Kids These Days With Their Dopamine And Stuff

I'm reading an excellent book right now, Dopamine Nation. I'm nearly done with it so I wanted to share my biggest takeaway with you.

Your body is constantly trying to establish an equilibrium between pleasure the pain. This plays out in your brain, primarily through the mechanisms associated with dopamine. The more pleasure you experience, the more your body ratchets up your sensitivity to discomfort.

The author is a clinical psychologist and she illustrates her points with examples from her practice. In one, a young woman comes in to deal with her anxiety and her chronic use of the chronic. As she became more and more anxious, she consumed more and more weed. She got to the point that she woke up with weed, used it regularly all day and then had some more at night so she could sleep.

What she didn't realize was that it was the weed itself that was making her anxious. Her utterly exasperated body, struggling to establish the equilibrium it was designed to maintain, cranked up her anxiety levels just as fast as she smoked pot. When the cannabis wore off, she was left with overwhelming anxiety.

As an old crank, I love to read essays excoriating the younger generations for being lazy and stupid. Kids these days! I tell you, back in my day we only had three channels on the TV. If we wanted to see a TV show, we had to wait for it to run. The only time we could see cartoons was on Saturday mornings. None of this Cartoon Network stuff or YouTubery! The youth of this country is soft and useless!

That's all true, but it's not a sign of cultural rot from indolence, it's a sign of cultural rot brought about through technology. Many things we consume, from movies with their 3-second scene cuts to Instagram and TikTok, have been carefully crafted to trigger maximum dopamine releases in our heads. The population can't help but become more agitated* and sensitive because their bodies are each striving for that equilibrium between pleasure and pain.

In short, we're pleasuring our way into screaming at each other. "The country is so divided these days!" is really an indication of a population in a state of constant discomfort.

We need a new generation of rebels.

* - It's not always agitation, sometimes the discomfort leads to sloth and depression. It could be that your innate personality selects the way in which the discomfort manifests itself. In any case, you become unhappy and it shows.