Self-Diagnosis Through Spreadsheets

About two years ago, Lilith gave up caffeine for a month, cold turkey, just to see if she could do it. Result: yes, she could. However, for the first week or so, she mentioned that she was having trouble concentrating. She felt really fuzzy, scattered and daydreamy. She hated it, because it was a major distraction from her work. Luckily, this was during winter break, so she wasn’t working as much.

To which I said, "That literally sounds like how I feel, pretty much all of the time."

At the time, I experimented with the idea that if lack of caffeine made her like me, maybe caffeine would make me like her. Nope. Not even a little. 

Until we had that conversation, I just assumed that everyone was like that. Others were just better at getting over it. I began to wonder if I had ADD, but apparently, that’s not a thing anymore. It changed to ADHD in the DSM-IV. "Doug is hyperactive," said no one, ever. So I never really knew what my deal was. All I know is that it takes me forever to read a book because I’m constantly spacing out.

Anyway, this week, Lilith came home having learned of something called Sluggish Cognitive Tempo. It’s not in the DSM-IV or the DSM-5, but it’s a thing out there that people are studying. It even has its own Wikipedia article, which leads me to believe that it’s more prevalent than, say, Never-nudism. (I can’t really think of a rare disorder that is actually real, though I guess Never-nudism could be linked to gymnophobia.)

According to the Wikipedia article, SCT "is a cluster of symptoms, and possibly a distinct disorder, characterized by the individual being daydreamy, mentally foggy, easily confused and staring frequently. Individuals also have symptoms of hypoactivity, lethargy, slow movement and even sleepiness. … Most consistent across studies was a pattern of social withdrawal in interactions with peers rather than the social intrusiveness, aggressiveness and rejection so often evident in ADHD."

I’m not self-diagnosing myself here, but this sounds like something I should, at least, look into further. I’m also going to mentally refer to SCT as ADHD’s shy cousin.

After reading some of the symptoms to Lilith, I said, "Huh, that could explain my laziness." She told me that she didn’t think I was lazy, to which I replied, "You don’t? Why the hell not?"

More from the article. "A key behavioral characteristic of those with SCT symptoms is that they are more likely to appear to be lacking motivation."

BOOM!

Reading further into this, I saw one thing that I thought didn’t quite fit me. "They lack energy to deal with mundane tasks and will consequently seek things that are mentally stimulating because of their underaroused state, and intense craving for emotional and intellectual stimulation."

My first thought was that I actually like mundane tasks. I thought of things I did at my last job, and I actually enjoyed the more mundane because there was less opportunity for me to screw up. Then I started to consider that and I realized that the mundane tasks allowed me to think about other things while I worked. Also, I had a tendency to add needlessly complicated elements to some things.

For example, at one point, I had made a spreadsheet of all of our clients. Within that list, I had certain clients that I needed to check for various things on a daily basis. I had to do that part of my job after 11, but it had to be done by 3. So I eventually devised some formula to figure out how far along in my four-hour task I am and if I was projected to have enough time to finish. Of course I never even came close to missing my deadline. Even with the added work I gave myself, even that one time I took a 90-minute lunch. That just drives home how unnecessary those steps were, but I took them anyway because it made it slightly more interesting.

So, I’m not really sure what to make of any of this, but Lilith said that she could hook me up with some of the academic papers on the subject. There’s a certain amount of irony in someone unable to motivate himself to sit down and concentrate on an academic paper about a disorder in which people lack motivation and the ability to concentrate on things.

This may, or may not, be related to SCT and me.

I found this game on the Adult Swim Games site called Hemp Tycoon. It’s a stupid game, which means I eventually got hooked to the point where I have a love-hate relationship with it.

As far as I can tell, it’s like Farmville. Though, honestly, I’ve never played Farmville so I have no idea if that’s an apt comparison.

You can plant different seeds. The different seeds have different grow times. The different plants are sold for different prices and give you different levels of experience. The point is to get as much money so that you can expand and grow the more expensive plants and to get as much experience so that you can unlock more parts of the game.

Some of these seeds take several hours, even days, to grow. So you plant it and have to remember to harvest it hours, even days, later. Here’s where you lose me. This appears to be a game where you play it a little and you HAVE to come back at a certain time in order to harvest plants before they wither. No. I am aware that I’ve turned "wasting time on stupid shit" into an art form, but I like being able to dictate WHAT time I waste and when. I don’t want the game telling me that I have to come back six hours later. I’ll come back six hours later only if I want to.

So that was it, I was done.

Until…

I realized that this game seems to be actually designed counter-intuitively. One would think that the more expensive seeds would yield the higher profits and more experience points, but the direct opposite is true.

Here are the stats on the cheapest seeds in the game:

For $10, you plant the seeds. In 30 seconds, you can harvest it, get 5 experience points and $25.

Here’s another a more expensive one:

This gives you 24 times the experience but it takes 5,760 times longer to get that experience. And don’t yet "yield" fool you, it actually seems to mean nothing. It says it yields five, but selling one batch of Desert Palm doesn’t give you $2,000 five times. It’s just $2,000. After two days, you would have $750 profit to show for it, which you could earn by planting Baby Verde 50 times, which you would theoretically be able to do in about half-hour (50 x 30 seconds + whatever time spend planting and harvesting).

In a monument to my ability to waste time, I wasted time by making a spreadsheet devoted to this time-waster. I plugged in all of the info for all 42 available plants and I found that it isn’t even close. There is only one other plant that has a higher profit per minute rate AND experience per minute rate, and that won’t be available until Level 28. Until then, planting anything other than Baby Verde doesn’t come anywhere near making any economical sense.

Unless there’s something about this gam

e that I’m missing, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to plant the cheapest seeds until infinity.

Then I learned that you could plant something like Desert Palm, change the time and date on your computer to two days ahead, and harvest that immediately. But that’s cheating.

Point being, I spent a good chunk of my day playing a stupid game, making a spreadsheet about said stupid game and then wrote something about the stupid game and the spreadsheet. If there isn’t a name for this disorder, there certainly should be.