Pattern: Broken Reward System
First articulated in December 2018 at 3:20am, in a journal entry written as homework in California. Steven was 21.
“I have a theory about my reward system, I think it’s broken. Because the fact is that I think a part of me like all of this. I like pushing myself to the limits, more and more, which makes me feel really alive, then I regret. Every time I’m getting close to my goals of having this stable and healthy standards of living, I’m getting bored and just kinda pop all of my balloons one by one to fall on the ground, and start all over again after a period of nonsense.”
What it describes
A self-sabotage mechanism that activates precisely at the point of achieved stability. The approach to the goal triggers boredom, which triggers dismantling, which restarts the cycle. He holds both roles: the donkey walking toward the carrot, and the person holding the carrot to keep the donkey moving. He is both the motive force and the obstruction.
He noted at the time he did not know if he needed to “keep trying again and again until it’s working out, or if I’m just doing something wrong.” As of 2026, the question remains open. The diagnosis of Neurodivergence has provided some structural explanation.
Instances across the record
- California 2018: arrived ready to transform, did not transform at the rate desired, and started to interpret the gap as personal failure.
- Ipso: found job, apartment, and social scene at once, then quit the job for reasons he still calls “complètement aberrante.”
- Séroplex Recovery September 2020: recovery was brief but real. He wrote “IT’S WORKING, I’M WORKING,” then returned to the after-party cycle within three weeks.
- ESN job: took the job as a structuring challenge, then undermined it through hidden substance use and absenteeism.
- Shadow Application: committed to Shadow alone, and the rejection landed harder because he had not kept parallel options open.
- Résilience: left a job he liked for a freelance contract, then had no replacement when the contract ended.
- March 2023 Crisis: reached a low point he treated as a floor, wrote “i feel free” on day one, then relapsed partially by April and fully by June.
The ADHD/autism lens
The 2024 diagnosis changed the framing. What looked like willful self-sabotage is now partially legible as:
- Autistic demand avoidance (structured environments trigger rejection)
- ADHD’s dopamine dysregulation (stability feels like understimulation)
- Burnout cycling (masking and performing normality depletes a finite resource, then the system collapses)
None of these explanations remove agency. Steven does not use them to remove his own responsibility. They change the intervention logic. It is not a matter of wanting the right things harder.
The persistence underneath
Despite the sabotage pattern, Steven has never stopped. Each crash has ended. Each floor has produced a return. The length and depth of the crashes is a concern, since 2022 to 2025 was significantly longer than 2020, but the return has always happened. In January 2026 he reframes this not as hope, which he treats as too fragile, but as “une insistance ontologique,” a stubbornness in existence itself.