It's hard to describe, but I'll try to list a few details and hopefully that narrows things down:

• I can only do it eyes closed.
• It's wordless.
• It feels like an inward, mental smile.
• I let go of tensions in parts of my body.
• The feeling itself still has some kind of tension, concentrated around the eyes and forehead.

These are just some characteristics, not what I've optimized for. My intent is just "manufacture some pleasure" and that's what my brain comes up with.

Hope that helps. If you have more specific questions I can try to answer those!

I edited the intro to make this clearer, thanks. 

That’s indeed a limitation. I guess there was still a small pleasure associated with it for me, but low enough to not be the main driver. The gratification I get when noticing and deciding not to indulge in it is greater.

Yeah I thought about that, but (I didn't expand on that) the habit also included picking skin around my cuticles with my fingers, so that would've only half worked at best.

That’s why I waited six months before publishing the post :)

I really enjoyed how you connected all these ideas.

I also feel like there’s a parallel to be made between:

1. Learning to navigate in an irregular environment vs. using a GPS
2. Learning critical thinking through exposition to lots of different ideas vs. being recommended content through ML algorithms

In that analogy, the street orientation diagrams from old cities would be like nuanced thought, while those from grid-like cities would be more polarized.

I don’t know if that makes sense…

Some Black Mirror vibe in there, glad I read it. Not directly connected to LW, but doesn't feel out-of-place to me either.

Typo: I think a "be" is missing, as in "be swallowed".

I see the entire corpus of mankind’s creative output as a tiny ship, a gnat really, about to swallowed by a towering ocean wave.

Anyway, thanks for the nicely written post! I think I've had a similar feeling lately. If we're getting surpassed by machines in every intellectual task, maybe the only thing left to do is... just enjoy life for its own sake?

Actually, AI dominates chess, yet humans still enjoy playing it. I'd say that's because the fun is in interacting with other people, rather than in beating the game. Could it be the same for writing?