On Dopamine
Dopamine makes us feel good.
Don’t get me wrong – it is not completely as simple as this, and here’s an article on Slate about the misconceptions of the famous brain-chemical; It is responsible for many brain functions…
For the purpose of this article though, in which we will explore dopamine “sources” that are potentially fucking up your life, we will examine Dopamine as a feel good chemical that our brain releases because of specific stimuli.
In theory, the evolutionary purpose of this “release” is to reward us for activities worth pursuing: Tasty food, beautiful woman, victory, conquest… or anything else that we need in order to ensure our overall well-being.
It goes to say, its an important bodily process because feeling good gets the animal, the human, addicted to seeking out the behavior.
To put it shortly, somewhere along human evolution, capitalism happened… industrialization happened… and the innovative ones among us realized that they can create products that can imitate stimulus that causes dopamine releases in our brains. Perhaps to our detriment as a society.
Why would anyone do this?
Like anything we do as a species, the motivation is to create a better life for ourselves.
And in our modern times, creating a better life means making more money. And the best way to make money is to get people’s attention while giving them what they want: To feel good. Mmm Mmm Dopamine…
So, ironically, while seeking to make life better for themselves, the smart and ambitious, but maybe not so wise among us have created products that stimulate dopamine release in scenarios that are not inherently valuable to our survival. I will make the argument that these products are detrimental to the overall integrity of our culture.
This, In turn, creates a societal class which craves for inherently meaningless products and activities – to feel good instead of being good.
Life becomes meaningless for these people, and instead of living a purposeful life, full of meaningful action, they seek further expedient activities that only serve to release dopamine in their brains.
Cheap, Cheap, Dopamine
It’s interesting to think that we would have the intelligence to hijack the brain’s neurochemical activities.
Playing God – as is what humans do best.
As a result, because we are not biologically adapted to judge the validity of these sources of stimulus that releases dopamine – anything that emulates a source will do the “trick”.
This mean that Instagram model may as well be a real half-naked beautiful woman standing right in front of me…
And so, we are now stricken with a species-wide problem of over-stimulation from unworthy, illegitimate sources.
Nowadays, every industry employs media that serves only to hijack your dopaminergic system. They spend millions of dollars every year on fancy ads and psychological studies in the hopes that you will be drawn to pursue their particular brand of products.
As a consequence of this, many of us struggle with finding a deep sense of meaning in our lives as our dreams and goals are blurred by the constant and random surges of dopamine from constant and random sources.
How do cheap dopamine sources rob us of meaning?
In the next 3 sections I’ll highlight the differences between natural sources of dopamine and cheap sources. Though they both “do the trick”, you will see that pursuing the latter will eventually lead you to an empty, pathetic, and maybe even destructive life.
Pornography
This is a topic that is very dear to me and the source of struggle that I continue to face (though, I’m winning now).
There is growing awareness for this toxic habit. Communities like NoFap, and MakeLoveNotPorn have been a huge inspiration to me to eliminate the habit of consuming porn. Like any dopamine addiction though, it is a fight.
In the quest to make everything expedient, even sexual satisfaction, we invented pornography. Distributed by the most expedient way to distribute things: the internet. Culturally accepted but never spoken about, it is the perfect wolf in sheep clothing.
There’s no denying that men get so much validation from attracting the opposite sex. Because of this, throughout history, men have been doing death-defying shit just to get noticed by girls.
This is to our benefit as a species, because the instincts to do this has literally propelled humanity to amazing innovations and to eventually conquer the natural world.
Some may argue that we’ve gone too far with this – but that is a debate to be discussed in another article. Nevertheless, there is no off button for the male instinct to impress the hell out of the ladies.
What comes close, though, is a sort of distraction. A distraction which can give a vague semblance of sexual satisfaction to a male, without him having to work for it. A placeholder, if you will, for sex, that is rewarded to him without him having to sacrifice comfort, develop discipline, and take risks.
As it turns out, we need men that constantly try to impress girls. A lot of the by-product of this pursuit is beautiful art, music, and technological innovation. Pornography will eventually rob humanity of this, as it sedates us with over stimulation.
Click-bait
“There are barbarians coming over the hill!”
Screams a villager running back from his daily forage.
Instantly, everybody’s ears perk up and they are drawn to him to find out more information. What weapons do the barbarians have? What colors do they wear? What language do they speak? How many of them are there?
Yes, they all feel fear – but at the same time, they feel charged-up and certainly, they are getting a massive amount of dopamine to their system.
Makes sense – the human body needs to reward us when we choose to face and eliminate imminent danger. Now imagine if we just ignored existential threats. Well, we wouldn’t have survived very long…
It’s in our DNA to feel good when we consume news and marketers of media have known and exploited this since the beginning. Indeed, we are biased to be curious about danger and to constantly find out what the “other team” is up to as all of these things pose a potential threat to our existence.
But what if these signals to our brains were to be all around us? What happens then? Ironically, we may actually lose all sense of what is actually an existential threat to us.
We may become the smoker who is paranoid about chem-trails while he is literally breathing in toxic chemicals into his lungs as he’s rambling off.
We may be the gossiping housewife that is talking shit about characters in reality shows while her own personal life is in shambles.
Dopamine, which directed our attention to what was meaningful and important, can be exploited by those who only seek to profit from our attention to “news”.
Gambling
In probably the worst exploitation of our primitive dopamine circuits, lotteries and casinos make a killing every year. Made aware of how bad it really is, there really should be constant protests in front of these companies.
Alas, they have been legal for too long, and are now far too large to ever be stopped now. They are literally institutionalized.
Essentially, what these companies do is hijack the part of our circuitry that rewards risk-taking.
For most our history, risk-taking was inherently virtuous, so it is no wonder that we feel good when we perceive that there may be a potential smart risk to take.
For example, Caveman Ronnie went to the fishing hole 30 things in the last month. 18 days out of that schedule, he came back with enough fish to feed 3 families in his village. On the 31ˢᵗ day, do you think he’s going back to the fishing hole? Of course, he will be compelled to go back. The rewards far outweigh the risks.
The straight-forwardness of these scenarios in our evolutionary past is most likely why we are ill equiped to process complicated probabilities. There simply was no reason for our species to develop anything more than folk numeracy when it comes to interpreting the happenings of our lives.
In turn, there was no way our DNA could have anticipated mass media and advanced technology that could hijack this system, leaving us existentially vulnerable. Mass media makes it so that everybody that plays gets to see the winner. They get to feel like there is a chance.
Even though there is roughly a chance of 1 in 297000000 that you will win the lottery, your brain gives you a nice little dopamine hit when you buy that ticket.
Slot machines are programmed to give you “near misses” and reward persistence by giving big wins over a set amount of time. They literally make you addicted to them.
Now, though it doesn’t hurt to spend a bit of money for a bit of “fun” – on principle, its unwise to participate in a whole industry that bases its entire bottom line on hijacking our stupid monkey brains. By doing so, we set the precedent that our actions are not going to be based on a rational choice but, instead, on emotion.
Then, what other meaningless, undignified activities will we participate in just to get a nice kick of dopamine?
Final Thoughts
It’s useful to reflect upon why we are drawn towards certain activities. Do they our family up for a better future? Are they inherently meaningful and purposeful, and satisfy our passion for life? Or do they serve our escapism from reality?
In modern times, there are far too many things we can do to give our brain a nice little hit of dopamine. Because of this, we must be careful or we can be sucked into being the slaves of those who supply the most expedient but cheap source.
Let us scrutinize where we get our kick from. From there we can make the proper adjustments to our lives so we ensure that we maintain a strong, productive culture and society.