HN is not different to other social media. It will feed you a lot of small, digestible units of content that will do something to you. Each of these feelings ar

HN is not different to other social media. It will feed you a lot of small, digestible units of content that will do something to you. Each of these feelings are rewarded by a hit of dopamin. The dopamin flow is neat, but not enough to makes you feel great or like you've accomplished something. So you go for more and you keep scrolling. You will not react the same to each unit of content, which create a very addictive system known as a skinner box (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber). It will continuously give you small hits of dopamin, sometimes giving you a lot, keeping you hooked for those big hits in a very tight feedback loop. Learning Rust, while stimulating, does not has that tight reward loop, so you are not addicted to learning Rust but to scrolling HN as your easy dopamin dispenser. You need to invest a lot of effort into learning something complex as Rust (or painting, or whatever which require a good amount of knowledge and practice.) before getting that dopamin reward.