The Raw-Dog Experiment

This isn’t too interesting, but well, I just wanted to put it out, more of an update than a post.

I consistently clock 100K minutes on spotify a year, well and guess how many minutes are there in a year? its 525,600. I have used spotify, the past few years (since 2020) for almost 1/5th of my life. Although this might sounds great, I recently realised the existence of a correlation.

Kiwi (our pinapple green cheek conure) learnt to do ‘round-round’ by first following a treat to go around, and then getting a treat at the end of it. If taking a cold shower in the morning, is going to affect the way your brain works for the rest of the day drastically, then I’ve consciously taken some horrible (potentially horrible) decisions in life. :(. Dopamine Nation mentions that pain and pleasure are processed in the same region of the brain, and typically body, like most forces of nature, tries to counteract sudden. Like when you cry out loud, and you feel a little better at the end, and how when you know something isn’t right, when you’ve been relaxed and happy for too long haha. Well, all the stereotypical kids in movies and shows (and irl too), that wear headphones all the time are typically very non-chalant and kinda detached? indifferent? Maybe its probably because of how music continuously pushes the pleasure side, that the brain reacts with a kind of mellow sadness to counter.

How your body and mind are mostly a closed loop, one affecting the other, I realised I’ve let my comfort zone affect the way I operate so much, that I’ve just keep becoming softer and weaker every day. It has just become so hard for me to be able to do things I used to excel at.I’ve lost things because of being emotionally confused, and I want to take ownership for it. I also see some many cases of (mostly mine) instances where people exactly know what is stressing them out. There could be multiple things, multiple reasons, but some are objectively declarable, and even when it is laid out, people find it hard to execute or do something about it, even when in most cases, they know what exactly has to be done. I want to be able to ‘execute’ things, without other distractions. I want to rawdog life for the next 5 days to start with.

Starting Monday, 18th August, 2025, I am going to list out things I want to finish by the end of 5 days, and just do it, nothing else. I don’t want to go to sleep listening to valorant vods/podcasts. I don’t want to need music, to shower, videos to eat or just ambient noise to function in life. I guess the goal is to just be able to ‘execute’ something if I want to. Take control of my body, and give my mind the power to be able to just do it. Meanwhile, this was kinda what inspired me to try this out - https://youtu.be/L3gwLK5ZVgE?si=fY9pV36ceRKYobhg She had really nice insights, and now I wanna see how it affects me.

I want to be able to just sit with my thoughts for a few minute when I want to. Although it freaks me out, just the thought of it, I want to put myself through it, because, for some reason, deep down, it feels like I might end up never being able to.