish the same goal.
Call it pain avoidance or dopamine stacking, they're probably both apt, but there's a difference in degree between the level of control and personalization and dependence between humming a tune or listening to a stationary giant radio and the current state of not being able to do anything remotely unstimulating or arduous like standing on a train or going to sleep without a distraction; how normal it is seems like logical fallacy, It's also pretty normal for people to spend 5 hours a day looking at their phones, not have made any friends in adulthood outside school, or have any romantic prospects.
I find it funny/depressing that I've been asked at least 3 times why I don't wear headphones at the gym. If you can pull a lever or click a button and take your mind of something you've never let become less painful, how important is the distinction?