Take something you don’t like and try to like it

As a compulsive, I have the problem of liking too many things. I don’t drink coffee because in a month I’ll be neck deep in forums about the proper way to grind beans. I don’t own an aquarium because I’ll be obsessively learning about perfect water pH for the most exotic fish. I don’t drink hot tea because I’ll be studying growth patterns and how seasonality affects leaves and their flavor. I don’t drink beer because I’d be sucked into learning how to craft my own.

I appreciate that it’s useful to have an open mind about your tastes and preferences, but each rabbit hole I stumble into is far deeper than the time I have available to explore. So for me, i have to find reasons to dislike things to protect my time and my existing obsessions.

What are some of your current obsessions? I enjoy learning and discovering so I enjoy tech and when I get into something the joy is from the rabbit hole and then I am done and move on.

What has kept your interest?

As I creak and grunt into my mid-forties, I find a major concern of mine is my mind growing stale and stiff like an old slice of bread, and a good random deep dive into cheesemaking or the different uses of tofu in traditional Chinese cooking might help stave that off. Or it might just make me boring in a different way, IDK.

Not OP, but I was also replying and had thoughts along a similar vein.

I'm 44 and have had countless hobbies over my adolescent and adult lives. Some I've taken up multiple times, some I've visited multiple variations on a core idea (e.g. aquariums/planted tanks/dwarf shrimp tanks). I've learned (and subseqeuntly forgotten) a tremendous amount, and spent an unholy amount of money. Most things have not stayed with me.

Miniature painting is one thing that I think might last me the rest of my life.

I think it boils down to a few factors:

- miniatures aren't alive; I don't need to care for them, so the worst that can happen is I break or scratch something. This keeps my anxiety/concern/guilt largely out of the equation.

- the feedback cycles are fairly short; I know almost immediately if a paint stroke was good or bad, if my brush is too wet or too dry, etc. A single project is normally just a couple of hours, and then it's done and I can view it as a completed whole.

- the product occupies little space and it's trivial to keep around and compare to work done before and after and see progression and evolution over time. Also, if you're prone to collecting things, just keeping the product on the shelf next to other things becomes an ongoing source of reward.

- if I absolutely fubar something, I can buy or print a new mini for a couple bucks or throw it in some Simple Green overnight and brush the old paint off. Most of the time I can just paint over the issue.

- paint, brushes, a wet palette, minis, airbrush, etc all add up, but you can have an amazing setup for under a thousand bucks, and you can transcend the realm of mortals for $2K. The ongoing costs after that are manageable unless you're into Warhammer. You can get started and do some really fun and cool things with a $50 starter kit.

So there's some higher-dimension graph with effort, frustration, reward, feedback latency, etc, and for me at least painting miniatures tends to sit in a happy area.

How hard is cleanup in order to keep things usable? I love the idea of painting minis and models- especially learning the various weathering effects but it seemed like it would take a lot of energy to keep everything functional.

As someone with ADHD, for me obsessing over something to the point of needing to be reminded to eat and drink is actually extremely healthy.

It took me a long time to accept that following my special interests is what my brain craves and what gives me a sense of fulfillment. It might be unhealthy for a neurotypical person but very healthy for me.

In fact when I am losing the spark and just can't get into anything that is when I know I am burning out and need to make changes.

Trivial, honestly. And I'm not a particularly disciplined or functional person. The overwhelming majority of hobbyists use acrylic, which has no meaningful smell and can be thinned with a drop of water. I haven't had any issues with staining or the paint going where it's unwanted, and you typically only use a few drops at a time.

Sometimes I use a dry palette and sometimes a wet palette. The dry palettes are plastic and cheap on Amazon. You rinse them off in the sink. If the paint dries, use a greenie or a brush - no problem. The wet palette just needs to be wiped off with a wet napkin before you close it up, and to have the wax paper replaced when it starts to rub through. If you get the sponge dirty, it's a sponge - just fill it up with water, squish it, maybe use a little Mean Green/Simple Green/etc to clean it up.

The airbrush is a little more involved, but I dramatically overestimated how much of a pain in the ass it would be. Most of the time the cleanup for that is 3-5 minutes and not unpleasant. Occasionally it'll need to be broken down a little further, but it's still not a big deal. The mechanism isn't nearly as complex as it may initially seem.

Brushes aren't a big deal to keep clean. You'd destroy a bunch, but you'll learn over time what not to do. Just don't start with the (comparatively expensive and arguably barbaric) sable brushes, start with garbage quality brushes and treat them as disposable. Rinse them, use a little brush soap, and don't brutalize or drown them and they'll last longer and longer and maintain a better quality, then you can upgrade.

Nothing else really comes to mind in terms of labor.

Your comment immediately made me think of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZK8Z8hulFg

While I'm savvy enough to keep my madness to myself (most of the time), that's pretty much what's happening in my brain!

Similarly, I have so many hobbies now that I am actually stressed by them taking us so much space and costing so much money, and me spending so little time on each of them.

I'm now actively trying to cut down on them instead, and accept that I'll have some "boredom" time as a result.

I can "like" just about any hobby. I definitely don't need to explore more of them. They find me on their own, and I really don't need them to.

