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Is it going to still work on blood pressure? I don’t like the idea of taking meds because I want to resolve things with diet and exercise when possible, and I’m afraid of side effects. But if I eventually have to start taking a blood pressure medication and the side effect is it makes my ADHD better, I could get on board with that.
My perspective is only mine, but I’ve had mixed results on this.
I’m in my mid-thirties and I have not seen a doctor as an adult. I have been to urgent care twice, once in my early twenties for pneumonia and once a couple years ago for a fungal ear infection.
I have a few minor ailments, some curable and some not, which I would love to see a doctor for. But I’m always afraid to open that door. Due to my ADHD, I tend to get in a cycle where I’ll find a decent job, burn out due to poor sleep hygiene and the pressure of wanting to do well, and then spend months working on personal projects and getting good sleep until I have to find work again.
I have this fear that I’ll find a doctor and get prescribed for something that I’m told I need and then become reliant on that medicine and then leave my job and not have an affordable way to get it. I’m mildly overweight, but at my peak fatness I was worried I was pre-diabetic. And I avoided seeing a doctor still because I figured I’d like to focus on diet and exercise to address it without medicine, because I don’t want to get prescribed anything. I get concerned hearing news stories about doctors getting pharmaceutical kickbacks.
I can’t stay young forever. My problems will worsen without adequate care. My goal is to make enough money from creating software independently that I don’t have to worry about whether I have a job or not when I schedule a doctor’s visit. To know I’ll be able to afford any medication either way. I feel like I’m getting close to realistically achieving this but it’s not necessarily a realistic goal for the average person with ADHD to have.
In the absence of healthcare, I have smoked and consumed a lot of cannabis. This self-medication has been the source of some of my ailments. There is a real possibility that if I continue to smoke this way into old age, I will develop some form of emphysema. I do not want to be dependent on this drug forever.
That said, the effect it has on my ADHD is mostly positive. I’ve developed a tolerance such that I’m not as affected by most of the usual negative side effects - impaired memory, lowered cognitive function, etc, though there is still some effect. It leads me to disassociate more for sure. But that can also be good practice for maintaining focus when I’m sober. I’m a lot better at that than I used to be. Maybe mainly due to maturity and experience. But if properly channeled, the THC-fueled ADHD tangents can lead to productive results. In my experience.
People forget that cannabis has a narcotic component. When I consume edibles, it makes me sleepy. But something about the metabolic pathway of smoking gives cannabis smoke or vapor a stimulant effect on me. And it motivates me to enjoy the thing I’m doing, whatever that is. It’s very easy to get lost in the enjoyment of watching movies or playing video games or making comments on Lemmy (oops). But when I’m doing work while high, I get a certain enjoyment in the minutiae of the task and trying to adequately solve whatever piece of the puzzle is keeping my work from advancing. Where I might not have had the motivation to work at all before, cannabis can make it a fun activity. Again, it’s how it works for me.
But it’s expensive, even with how cheap it’s become. When you look at the long term, who knows if I would have saved money with pharmaceuticals instead? And it hurts my lungs, makes me cough loudly. I’m also dependent on it. I’ve needed to stop at times for jobs, or because I was trying to quit. And I notice after a week or two, I’m more irritable, more lethargic, with increased depression and suicidal ideation. It is addictive.
But so are the stimulants people with ADHD take. I’ve dated people on these meds and seen the difference in energy of on versus off. I wonder if in some ways I’m better of from having not used my access to medical care and instead I developed coping mechanisms that allow me to exist in the world. Or just grew out of some of my issues to some degree. But even if THC has helped me with the introspective development I needed to reach this point, I wonder if I would now be better off without it. And maybe give the pharmaceuticals a shot, tentatively. I’m unsure.
I don’t think the guy promoting cannabis in this thread is doing so with very much tact, and maybe the downvotes are useful to deliver that point. But given my history I hesitate to entirely dismiss the idea that cannabis can stand in for a stimulant in certain scenarios. We should be realistic about the risks and tradeoffs, but I felt the need to provide my somewhat biased viewpoint. Not trying to persuade anyone, just want my experience to live here as another point of data. In case anyone else has experienced something similar.
It’s an uphill battle for sure. We gain resiliency from decentralization, but you’re right that there is a cost in efficiency. Long-term, we should work to achieve collective ownership of centralized data centers, to literally seize the means of our content production.
But we can’t currently afford the upfront cost such an endeavor takes, even collectively. The ruling class has gone far to ensure our collective means reach not much further than the ends of our own tables. But I still have hope for what we can achieve.
Even if we don’t yet have the resources or the efficiency, one thing we can start working on already is the political infrastructure. Obviously, the official government is laden with corruption. And we can dream about overturning Citizens United, but we shouldn’t be holding our breath. While we must keep fighting that fight, we can simultaneously devote time to learning how to govern ourselves.
What is fair? What are rights? What is the value of a person’s time? Of a person’s life? What is a person? When does an idea stop belonging to an individual and start belonging to everyone?
We can codify these things, and we can even make algorithms that compare our opinions on these subjects and build up logical governing rules over time to maximize fulfillment for everyone. But one thing that’s almost impossible to do is to protect our new society from corruption. We can make the perfect voting system and even if we manage to successfully detect and remove bots, the influence of capitalist ideology penetrates our zeitgeist deeply. Our TV, music, religions, and games while often poking fun at the beast are all intrinsically part of it.
