How To Make Hard Things Feel Addictive ► Explained With Dark Souls
Dark Souls makes hard things addictive. And I know this might sound kind of shocking. How could something difficult be addictive? Whenever I sit down and try to do some work, I always end up getting distracted and procrastinating the thing I actually wanted to do. You’re so tired of thinking of yourself as lazy because you do have this ambition inside of you. You just don’t know why you can’t seem to use it. But the game Dark Souls made me
Realize how to rewire my brain to actually crave doing hard things because it actually does exactly that to you in the game. We get angry and frustrated with the game, right? Half the time you don’t even look like you’re enjoying yourself. >> I just can’t do it. I can’t take this no more, man. And yet we do enjoy ourselves. But if it’s such a hard game, why do people like it so much? By the standards of other games these days, it
Shouldn’t be this addictive. Most modern games have become really good at keeping you hooked. You get a bunch of XP, coins pop out of enemies’ butts. You might even get a victory jingle. >> Everything carefully designed to keep you playing as long as possible. And it works because it gives you constant dopamine. You’re always being rewarded for something. But Dark Souls doesn’t have any of that. You beat a boss and it just falls over and disappears, turned
Into fairy dust. It’s pretty anticlimactic. You die, you lose everything, you walk all the way back to the boss, and you do it again. Modern games are designed to keep you playing, but Dark Souls isn’t. Dark Souls removes every reason to keep playing except the one that actually matters. The game acts like a filter for people. If you’re playing for rewards or validation or even to brag to other people that you play Dark Souls, then you’re going to
Quit because the game doesn’t give you enough of that to keep you going. But if you can get past that, where you stop caring about the rewards, you start playing for a different reason. You play because of the way you feel while playing it. The curiosity, the challenge, the mastery, that feeling of I almost had them. At first you might have been playing for the rewards, but now you’re playing for that feeling of overcoming big obst acles. You’re
Playing because you actually want to, not for any kind of reward anymore. And now you’ve been filtered by the game. And the thing is that most modern games and Dark Souls are trying to teach you two different things. Because when you play Call of Duty or something and you open a crate and a bunch of colors explode and sound plays and something shiny pops out, it’s basically teaching you the same thing gambling teaches you. Keep going, open another one. Don’t even
Get me started about loot boxes. You get addicted to dopamine, addicted to the reward, addicted to the win. I I TOLD YOU. I I SAID IT. EVERYTHING is instantly gratifying right in your face, rewarding you for literally everything every step of the way. This is called extrinsic motivation. When your motivation is the reward, open the next chest, win the game. But Dark Souls is different. It gets you addicted, but it gets you addicted to the struggle rather
Than any rewards. It doesn’t reward you for playing, but you still want to play anyway. That’s intrinsic motivation because when you get through the filter of people who only just want the reward and instead just keep trying to beat the next boss, even if you die over and over again, like the game intended you to do, you start to not even care about rewards anymore. You realize that the point of the game was never about the reward. It was never even about
Beating the boss. The point was the struggle. So if struggling can feel good in Dark Souls, then why doesn’t it feel the same in real life? It’s because right now, real life is the opposite of Dark Souls. In Dark Souls, you get clear feedback. You know when you messed up. You know when you improved. You get killed by the boss earlier this time, or you managed to get it to even lower health than last time. But in real life,
A lot of the time you don’t get this direct feedback. You just kind of coast through life not even knowing if you’re really improving or just making yourself worse. The only times we can really see if we made progress or not is when you study for a test or something and get your grade back. But when it comes to tests, it’s more like they’re extrinsically motivating since the goal is the grade. And so you don’t actually enjoy improving yourself
Anymore. You just can’t really see progress or improvement when it comes to day-to-day things. You feel like you’re stuck. And on top of all this, we’re constantly being distracted by rewards and dopamine and other people, and we just don’t have any clarity or peace or even purpose. And this is why it’s so frustrating to just go get some hard work done. You always end up procrastinating even though you know you have this burning flame of ambition