I'm in the other spectrum I think. I like a lot of stuff, but I don't seem to be able to immerse myself in them. The flow doesn't come easily. Instead I feel detached and ambivalent about pretty much everything. It's fine that I'm doing, and while I'm doing it I'll do it with a lot of presence. I also get very good at it. But in time I just wanna lazy out and watch TV while browsing the web. It's pretty sad and I wish I could will myself into one obsession or another.

> the product occupies little space and it's trivial to keep around

Haha, I have found this to absolutely NOT be the case! Each individual mini only takes up and inch or so, but they multiply and between them and the brushes/airbrush/paint racks and the ever-increasing grey Pile of Shame, it’s not a small amount of space taken up!

It is an extremely rewarding hobby with a low bar to entry, though, and I agree that I will probably never stop.

Everything is a distraction from a distraction from a distraction. -Kierkegaard

> I wish I could will myself into one obsession or another.

I understand. Not sure if you’re in the same boat, but for me, it’s a combination of age, energy, time, and becoming jaded. I used to spend late night hours poking at new things to learn about new hobbies and the like. The older I get, the less time and energy I’m willing to excerpt. This has been great for my getting back to reading books, but it’s been a sinkhole for self-learning and new skill development. The dopamine is lacking.

> I don’t drink coffee because in a month I’ll be neck deep in forums about the proper way to grind beans.

This was me last week. I was looking to buy a new coffee grinder, and I just could not believe the way that people on the Internet talk about these things. One popular coffee YouTuber recommended a $200 hand grinder as an entry level grinder [1]. There's also a widely repeated concept in the community of the "end game" grinder - as if working your way up to a $1000 coffee grinder should be the goal of every coffee drinker rather than just being satisfied with a $200 - $300 grinder (or even a $100 grinder, god forbid).

And I decided not to go down the rabbit hole because I really doubt whether spending more and obsessing more would actually increase my enjoyment of coffee. I currently use a $23 hand grinder [2] that makes a tasty cup of coffee (I am looking for a new grinder not because I am dissatisfied with the results, but rather because grinding by hand can be annoying). Now that I know there are $200 grinders out there, it makes me wonder what I am missing out on. And I'm sure if I had a $200 grinder, I would be wondering what $500 would get me, etc. And how am I ever going to be able to enjoy a cup of coffee at a restaraunt, or at a friend's house, if I allow my standards to get so high?

So I guess to bring this back to the original article: try to find enjoyment in the basic, no-frills version. If you're a coffee snob, can you still enjoy a cup of Nescafe instant coffee? If you're a wine snob, can you enjoy a glass of Yellow Tail? If you're a music snob, can you enjoy listening to Taylor Swift?

[1] https://youtu.be/1t8qUbZ6nSs?si=JrpezhykYAm2lZoq&t=705

[2] https://a.co/d/aIqZtw1

I am a calm coffee (espresso) snob.

I love the basic, and I love the fine.

Believe it or not, expensive grinders (~$500 range) create an unbelievable difference.

But they’re a luxury :)

Lance Hedrick (popular coffee YouTuber) demonstrates time and time again that cheap machines and setups can rival even the most expensive end-game setups.

There's a difference between being present and enjoying something in the moment versus equating the background process with the moment itself.

Coffee is an example, but there are plenty of others:

There's a pretty basic problem that a coffee grinder is a motor, the actual grinding surfaces, and the tubes that connect where the beans come from and grounds go to. Maybe add a scale and a little bit of electronics, but still, what does a $1000 grinder have that a $200 doesn't?

Indeed you have to get a lot of things precisely right to get a desired grind particle size distribution and that takes science and study and precision but the end product is still only a few simple parts that meet a specification. The problem is volume and just charging large amounts of money because that's how you attract customers in the "quality" space where having very good taste for quality is itself quite hard.

Coffee grinders are ripe for disruption with a low cost high quality product, but in order to pay for the engineering time to make one you have to have confidence in pretty high volume so picking a price point is hard.

As an alternative... I have fun, for lack of a better phrase, collecting hobbies. I don't intentionally try to stop having one interest to give another "more important" one space, I just follow my nose. (most recently, auto repair and painting)

HAH! I have been happily using your grinder for a decade (When I clicked on your link, Amazon tells me I bought it on July 30, 2015). Last week, I realized it is just way too worn down to be useful. I see no reason why I wont buy the same one again.

Pro tip: stick your drill/electric screwdriver to it and now you have a $200 motorized grinder. Been doing that for a decade. I use the same drill to roast my own beans in a homemade "wobble disk" roaster (look it up on youtube, if you care). I also use the drill with a whisk, and many other things.

While I enjoy (and crave) the waves (of time) that make my brain obsess over things which bring me immense joy to the point I neglect essentials (food and water), what follows is a hard learned crash where I have no energy (or dopamine) left to give to anything!

Similar for my approach (although I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD). This is how I learned electronics enough to manage becoming a certified electrical engineer without ever officially studying anything even remotely like it. I was in the exam with people who did this professionally for half of their lives. This is also how I learned anything I ever did as a freelancer, including sound mixing for movies, VFX work, color grading, programming: I was curious about it, I was young, had time and just followed my interest. It is still how I learn new things, only now all the knowledge from other domains helps me doing it even faster.

