Cheap Dopamine Is Getting In The Way of Real Life
The scariest part of it all, cheap dopamine can convince us that life demands nothing of us.
Most of the time when we talk about diets we mean the food we put in our body. We try to avoid trans fats, seed oils, and food infused with sugar, and for good reasons: heart health, maintaining a healthy weight, keeping our teeth strong, and the reason for it all, our overall well-being. All this seems to keep us healthy.
But I don’t think this is the only diet we should pay attention to. I’ve written before about how health is of the utmost importance. But I’m becoming convinced that one of our most pressing concerns isn’t only the food we put in our body or the exercise we do, but the information we consume, how we use our free time, or how we chase the “feel good” feeling. Our dopamine diets.
Cheap dopamine, for example. It is overlooked. It is the junk food, the mindless scrolling, and the binge-watching of Love Island.
In the book 1984, George Orwell warned about authoritarian figures stripping away our power, but I would argue that our power instead has a chance to be given away by cheap dopamine. It is getting in the way of real life. Real life is not what you see online. Real life is what you see when you log off, lock your phone, and forget about it while going out in the world.
We can’t bear to sit in silence so we pull out our phones to escape the “horrors” of reality. We play video games to level up as a substitute for what we hope to do in our careers. We mindlessly scroll on social media when we can’t rationalize sitting in boredom. And somewhere I think it affects us.
It all shortens our attention span because we need that constant stimulation. But it is not always my attention I’m worried about. It’s who I become when I turn away from any fears, risks, expectations, or pain and turn to the cheap dopamine. It allows us to coast through life.
Our ancestors used to be wary of other predators and faced starvation if they couldn’t eat, but today we have the luxury of avoiding that. But it goes beyond this, childhoods have switched from play-based to phone-based. Childhoods used to be spending time outside toying with risks and dangers that would surely upset your parents. Now, the freedom we once had in real life is all online, away from anything our parents could see.
Everything has become digital so we no longer worry about difficult conversations and instead ghost or block. We don’t have to fully commit to anything and throw our whole heart into it, with the risk we might get hurt, because why would we when we always have other options? We can scroll the slop the algorithm feeds us from the comfort of our house rather than go to the office and interact with coworkers. We have food delivered to us by only moving a finger rather than having to make ourselves presentable, interacting with other humans, and being forced to communicate appropriately.
But perhaps the scariest part of it all, cheap dopamine can convince us that life demands nothing of us. In a world full of comfort and optimized for ease, cheap dopamine allows us to spend our days not doing much of anything.
It is scary. Scary because it is getting in the way of truly living. There is no life without expectations. There is no life without suffering. There’s no life without pain or discomfort but things out there try to convince us of it. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, has a quote in his book Man’s Search for Meaning,
“What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life–daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk or meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
We can derail our lives if we spend it consuming cheap dopamine rather than fulfilling the expectations and answering the questions that life has set forth for us. As Nietzsche says,
“Who he has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
But the why can be derailed if we continue to use cheap dopamine to fill our days while postponing the inevitable, delaying the hard conversation, or avoiding the risk of failure. I am sure this plays a part in Gen Z being more risk-averse than previous generations. Scrolling social media is a lot more comforting than having to strike up a conversation while you wait in the waiting room. It is much easier to level up in video games than it is to jump, take a risk, and try to advance in your career.
But for me, the best days and moments of my life are not when I am on social media, eat a bunch of junk food, or optimize my day for comfort, bunkered up inside all day.
The days I look back fondly are those when I threw my heart into something and tried to answer the questions life threw at me, no matter if I failed. Days spent studying to get where I hoped to go in my career, but not knowing if it would even work. The moments in the gym or on a run where I can barely breathe, suffering to try to achieve a goal despite wondering if it was even worth it. Moments when I tried to fulfill the expectations of life because life never stops expecting things of me.
I could put a caveat here and say, of course, there are moments when it is necessary. When we want to rot in our beds. Sure, a balance is necessary but I don’t want that to be the emphasis. Because I think it is a real issue. I think it is important to be mindful of what we consume and how we spend our time. Marcus Aurelius has a quote I like,
“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.”
And if we are constantly avoiding risk, turning away from our fears, and resorting to a slew of 60-second videos to pass the time it is not great. Inertia pushes us this way but I don’t think that is how we fill our soul.
But if you take a risk and fail, so be it! Never do I regret failing, I regret sitting on social media or plugging in my headphones to avoid something. I never regret living in the real world. I regret living online.
I mean what are the other options? A life of few stories to tell where we realize 20 years later we should have done more? Never fully living and instead watching other people live? And wasting away all our time with cheap dopamine and not seeing that as the ultimate risk? Being stuck in the ideal that life never expects something of us?
The last thing I think we want is a life of this. Jimmy Carr says,
"You cannot have an easy life and a strong character at the same time."
We want strong character but I don’t think that is built online or in an episode of 90-day fiancé. I just try to remember that life is always expecting something of me because that’s living. The scary part is not the expectations life has of me, it is the idea that too much cheap dopamine tries to sell me that there are none.
Appreciate you reading. Always appreciate hearing from others so leave a like or comment.
-Scantron
Spot on! As a 64 year old, I see 20-something employees who struggle with the simplest challenges. We learned by doing, not by watching