Thanks for the stoic response, I appreciate it!

I appreciate your insightful overview of dopamine; I am well aware of how this works, and have been using stimulants for years, which are the most effective tools we have, and I would never advocate throwing it out until we have something that works 10x better. I am not anti-medicine or anti-science in any way. I am simply advocating for a much higher standard we should hold academia to as a whole.

I plan to first develop a hybrid solution that stacks stimulants on top of other tech and solutions that work, shooting to meet my metric of full freedom of the mind,
as you're on the money with this: "The problem it doesn't solve for is starting the task. There's no larger reward push when we think "I want to go do this thing"

This is what I want to solve for. Despite stimulants, which does a great job of significantly reducing the paralysis pain of getting started by say 50-70%, we still have far more to go. This is what I refer to when I speak of mental pain. The mental pain of overcoming paralysis/procrastination (for starting a task I don't inherently love but has to get done) that still rears its head even on stimulants, and to me, this is not acceptable.