Quill's Corner

Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isn’t monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except “a behavior I personally disapprove of.”

Addiction is not “I enjoy stimulation.” It is not “I have habits.” It is not “I seek input before I produce output.” Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.

When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about “dopamine” is not enlightened. It’s sloppy.

There’s also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isn’t explicitly productive, it must be rot. We’ve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.

What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly you’re “stimulus addicted.” If you can’t brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now it’s framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.

This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesn’t trend. Alarmism does.

There’s also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having “bad dopamine habits.” It’s easier to diagnose people’s scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.

Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. That’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.

When I hear the word “addiction” tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesn’t sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

redpill incels

their worse cousin, blackpilled incels

Zizians

Rationalism in general

extreme political movements in general (both the right and the purity culture obsessed, pro revolution left)

fandom purity culture

lots of gen z members, off

the top of my head

Women wanted to be lawyers and engineers and chemists. They wanted to use their brains in challenging and interesting ways. They wanted to get the satisfaction from solving problems and inventing new shit and getting attention for it.

I decided to go all in on the ecology/plants aspect of the Buckyfic after realizing that the best fanfiction illuminates things that the writers are uniquely experienced in.

Telling a story that is derivative, using pre-existing ideas-- "fanfiction" (aka the way stories were for thousands of years) instead of this newfangled idea of "original" storytelling -- forces you to come face to face with what you have to offer as a writer. You don't choose the settings, the themes, the characters.

When you're writing an "original" story, you can default to writing what is familiar to you, not realizing the plots, ideas, and possibilities that simply aren't occurring to you because they are outside your experience.

While writing fanfiction, the things that you uniquely can offer to the story truly glow and highlight themselves.

As a fanfiction author, you are not the creator, you are the host body. You have to answer: Why this body?

I read the brilliant fic Prisoner One by ancientreader and was absolutely blown away by how vivid and real the author made the Brooklyn setting feel. Then i read in the comments that the author had lived in Brooklyn for thirty years. Well, that makes sense.

Then I thought: This depth of experience, whatever thing a teller has that less than 0.1% of tellers have with such depth, makes the story glow with authenticity and vividness.

Then I thought: The best storytelling draws on the teller's deepest experiences.

I know something deeply and that thing that I know is plants. Specifically the plants of Central and Eastern Kentucky.

Because of my depth of experience, the ways that plants could be fundamental to the story offered themselves to me easily. Bucky, fleeing from his captors in a confused and desperate state, has to rely upon the land for his immediate survival. I thought immediately that this was probably not the first time he'd fended for himself for long periods outside civilization.

Plants create almost every aspect of the non-urban environments Bucky has had to survive in. They provide cover. They are sources of food. They determine how and how fast he can move through the landscape. They orient him in place and time: between the wipes and periods in cryo, I imagined that Bucky often didn't know where and when he was. The plant life in an area could tell him generally where in the world he was at and what time of year it was.

Knowing plants could have granted Bucky a relative degree of autonomy amidst his crushing dehumanization as a living weapon: he could figure out where he was, feed himself, access some basic medicines, make crude tools or jerry-rig fixes to his gear.

So the first few chapters in Bucky's POV are him traveling through remote areas of Appalachia, and the presence of plants is constant and so deeply wrapped up in Bucky's piecing himself back together as a person. He learns from recognizing a tulip poplar tree that he is in North America. He eats black raspberries in a thicket and takes pleasure in their sweetness, and realizes that he will not be punished for the unearned reward -- this is his first conscious realization of something like the fact that he is free.

So much of the plant related content is drawn directly from personal experience in a way that research couldn't replicate at all. For instance, the ways Bucky uses the environment as cover; he feels protected in the scrubby thickets of honeysuckle and multiflora rose in marginal woods, but they are difficult to move through, so he has to travel further into contiguous stretches of woods to be able to cover ground quickly. The concealment of the thicket, the way the thorns hook into his clothing and skin, the way the plants co-occur in the environment. Amidst the thicket, he sleeps underneath a shelf of bank created by a sycamore tree's roots.

It's very much, like, something that doesn't naturally assemble itself from reading ABOUT multiflora rose and honeysuckle and sycamore, but instead grounded in the experience of having been stuck in multiflora rose thickets yourself plenty of times.