The trick is to play judo instead of karate with your own drive. Instead of trying to stop your urge and force yourself to do the boring stuff, it can work to take your energy and just slightly redirect it to where you want to go and where it makes sense for you to go. Maybe you have the urge to play a video game and can redirect it to reading a book like homo ludens instead, or maybe you redirect it towards making a game? Even if you never finished it you learned something.

I never learnt to bake, because I'm already fat enough.

Strange question: Could you obsess mainly over time management / optimisation and fix all of this?

Here's a cheat: use sieves to get the right grind size; then how "good" the grinder is is a matter of only efficiency - the worse the grind the less % is usable and the more coffee wasted. Then you can calculate the best option based on deltas of wasted coffee * coffee cost vs the cost of a better grinder (and maybe expected lifetime, but I assume burrs will wear get worse over time?).

Kind off.

First of all, time management techniques for neurotypical people do NOT work for people with ADHD.

This is why an diagnosis is so important. If you don't know that you have ADHD you will constantly try stuff that won't work for you, you will set up yourself for failure and do more harm that good and it will destroy your self esteem.

Neurotypical people tend to be importance motivated while ADHD people are interest motivated. So the approach needs to be very different. Furthermore time is very different for ADHD people. Most neurotypical people can not cram in the work of 8 hours in 2 hours, I can. But I also can't hyper focus all the time and have times where I am not getting anything done.

With ADHD it is more about managing your level of stimulation. You start the day in a dopamine deficit and need to start with small tasks that gives you quick wins. You can't tackle the important but absolutely boring work head on, you need to do some stimulating activities first to get the ball rolling.

Many ADHD people including myself develop a special interest in ADHD and organizational techniques to manage it so yeah it happens. But you can't fully control what you happen to be interested in.

Though the whole self optimizing thing is also dangerous. Some people can learn to mask their ADHD very well and be super organized but it comes at a cost. It takes tremendous energy and leads to ADHD burnout in the long term. That is often the trigger for adults to get diagnosed in the first place because they just can't keep up the masking anymore.

> You start the day in a dopamine deficit and need to start with small tasks that gives you quick wins. You can't tackle the important but absolutely boring work head on, you need to do some stimulating activities first to get the ball rolling.

Sounds like just about every human being.

The difference is that neurotypical people often have a super power that is called not having a executive dysfunction. If they want to do the task, think the task is important and are able to do the task, they can just do the task.

It is hard for me to even imagine that such a thing can exist but it absolutely is the case.

The difference is how strict the "need" it. Like neurotypical people also benefit from working on something they are interested at but for ADHD people it is not optional but necessary to function.

Also neurotypical people get much more dopamine out of even simple tasks while I can have the best conversation ever with someone and still need some fidget toys to not go crazy from sitting around.

Are you on an AD(H)D medications?

Are you me? I feel like this 100% mirrors myself. I've been slowing down the learning, I have a list of things I need to get myself to learn but I just can't find the energy to poke and prod. But I have started reading more books again.

I used that Hario grinder for years but eventually the clear base part broke. I continued using it by grinding directly into the AeroPress but it was pretty annoying. I finally upgraded to a KINGrinder K6 and it’s amazing how much better it is. It grinds way, way faster.

Personally no because I am currently too disorganized to find a doctor that would prescribe it to me, despite being diagnosed already. I live in a country that is very backwards when it comes to mental health and where the system is designed so it is very hard to get help in hope most people don't so healthcare costs can be kept down.

Generally, medication is the most effective treatment for ADHD by far but also does only work for like 80 percent of ADHD people. Some need to cope without it either way.

Hahaha, yes. Very true. I meant each individual mini is small. Yeah, my Zenithal-primed Pile of Shame occupies several square feet of wall and shelf space.

> Coffee grinders are ripe for disruption with a low cost high quality product, but in order to pay for the engineering time to make one you have to have confidence in pretty high volume so picking a price point is hard.

It sounds like a Chinese company has kind of done this with the D40+, DF54 [1], DF64, and DF83 grinders, available at price points from $200 to $800. They are white label products sold under various brand names like Turin, MiiCoffee, etc all over the world. If reviews are to be believed, they have a good grind quality in addition to nice quality of life features like very little retention, static electricity, replaceable parts, etc.

The $200 - $250 range is still probably too expensive for most homes, but definitely not out of line for a high quality kitchen appliance.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbL0olOitJg

The first part of your post and second part seem to contradict each other; please explain.

Exactly. Before I was diagnosed with ADHD, I was experiencing severe executive function. Just nearly no ability whatsoever to do things I wanted to do, even if they were fun. But had big impacts in terms of friendships (not actively trying to socialize very much, because planning basic get together felt insurmountable) and home life (simple chores were almost impossible to get done). And it doesn’t feel like laziness (which I think is more like you just don’t want to do the annoying thing right now), but like I really wanted and needed to do it, and just couldn’t make it happen.

ADHD meds have been almost a literal lifesaver, and the amount they make work halfway tolerable is… crucial.