Just Throw Some Dopamine At It

the easiest solution to ALL of your problems--not to mention the regime's

“The Savage nodded, frowning. ‘You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.’”

--Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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I’ve discussed before how social media has given us the power to become celebrities, and the deep-cutting damage this has done to our sense of belonging and community. But celebrity status isn’t the only magic offered to us by the black mirror.

While the notion of joining the Influencer’s Initiative is certainly seductive to many, there are still plenty of social media users who have no desire for fame—sometimes, in fact, the opposite. What they want is to disappear. But what’s more, they want to make things disappear—specifically “bad” things. Bad emotions, troublesome tasks, uncomfortable social situations. Social media can do all of this. Easy—just throw some dopamine at it.

The power of social media to numb the mind, to dull the senses—to maintain in its consumers a state of placid “happiness”—is leagues beyond that of Huxley’s invention of soma in his novel Brave New World. Not everybody wants to be famous, but certainly everybody wants to be happy. Never mind whether this happiness is synthetic or genuine. With magic like this, people don’t often ask questions.

But, to quote Rumpelstiltskin from Once Upon a Time, “Magic always comes with a price.”

And the price with social media is, well, if not your soul, then at least your spirit. For the ability to dull even the tiniest negative feelings at a moment’s notice with a quick hit of dopamine, we exchange the more noble aspects of ourselves: our grit, our determination, our vitality—all of the things that enable us to achieve true greatness or create true art. Indeed, we find ourselves hurdling down the Creative Doom-Spiral before we can close the app.

We also sacrifice community. Community, for all its intrinsic benefits, is a nasty and inconvenient thing, after all, seeing as it involves real people who can’t just be blocked, muted, or cancelled when they offend us. And yet we wonder why we’re so abhorrently lonely.

And, when we’re lonely—well, that’s a bad feeling, and so it’s straight back to the cra—I mean, dopamine house. See? Someone liked your selfie! All better.

Earlier this week, I stumbled across a YouTube video in which the commentator argued that, perhaps, it isn’t so much of an attention deficit that causes our inability to focus on anything longer than a thirty-second TikTok reel, but a motivation deficit. Possibly, these are one and the same (I tend to think so), but I do think this is an accurate way to describe our deal with the devil. In exchange for a few meager drops of dopamine a day, we have relinquished the agency, motivation, and moral clarity necessary to produce—or even consume—truly intelligent, inspired content.

In his book The Life We’re Looking For, Andy Crouch refers to this currency we’ve gambled away as “flow”:

“Often flow simply begins […] with whatever emotional state we carry into the experience. At the beginning we may feel that nothing is changing—indeed it is very possible we will not even notice as our mood begins to shift.

And what about the ending? When flow subsides, as it inevitably does, we are left with a sense of gratitude, humility, and even awe. We feel strangely okay.”

(The Life We’re Looking For, pg. 49)

Meanwhile, what we’re left with as a result of our holiday in the digital casino is a hollow sense of loss; a malaise of isolation and disillusionment.

“And yet, for all the ways we cling to the superpower zone [social media] as we are dragged away by a parent, spouse, or other responsibilities, when we look back from a distance, our memories of our time spent there are strangely inert. If we can remember the experience at all, it seems that we were in some kind of alternate universe that cannot really touch or inform our own—which is in fact precisely true. We have none of the rich, grateful memories that we do of our moments of real flow.”

(The Life We’re Looking For, pg. 50)

One of the reasons I believe many people are finding themselves—as I have—disenchanted by social media and its hollow promises of easy dopamine is because we’re beginning to sense the counterfeit. What we want is “flow”: to experience the deep, impassioned bliss of diving into something with our whole selves—whether that is to read and truly contemplate a novel, write a novel, go for a hike, work in the garden, learn an instrument, or whatever. We want to be fully present in something. A thick, tangible something. But we moderns get skittish when presented with the unalterable reality that this will mean experiencing a certain degree of inescapable friction or “negativity,” as is par for the course of human events.

It is always easier—and more comfortable in the immediate sense—to pick up your phone, to be put under its spell. We do it at the slightest inconvenience: to avoid an uneasy text message; to delay spending time on a project that we know will take hours of difficult labor. We even do it to avoid the sort of silence where our own thoughts might have a chance to wander, because when thoughts wander, they have a habit of taking us into places that aren’t always polite or allowed in the oppressive context of Modernity.

What we don’t often realize—at least, in the moment—is that many of the things we avoid because they are “too difficult” or require “too much time” are often the very things that will lead us to the “flow” that our spirits so desperately crave.

Crouch goes on to say, “Flow is the timelessness of a live performance, the moments when the skill and vulnerability of the artist in the presence of an audience somehow hold in reverent suspension all we have known and dreamed of life. The superpower zone is clicking on the double arrow that will start the fifth episode in a row of The Office.”

So why do we do it? We know it’s bad for us. We know the dopamine firing into our sad little brains is unearned, and yet, for many, the power to abolish slings and arrows, to abolish scary emails and boredom, is just too intoxicating.

And so, the spell that renders us inert, bound to the sinking stones of a civilization in decay will prevail—until we do the work to break it and push forward with fresh clarity and conviction to develop the pillars of a new culture, undeterred by all the challenges and “negativity” and uncomfiness that will entail. We cannot afford to remain in stasis, lobbing cheap dopamine at our problems until we come to in five, ten, twenty years and say, in a very boomer-sounding voice, “Well, now, how the hell did we get here?”