Please read the other comment I made in this thread, I hope it helps you beat it!

Firstly, I would like to preface by saying this is a tough addiction to beat, and is the addiction that defines our generation. Do not beat yourself up about this. I’m sure I speak for most of us comrades here to say that we care about you and your health.

That said, I’ll echo what other commenters here have said: 100% try a dopamine detox for u, for a full week or two. If it’s possible for you, inform your close friends/family what your are doing and that you may be harder to reach for a week. Basically, I would just turn off your phone and only use it when absolutely necessary, turning it off as soon as you’re done. Make sure to get a plethora of material that can at least somewhat entertain you without digital devices necessary and make them as convenient as possible to get to while making your phone as difficult as possible to access. Stick your phone in a drawer or something and have a stack of good books and maybe a crappy cheap MP3 player on your desk if you can find one. Granted, this is just about the most extreme option.

If the nuclear option is a bit impractical (which, for most people, it will be) I would set your phone to completely 100% grayscale and use the app ScreenZen or Mindful to set screentime limits for apps and block websites and such. If you care about privacy, I would turn off the network access for these apps as they require a lot of permissions that can be easily misused, and can work 100% offline. Mindful is open source and has privacy in mind, but if you’re properly paranoid (me), you’re gonna wanna get rid of its network access anyways. I personally find ScreenZen without network to be more useful as a leash to keep yourself on. It’s the only app I have found that allows you to set time limits for websites and allow cooldowns for apps rather than just completely blocking it after a certain point. Mindful might be more your speed during your detox phase because it completely hard locks sites and sets strict time limits for apps, but it’s up to you. Both have anti tamper protections that will prevent you from changing the settings unless absolutely necessary. I can let you know more about how I would personally configure them if you’d like. I would keep Mindful on for at least some long stretch of time—even after the detox has ended—before loosening the leash a bit by switching to ScreenZen, because you don’t wanna end up in the same place again.

On computers things get a bit more difficult, but scrolling is honestly not as stimulating on pc, at least to me. Regardless, you wanna take steps to prevent the scrolling from happening anyways. Fair warning: I never personally struggled with desktop scrolling, so I never did this, but there are anti scroll browser addons like this one for only chrome and this one for firefox and chrome (I can’t find one for safari on desktop lmao). I’m sure there are other methods too in order to bypass. You’ll have to experiment with that yourself unfortunately.

Best of luck to you in your journey. May you reclaim your brain.

Criticizing yourself based on whether you’d use it as a wallpaper is actually an amazing idea, so I’m stealing it!

Thank you very much comrade! Your resources will be put to use!

I am from the US and learned cursive writing in kindergarten. It became my primary way to handwrite for some time, although now I am blending a bit more of print writing into my writing fashion. On the culture of touch starving, that I can agree is silently murderous to many people. When every touch, no matter how innocent, is sexualized and sexualization is a horrible taboo to most of society, a basic form of human connection is lost between entire generations of people.

Yeah, this place sucks… I’ve only ever met a handful of decent people who don’t become rabid at the first chance. I have no earthly idea how with these as my material conditions I became a communist.

I have long learned that lesson myself, unfortunately. Still, I feel like writhing in my skin whenever I simply have to stand there and swallow the slur without any action.

ooh yeah no YouTube ads is huge. Invidious and NewPipe are godsends. Me personally I’ve had relatively annoying inconveniences from changing my operating system because Google and Apple don’t let you see RCS chats (the thing that has read reciepts and allows for reactions) in group chats on third party messaging apps, so I’ve had to migrate every gc I’ve been in on SMS to Signal or Matrix. other than that degoogling is a lovley experience esp when you start downloading the foss replacement apps for stuff

Super Productivity app my beloved

Good on you for degoogling. It can be rlly inconvenient at times but it’s more than worth it

I would love to train a martial art actually. I used to do combat sports way back when, but nowadays martial arts are so cost prohibitive. It’s nearly $200 a month for local martial arts classes in my area, and as a college student with no job I can’t afford that. I wouldn’t feel good putting it on my parent’s dime either, so the only option is my already extant home gym my dad bought many years ago.

Trying to determine whether this is the tasty and delicious mushroom of blood pressure regulation and joy or the anus bleeder 9000 of horrific hallucinations and death while the drones are closing in

In a way that same image (not from here, I saw that shit in an anarchist subreddit months ago) is what led me to make this post. I’ve also never forgotten it. Currently I just am struggling with any form of motivation to get back in the gym, as my original motivations were rooted in patriarchal, insecure bourgeois nonsense, and now I struggle to do much except put flab on lol. I suppose this should be the sign to actually do something assisting the revolution, in some small way, and motivate me to do better.

Stay strong comrade 💪

Yellow Parenti is the affectionate name given to Parenti’s 1986 lecture given at the University of Colorado Boulder (or if you prefer the invidious link), a staunchly pro-AES, anti-imperialist lecture. The real name of the lecture is US Interventionism, the Third World, and the USSR (transcript). If there is someone who you are trying to sway from liberalism, who will be willing to consume in good faith, this is what you show them. Honestly, I would go as far as showing them this as nearly the first step in their deprogramming. It is almost a compressed version of B&R and is an excellent presentation of some of the gaping holes in the Western narrative. With how allergic most of the politically unenlightened are to reading, it’s quite useful to have a 1.5 hour video that can really make people think with language that is extremely approachable.

I suppose I shouldn’t have looked at it like it was going to be unapologetically pro-AES the same way that I understand the phrase today. The book is great for deprogramming newcomers from what I have seen so far: much more approachable language than most texts, well-sourced, and the opinions are most certainly easier to digest for a newcomer. Probably isn’t the best for my experience to be reading this just after finishing Dialectical and Historical Materialism and while halfway through Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. I do like Parenti though, yellow Parenti’s speech is an indispensable resource, and over all he seems to be an amazing author and orator to have in your deprogramming tool kit.

This is probably the more accurate way to look at the situation. Older communists—especially those who lived through the red scare—will, unfortunately always be marred by the material conditions of their time, in some way shape or form, in the formulation of many of their opinions. In more extreme examples of it than Parenti, Marx and Stalin were products of their time in many ways, it will likely happen to many of us in the future (the most obvious thing I see being a ‘Stalin was homophobic’ or a ‘Marx was antisemetic’ of the future will be ‘FinnTheComrade ate factory farmed meat’ lol).

Side not: how do you figure that Irving Stone thing even happened? Was it not historical context of the time for Communists and Liberals to be mortal enemies like they are now? Interesting.

Added (both) to the reading list! Thank you for the recommendation comrade.

I understand that, but I don’t need confirmation that everything is going to be okay. On the contrary, I believe it is likely that things will only get worse for me from here on out, but that it will bring us a chance to do what must be done, and so it is worth it. I fully acknowledge that I may die or be imprisoned in the future due to being an ML, but what I really made this post about was, I think, the feeling of my own impotence at the moment in my life. I think it is probably best to take what pleasure I can from concrete things, though.

Thank you very much for this video, comrade. It helped me quite a lot in getting a hold upon my own revolutionary optimism.