Board games got interesting again before food did

2026-10-22 1136 views 2 posts

Honestly, i won't pretend the flatness is imaginary. Somewhere around the two-month mark I noticed I could still enjoy things — just not the things that used to be automatic, and food sat at the top of that list.

The odd part is which stuff survived. A 500-piece puzzle on the living room floor after my kid goes to bed still gives me that low-grade "one more piece" pull.

A podcast walk with no destination does too.

In the trials, most of the reward-blunting chatter is framed around food cues, and that tracks with what I feel: dinner is quiet, but a long aimless bike loop is roughly intact. So I've started treating fun as its own separate experiment — a two-line note on my phone about what actually felt good that day, no streaks, no judging it.

The list is short and small: a card game, a mechanical keyboard I keep disassembling, an old sci-fi paperback with a cracked spine.

Curious whether anyone else's non-food fun list got shorter, longer, or just rearranged. What's on yours this month?

This is such a specific observation. I’ve been keeping a dumb little note on my phone: activity, time of day, and whether I felt “wanting” before vs “liking” during.

Puzzles and Lego-type stuff kept scoring high on liking; food mostly dropped on wanting. My totally non-expert read is that tasks with visible progress and a defined endpoint still give a clean reward signal, while the old automatic stuff — snacking, scrolling — is what got flattened.

In the trials they separate appetite from reward/motivation, and your puzzle thing makes me think that distinction is real in daily life. Does the puzzle feel absorbing in the same way, or more like it’s just easier to start than food?