Name: The laziness cure you don't want to hear
Uploaded: 2026-02-26T08:56:12.000Z
Duration: 11 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Let me know if this sounds familiar to you.

Adverbs of degree

You just started playing a new video game.

Transition words & phrases

Maybe you started playing it because a friend told you it was fun, or maybe you started watching some YouTube gameplay videos about it, so you decided to give it a try.

The experience of playing the video game is pain.

You suspect that maybe if you just put a few more hours into it, something will cl.

When that click happens, all of a sudden what was once tedious becomes addicting.

And that core gameplay loop keeps you playing for hours and hours on end until it's cutting into your sleep.

You're playing till 3am and your entire family leaves you for someone who doesn't do that.

If this situation sounds familiar to you, then you will have no problem understanding the phenomenon of laziness.

Because in life, we work at various things every single day.

We know we're supposed to put in long hours of doing the right thing because we've been told by our parents, society at large, or by ourselves that it's what we should do.

But the payoff for doing these things often feels lacking, like we don't really understand the point.

And when we don't understand the point or the reward, we won't be motivated to do it.

And when we're not motivated to do the good things we're supposed to do, we think of ourselves as lazy.

You have seemingly no problem putting in long hours towards things that you find enjoyable or fun.

But when you can't see the point, you can't feel the motivation.

In other words, if you haven't discovered the core gameplay loop, you won't be incentivized to play.

So how does a core gameplay loop even work?

Why do some things feel addicting and others feel super boring?

And what if there was a way to feel that same desire and motivation that you might feel towards video games or watching your favorite show, but

to towards doing things that would improve your life to a significant degree?

And the first step is to understand what's going on under the hood.

You are only motivated to do anything in life not because the thing is enjoyable, but

Now, that might sound kind of funny, but it's true.

You're only Motivated to do something not because it's enjoyable, but because you think it might be.

A good example can be found in watching sports.

People sit down to watch their favorite sports team in the hopes that their team will win the game.

But when your team is getting utterly brutalized, it's not very fun.

But sports fans will typically watch anyways.

Why would you continue to sit there and watch your team get scored on and lose badly, even if it isn't enjoyable?

You keep watching because your team might score.

It's the hope that keeps you glued to the screen even when the activity itself is in no way pleasurable.

This is due to a psychological phenomenon known as reward prediction error.

And it's the reason why gamblers gamble, why smokers smoke, and why League of Legends players exist.

You expect that the activity that you sit down to do will be enjoyable.

And when circumstances don't play out in the way that you expect, this puts you in a state of dopamine deprivation.

Your reward prediction had an error and it feels bad, it wounds you, and

it makes you crave the antidote that might just be around the corner.

It's almost like developing a habit of cramming your foot into an extremely tight shoe only to experience the eventual relief of taking it off.

We've been gaslit into believing that our return back to baseline is pleasurable.

If you and I were sitting on the couch, just chilling out together and I show you a funny meme on my phone, you'd probably say, ha, that's pretty funny.

And then you'd go about your day feeling kind of the same.

Maybe a little bit better off, because I have a brilliant sense of humor, but

also because we shared a little moment of human connection, a little shared experience.

But what you probably wouldn't feel is a restless agitation.

Desperate for me to show you another meme.

But that's exactly how you feel when you're scrolling YouTube shorts or browsing funny memes by yourself.

Like, I think that's funny about it is just go next.

And the joke is that things that are made in China are not good quality.

Because when you're Caught in a doom scrolling loop, you're sifting through mostly unfunny videos, which is slightly psychologically painful, which makes you crave finding an actually funny video to ease the pain.

The motivation to keep going doesn't come from anticipating pleasure, but anticipating the relief of the agitation.

The agitation that was caused by participating in the activity in the first place.

This is the dopamine illusion and it's the core mechanic in a gameplay loop.

It's also the very thing that we need to weaponize in order to make our real life activities more motivating and addicting.

Before we dive into that, I just want to thank the sponsor of today's video, AG1, who have recently released a new and improved version of AG1.

They're calling AG1 Next Gen and along with it they've released a bunch of new flavors, one of which I really, really like, which is the berry flavor.

I don't really know how they did it, but the berry flavor actually tastes delicious.

It's so much better than the original flavor.

And for those of you who don't know, AG1 is by far my most taken supplement of all time.

And that's because it's loaded with over 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food sourced ingredients in every single scoop.

It's honestly just the easiest way to make sure you're covering your nutritional bas.

My diet is far from perfect and if you're watching this video, that's probably you too.