Many of the specific experiences Bucky has with plants are just. My own experiences. For example, the reason he knows that red clover "tastes like hay smells" is that I ate a red clover one time, and it tasted like hay smells. He uses Kudzu as makeshift rope to tie things into bundles because I've done that. He gets a rush of memory when smelling a wormwood leaf because the smell of wormwood brings me back to the farmhouse I lived in when I was nine.

Later on, yarrow makes an important appearance; Bucky knows this one because the leaves stanch bleeding, something I've used it for many many times. Yarrow also is common throughout the entire Northern hemisphere, meaning Bucky would have seen it a lot. He thinks of this plant as an old friend. It's very poignant.

I thought a lot about which plants Bucky would and wouldn't know. I decided that he would be most familiar with cosmopolitan weeds he encountered in many different places, and he would be able to name most of the edibles and plants that were important for orienting himself. Random wildflowers and many of the more geographically restricted plants he would be oblivious to, hence the reason I described some wildflowers he couldn't name.

I even put some thought into which trees would be easiest to climb if one had a superpowered cyborg arm (the answer I landed on is chestnut oak).

Bucky's relationship with plants helps characterize him as keen and resourceful, and also demonstrates that he wasn't a completely hollowed-out shell as the Winter Soldier: he hung onto bits and scraps of his humanity, and was alert to ways he could reclaim a little bit of autonomy. The plant world helped him hang onto that connection with his humanity in a way.

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!

The FBI cut the phone lines during the 1977 disability rights sit-in. Then they turned off the hot water.

They locked the doors from the outside. One hundred and fifty people were trapped on the fourth floor. Half of them used wheelchairs. The government assumed they would leave.

Kitty Cone was thirty-three. She had muscular dystrophy. Her muscles were failing, but her logistics were flawless. She knew how to organize people.

The federal government had promised to sign regulations protecting disabled Americans from discrimination. The policy was known as Section 504. They printed the promise on paper. Then they stalled. Without a signature, it was just typography.

The protesters entered the regional Health, Education, and Welfare building in San Francisco on a Tuesday morning. They took the elevators to the director's office. They brought sleeping bags and catheters. They informed the staff they were not leaving until the law was signed.

By sunset, the police surrounded the exits. Kitty sat near the windows. She organized the floor plan. She assigned committees for security and sanitation. She kept her medication in a small cooler.

According to federal memorandums released decades later, the strategy to end the occupation relied on medical attrition. The building was not equipped for long-term habitation. The FBI calculated that a population requiring ventilators, specialized diets, and daily medical aides would voluntarily evacuate if the environment became sufficiently hostile. They instituted a blockade.

The blockade went into effect immediately. No food deliveries allowed. No medical supplies permitted through the lobby. Guards stood at the main doors checking identification.

Kitty's muscles deteriorated faster under the physical strain. She couldn't walk. When the phone lines went dead, the fourth floor lost contact with the press. The government waited for the quiet.

Kitty dropped to the floor. She realized the barricades were designed for standing adults. The police had blocked the hallways at waist height. They hadn't blocked the linoleum.

The floors were covered in cigarette ash and spilled coffee. She dragged her body through it. She crawled under the barricades to reach the restricted elevator shafts and unguarded offices.

She carried notes in her pockets. She found a single working payphone the FBI missed. She called the local news desks. She called the mayor's office.

She crawled back. When her arms failed, someone pulled her by her ankles. The Black Panthers heard the news reports. They crossed the police lines with hot meals. The FBI could not stop them without a riot.

They shut off the elevators, so she crawled.

The occupation lasted twenty-five days. It remains the longest non-violent occupation of a federal building in American history. On April 28, the Secretary of HEW signed the regulations without a single alteration.

The protesters left the building the next morning. They went back to their apartments. The Rehabilitation Act regulations laid the groundwork for every accessibility law that followed. The HEW building still stands on United Nations Plaza. The elevators run on a schedule. The doors are heavy glass.

Kitty Cone: the woman who crawled under the barricades.

Source: Kitty Cone's oral history, Bancroft Library.

Verified via: National Museum of American History.