We were already wired for it, but we didn’t have access to the thing’s we have now. It takes a lot of wealth to ride the hedonic treadmill, but our societies have reached a baseline wealth where it has become much more achievable to ride it almost all the time.

Less racist in the modern sense, more profoundly stupid and racist in the archaic sense.

Civilized coutry is a redundant phrase if taken literally. A country is a territory and the associated state. You can’t have a state (political structure) without being ‘civilized.’ (participating in some kind of civic process) They are using civilized in a manner akin to how people used ‘white’ many years ago, referring to acceptability rather than color. e.g. The oft noted ‘Irish and jews weren’t white.’ In that context it seems more of a sign of lack of critical thinking than colorism or essentialism.

Pragmatically, I am, not because I chose to play the game, but because I didn’t play well enough to win.

With the benefit of perspective, no one’s. There is no author. The game, the loss, all of it, and even the world it took place in are meaningless. It’s all just part of the universe playing with itself.

Not really.

‘Mood disorders’ are highly heritable. Poor economic circumstances are highly heritable. Unhappy people who have children rarely cite them as the cure to their unhappiness. It’s very likely that, if an unhappy person had kids, they’d be unhappy too. Not a given, but more likely than not.

Sounds like you want a project.

You could try making a game. Python has pygame. Godot is a bit of a steeper learning step but has a lot of capabilities. I’ve messed around with each for fun.

Web dev can also be fun, and a very different style of coding. I’ve made things for a loved one who wanted some things for a site they run. Each thing they asked for took me no more than a day but saved them having to hire someone. I also made a little one-file site that I could share with some people as an RPG reference.

There are also coding games, as in games where you write code as part of the gameplay. These can help in that they give you a goal. Known names include computercraft mod for minecraft, screeps as both mmo and arena battle, Shenzhen I/O and other Zachtronics and zach-like games, The Farmer Was Replaced, etc.

And of course, you can always just think of something. I’ve written a few scripts to do simple edits to files, like ‘open each file in the folder this is run in and change blahblah to bloobloo and increment the version number’ or batch renaming files. Did one to find duplicate files and list them for organization/deletion.

I have other things I’ve started but never finished, but I enjoyed working on them, and they weren’t my job, so no worries.

If I knew how to grant my wish, it’d be less of a wish and more of a quest. Sadly, I don’t think there’s a way to give patience to the world.

Magic wish granted? Everyone gains enough patience to leave it to research until it can be used safely and sensibly. It was fine when it was an abstract concept being researched by CS academics. It only became a problem when it all went public and got tangled in VC money.