Inside you. You know it’s there, but you feel like it’s being wasted. Something has got to change. We need to make real life more like Dark Souls. And we can do this by making a couple small changes in our lives. The reason Dark Souls makes hard things addictive is because it removes everything that makes real life feel meaningless. Let me explain. If you want real life to feel like Dark Souls, you don’t need more motivation. You need
To start treating it like a game you actually care about. In Dark Souls, you just have the boss and you. You can see your health bar and you can see the boss’s health bar. We measure our success and our failure based on how full each of our health bars are. In Dark Souls, it’s clear, but in real life, it’s not. So the solution this whole time has actually been we need to give ourselves more clarity. Because when you can actually see
Progress, you can actually enjoy the struggle. And giving yourself more clarity means asking yourself more questions like, “What am I actually curious about? What is the one thing I keep thinking about and watching content about whenever I get the chance?” Because for Dark Souls, if you’re genuinely curious and you’re not just forcing yourself to play the game, then it becomes easier to actually do hard things because you’re doing it for the sake of your own curiosity. You progress
Because you want to see more about the world. Also ask yourself questions like, “What is the thing that I want to master? I want to be the best at it, not because I want other people to see me doing it, but because I really just genuinely enjoy it and I want to be good at it because it makes me feel good.” In Dark Souls, if you’re playing the game because inside you genuinely want to master it just because it’s so hard and
Because you want to prove that you can beat hard things, then the game becomes actually enjoyable to play, right? Think about the people who try to 100% the games. Like why do they do that? Because they enjoy the challenge. You’re playing just for the sake of continuous improvement. And for that reason, you actually prefer if the game is difficult because your desire is to achieve that excellence and total mastery of the game. Also ask yourself questions like,
“What it feels like could be my purpose. What thing can I see myself doing that actually has a purpose to be done and that would be important to me and maybe even other people.” And if you think you can’t find your purpose, let me tell you something. Remember that sudden urge you felt to just go do something really specific? You found a game that you want to try. Maybe it was Dark Souls. And you could just not stop
Thinking about it. So you decide to just stay home and pull some all-nighters just to play the game because it’s like this thing that matters to you the absolute most right now. That feeling is purpose. It can’t be put out of your mind. You just have to do it. And don’t you think if you were really dead set on playing the game in this way, you wouldn’t care if it was hard, right? You would just figure out how to
Beat it even if you get frustrated or angry. This is like your life right now, and you’re not just going to stop from a little resistance. Choose what you want to do based on your true inner desire, not according to other people’s rules or wishes or approval or anything. This is a good place to start because it actually makes you think about what you want, not what you’re just doing now because this is how your life is turning out to
Be. Stop living on autopilot. Give yourself more clarity and you’ll see that you can be addicted to hard things in real life, too, just like you can in Dark Souls. Stop saying, “I want to improve my life.” Because what even is the boss? What are you trying to beat? What are you trying to do? Clarity is key. Track your habits and use consistency as a marker of your success rather than achieving rewards. You might actually be
Improving, but you’re just not noticing it because you don’t pay attention to your progress. Track yourself. The truth is that hard things are not supposed
To be easy, but they can be if you give yourself every reason to make them easy and remove everything that makes it feel like unimportant to you. Remove every reason not to do them. I don’t think that you or me hates doing hard things. Obviously, right? Because we have this ambition inside of us. I think that we’ve just been playing the game the wrong way. So give yourself clarity and track your progress. You got this. If you like Dark Souls and
Self-improvement, I have a new free community that you can join. It’s just going to be a link in the description. I also have a new course that’s like how to genuinely fix your life but explained with Dark Souls. So if that sounds interesting to you, too, then that’s also going to be a link in the description. No pressure for either of them as always. But just they’re there if they sound interesting to you, right? You take
Care, guys. Don’t you dare go hollow.