So, what do we do? I think we should accept that part of ourselves. The part that corrupts us, that loves the wars, the pollution, the lack of education. The side of our society that glorifies the billionaire class and will lash out if in mortal danger.
Because I think you’re absolutely right. The more of a threat we appear to be, the more they will come after us. So, we need to make our endeavors look and act like theirs. Real businesses with a real regard for efficiency and profit margins.
But instead of a CEO and a board of directors, we place an artificial intelligence. And instead of trying to maximize profits for investors, we train our AI to maximize profits for workers. And each worker gets a say in the design of the AI, in proportion to the amount of work they do for the company. The work they do is measured as a calculation of how much success they make for the company. Success being a combined metric of estimated financial profit merged with quantifiable improvement in quality of life for our customers.
It’s not a corruption-proof system, but I think allowing real workers to collectively train an AI boss is a good way of combating the effects of corruption in realtime. If I were a worker in such a system, I would implore our AI CEO to classify any livestock in our farms as customers and workers with rights proportional to their brain sizes when compared with our own. So, making lives better for cattle on farms would directly affect the perceived value of the worker who made those changes. This might make our products more expensive when compared to a capitalist model, but if a worker implements the innovation of livestreams from all our livestock to show how fulfilled they are, and the biodiversity/ carbon capture solutions we have crafted into their environments, customers may be willing to pay for a food with less attached guilt, especially if they are entitled to larger profit shares from their own AI employers than in the capitalist model. And if our customers are perceived to be happier as a result, the workers who implemented the livestreams would be rewarded in kind.
If capitalists can game that system by creating bots which produce quantifiable work and are compensated in kind, we can still utilize that labor. If we set the initial conditions correctly, this should result in a workless society where no human has or needs money. Because at the end of that road, no humans can find any appreciable amount of work to do, so the only purpose they serve is to be customers for the perfected AI companies. And because all efficiencies have already been carved out by the capitalist bots, the only way for the bots to make additional profit is to make quality of life improvements for the customers. We become the livestock, with all our needs met. The rich become the workers, toiling to find something to do with their money.
And that may not seem like the perfect end, but maybe it’s the best we can hope for. The capitalists finally have all the money. But they’ve unwittingly taken part in our utopia. And we didn’t have to eat them after all. We just have to find a way of quantifying fairness.
If we can train an AI to determine what compensation is a fair reward for any given task, both now and in the future, everything else falls in line. But maybe that’s as tautological as saying if we could only root out corruption from the US government, we could get rid of Citizens United. The horse isn’t anywhere near that cart. But hey, it’s fun to dream.
It’s funny, I thought of the exact same metaphor to describe tech giants, just a few weeks ago. It was in the lead-up to reddit pulling the plug on their API, as I was thinking about the ideal alternative to the current model of social media. Sometime around March, I saw this video: https://www.tiktok.com/@endangeredecosystems/video/7226846526713171205?lang=en
I thought about how current platforms quash diversity similar to how huge sections of rainforest are replaced with endlessly mundane tree farms that produce only palm oil. Instead of different levels of canopy for big communities, medium communities, and small communities, the tree farm just has one level which uniformly blocks almost all the light from making it to the forest floor.
In old growth forests, the biggest and oldest trees naturally fall and leave gaps in the canopy for new life to emerge. Right now, we have some new trees reclaiming portions of the homogeneous zones. Where parts of Facebook are burning, we have Friendica moving in. Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube are slowly being encroached upon by Lemmy, Mastodon, and PeerTube.
I think that ActivityPub is a big step in the right direction, but it’s also just the first step of many. In the future, I want to see a full ecosystem of applications that are not just replacements of existing platforms, but living, growing, and evolving platforms of their own. We have pieces of that now, but communication between different fediverse platforms is not fully integrated. It would be great to eventually have an online world where the barriers between platforms are largely symbolic and any idea can spread anywhere with minimal effort.
Meaning, we’ll all be passing around snippets of code, digital assets, and textual ideas, allowing us to create new subplatforms on demand, which naturally intermingle and breed with everyone else’s subplatforms to produce dynamic macroplatforms capable of delivering desired content and behaviors quickly, accurately, and securely. We can crowdsource efficiency into every action in our society and everyone can benefit from our collective successes, while still programmatically rewarding those who work to push the progress bar forward.
Ultimately, I think that is the way to beat both climate change and income inequality. Find ways to achieve rampant decentralized success, so that resource hoarders cannot game the system to the detriment of others, but they can use their resources to take part in building a better society if they so wish. And if they don’t opt in, the rest of us will get it done behind their backs, and we’ll just have to find out whether capitalism or technosocialism works better.
That’s a really good heads up. I hadn’t thought about it much from that angle - that I might already be doing damage that’s hard to reverse.
I got my blood pressure machine from the basement and the first reading was systolic 141 diastolic 78. But I had just climbed stairs from the basement. I sat for a couple minutes and now it’s 115 over 75. Less anxiety inducing. Definitely something I should be tracking frequently and not have tucked away in the basement though.