RE: https://post.lurk.org/@loriemerson/116698844776482762

As a teenager, I recognized that my brain's reward system was a bit different than most people's (#adhd is a sort of dopamine dysregulation, and mine would go undiagosed for a few more decades), and I was prone to depression, so I classified both self-harm and gambling – especially the video slot machines becoming popular at the time – as _existential risks_ to my person; thanks to this it's been pretty easy to avoid either behavior (I recognize not everyone can do this with self-harm; though I've also come to recognize that I have a survivor's drive for self-preservation).

In college, I knew a number of people who got sucked into one of two E’s – ecstasy or Everquest – which I recognized as a similar existential cognitohazard and classified them similarly. I have still never played an MMO.

And as mobile tech has become entrenched in our lives, the cognitohazard of app-based dopamine magnets is something I've been wrestling with for nearly two decades.

So when the LLM chatbots were first introduced a while back, tuned for sycophancy straight out of the silicon valley addiction playbook, it was pretty easy to say, nope, no good will come *to me* from any of this – and that's *before* you start getting into the tangle of ethical/environmental/political issues surrounding the tech.

However, this personal rule is something that would make it nearly impossible to, today, get a regular programming job like I've had for most of my career. I've watched many people who a year ago accused me of being "incurious" go full-on psychotic or fascist or what because of their exposure to this technology, and if I wanted to continue the career I've had for two decades with a salaried job, I would have one of the hardest times of that career in finding such employment without capitulating to something I consider an existential threat.

I've considered exploring what a disability exemption would look like (yes this is messy, but considering that I have a prescription to highly-regulated stimulants to function in our society I think it could be justified), but despite not being a religious person – though I am a fairly spiritual one – it looks like there's another path for exemptions.