u/Efficient-Spirit-869

The idea is quite simple you have a chain made up of the kind of things that would be playing on TV during the extreme hours of the night and early mornings. Those films and shows of yestery year that no one really cares about anymore but which were cheap and served perfectly to fill the dead air between 11:00 PM and 4:00 Am.

Image laying couch late at night the volumes low the room dark. Halfway between waking and sleeping you don't notice when an old rerun gets replaced halfway though with an infomercial. Selling something you think? Your to out of it to care honestly and if you were awake the TV would be off and you'd probably be walking to your bed.

But the TV plays on the man on screen trying and failing to sell his viewer on a vacation package. The tv flickers as the backgrounds and outfits change to reflect different options. But somewhere between the digital backgrounds and costume changes something shifts in him.

He stops talking up a terrible vacation package and begins talking to you directly. First mentioning how boring your life must be something you could almost overlook but then he calls out your outfit and living decor.

And perhaps still half asleep you respond to his offer agreeing to something you're not going to remember when sun rise or maybe you think it's all a dream but either way you sign up to an adventure of a lifetime. Or is it lifetimes?

_

The benefactor is a salesman at heart the idea of late night advertisement come to life.

Which of course doesn't take into consideration something like a stable time loop and jumper deciding to enter into the jump as drop-in because that either screws with things as above or for jumps where the story starts in the middle of a loop completely throws everything out the window.

As when a being from outside of time shows up randomly in a closed time loop everyone is going to know about it eventually.

(So not sure if it's going to help anyone but here you go and none of what's written outside of parentheses belongs to me.)

It consists of three words to describe when you see a problem and how you deal with it.

Your first bias is your mood. We define this with your most persistent problem - like tired, broke, or sick. That’s all we need to know your average mood. Don’t think about it too much. May affect the results.

Your second bias is whether you see life as Random or Ordered.

Do things work out how they’re supposed to? Does the cream rise to the top? Does God have a plan? Are some people trying to subvert the natural order to the detriment of everyone? Maybe just the first three? Close enough! You’re on team Ordered.

Or does nothing make sense? Is the world run by nepo-babies? Does God help those who help themselves? Is existence inherently meaningless, and everything’s fucked because of bad luck or bad decisions? If so, welcome to team Rando.

Finally, pick your favorite coping strategy. Choose an alignment based on what you usually do when faced with a problem.

• Fixer - Look for a solution to the problem
• Socialite - Ask for help
• Stoic - Manage your emotions until the problem doesn’t seem important
• Vanisher - Run, hide, or do drugs

Anyway, some fellow called Doc-Danger claimed that our favorite coping strategy is born with an evil twin - the coping strategy that must never be used. And that makes mental illness inevitable because of the dopamine loop, the falsity of our early lives, childhood amnesia, and the malaise.

I don’t know what any of those things are. Thankfully, some Socialite asked him to explain and he posted the following:

The Dopamine Loop:

Dopamine is the brain chemical that rewards success. If an action has worked before, dopamine will give a burst of energy and happy thoughts when you try it again. Conversely, if an action has failed in the past, the lack of dopamine will make you tired and lethargic.

These effects are cumulative. The more often something works, the more you want to do it, until you don’t want to do anything else. Or, if something usually fails, it will get harder and harder to start, until you just can’t bring yourself to even move.

This dopamine loop is an important survival tool for animals in the wild. Unfortunately, humans inhabit a more manufactured environment.

The Falsity of Our Early Lives:

The environment of our early years is basically just our family. We are completely dependent on them, and they make every decision for us. Even events beyond their control are filtered through them and handled by their initiative.

But we still have one choice - how to treat our family - and our dopamine system is still operating. So we quickly learn what behaviors will be rewarded or punished by our caregivers. Our favorite coping strategy becomes what worked best when we were very, very, small. Which would be helpful if we continued to live in that environment.

Unfortunately, the real world is much bigger than our families, and eventually we end up in it. The strategy used to navigate your mother’s ire may not work in the institutionalized anarchy of a capitalist police state. That’s fine, you can always change your strategy. But it’s hard to change your strategy if you can’t remember why you picked it in the first place.

Childhood Amnesia:

No one knows exactly why we forget our early years. Probably something to do with neuron growth. Anyway, it’s some real Bourne Identity bullshit. All the details of our lives are scrubbed, but we retain our particular set of skills. Including our dopamine loops.

This amnesia makes our most successful strategy an mindless obsession. Instead of knowing that mommy wants us to ask for help, or daddy expects us to solve our own problems, we’re instead left with a vague, but powerful urge to be independent or social, passive or drunk.

And thus, the favorite coping strategy is born. Not with mindfulness, but in its absence.

Once again, this isn’t bad on its own. But not every problem can be solved with a single strategy. And our favorite strategy is born with an evil twin. The strategy that must be avoided at all costs.

The Malaise:

No strategy can solve every problem. Eventually we hit a mismatch. You can’t fix the inevitability of death. Or avoid a divorce. And your social circle is generally as ignorant as you are. A well rounded individual would switch strategies to suit their circumstance. But we can’t.

Because we learned, early on, that some strategies never work. Then we forgot why. But the dopamine loop persists. And it drains us of all energy if we think to ask for help. Or try something different. Or move on.

So instead we bash the mismatched problem with our favorite strategy, until we learn that it doesn’t work either. Now we have no strategy that gives us energy. And we slowly shut down. Until we can barely do anything.

This is the malaise. Brain quicksand.

(Finally there's this bit that hit me harder then I'd like it to have.)

What would you do if you could do anything?

I read a few answers. Cure cancer. End poverty. Eliminate jobs. World peace. Lose weight. Clean my house. Go to the beach. All good stuff. Then we got the second question.

Why aren’t you doing it?

You can only go to a jump if it has had a crossover with a different character or setting. There must be a jump available where those characters meet up.

Example

Aladdin into Wreck it Ralph, from there had to Mario because bowser existed in that film. That allows for Mario Kart 8 and legend of zelda as link was a dlc character that means super smash Bros is an option. From there the skies pretty much the limit.

By that I mean using things such as and angry or rage and other negative emotions to force a reaction out of you. Not allowing for self pity or pushing away negative things in your life.