Hi, my name is Joshua Hamer, and I’m a dopamine addict.
Boredom is a gift right now. This is not a surprise to anyone, particularly those who parent kids who will sit and play Minecraft for eight hours without even blinking.
But the dangerous part is that we live in a culture that has discovered a way to exploit that, maximize it, and monetize it.
And I’ve fallen prey to all of it, even while I knew it was happening to me.
I’ll explore this in three different ways here: food, social media, and the distraction industry (you’ll see when I get there).
Dopamine: Laying the Biological Groundwork
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter and is one of the most important chemicals in our body. It’s how your biology rewards you for something you’re supposed to do to continue living or carry on the species. Acts like eating energy-rich foods and having sex are immediate-gratification acts for which your brain will reward you.
But there are ways this can go wrong. For example, alcoholics have a disorder where their dopaminergic system rewards them too much for drinking, so they need to feed it more and more to keep up the dopamine signal. Eventually the toxic effects of the alcohol wreck their systems. So the reward system can get disordered, reward the wrong behaviors, and cause the individual to choose destructive behaviors over productive ones.
But that’s an extreme example. Let’s talk about what’s actually happening in the brain.
Too much dopamine being released will overload the receptors in the brain. So to prevent them burning out, the brain turns down the signal coming from the receptors, or downregulates them. It becomes a positive feedback loop: more dopamine release leads to dopamine receptor downregulation, which requires more dopamine release to achieve the same buzz, which leads to even more receptor downregulation, etc.
This eventually leads to a situation where the brain will seek out the low-value but low-effort dopamine response, almost involuntarily. How many times have you been bored for five seconds, and your phone ends up in your hand without you even thinking about it?
That’s where I’m trapped, and that’s where I’m seeing most people trapped. Let’s pick apart why.
Modern Food Culture: Big Ag Gets Rich
Let’s go back 15,000 years, before the Neolithic Revolution when humans started moving from being hunter-gatherers to settled agriculture. Human biology was the exact same as it is today. Think about the food that was available then and what our biological mechanisms thrived on.
There were animals: cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, wild game. There were some plants — pre-Agricultural Revolution there was some grain, but not much, and you couldn’t refine it. There were more starchy plants like potatoes and squash, but these were only available in tropical climates or in the summer in temperate climates, and they’ve been selective bred across the millennia to maximize their starch content. Fruit was only available for a few months a year unless you lived in the tropics, and didn’t have nearly as much fructose as it does today.
Now, we have companies who design foods to hit the “bliss point”, where the dopamine surge is maximized and the satiety is minimized, to keep you a constant consumer.
Let’s put it this way. If you were hungry, and given a block of cheese, you’d eat maybe a third of it before you’d feel sated. If you were given a large bag of Doritos, you’d eat the whole thing and be ready for a second.
This is the peculiar thing about human biology in our current environment. There’s something called the Randle cycle, where fat and carbohydrates are at such a ratio that it provides a perfect hormonal response to send all that energy straight into fat stores. Think of it like squirrels eating nuts and acorns to fatten up for the winter… except for us in the Western world, winter never comes. It’s just the constant storing away of energy.
It would be better for humanity if making this highly-processed, highly-rewarding food was expensive. But that’s the problem: it’s super cheap to manufacture, and it’s incredibly profitable. Why do you think this food is so prominently positioned in grocery stores and the meat is hiding in the back?
So that’s our food supply now: highly-processed non-nutritious food, made to be the perfect blend of carbs and fats to make you fat and still crave more, created not for your well-being but to make PepsiCo, Kraft-Heinz, General Mills, and ConAgra stockholders as happy as possible. All because they’ve hacked your brain.
Social Media: Making You Its Prisoner Since 2007
Facebook was dragged in front of a Congressional committee last week to defend itself after the WSJ revealed a bunch of internal documents, showing the company knows that their policies are knowingly causing harm by amplifying competition among teenage girls or by tweaking their algorithms to amplify emotion, good or bad. The whistleblower testified yesterday that the company "amplifies division, extremism, and polarization." I talked about this in my piece about tribalism a few weeks ago.
But let’s dig deeper. Remember about ten years ago when Facebook and Twitter switched from a purely timestamp-organized stream to an algorithmically-generated one? That was where things changed from useful to, eventually, poisonous.
These sites now organize their content by prioritizing the content that will keep you engaged. They do that by choosing the content that either similar to what has gotten you to engage in the past or other people like you are engaging with it in the present. Ultimately, this becomes a dopamine-maximizing strategy. You scroll, you interact, you scroll more, you interact more, trying to get more and more and more dopamine surges.
The algorithms don’t care if this is making your life better. They don’t care if they’re rewarding the right responses. ANY emotional response is what they want, because that leads to more engagement and more scrolling. So cue the hate clicks, cue the Twitter mobs, and cue the increased tribalism as the algorithms divide people into Agrees-with-Me and Is-a-Horrible-Person.
David French wrote a column last weekend about American polarization, and he cited some recent polls showing that over 80% of respondents say that their political rivals pose a “clear and present threat to American democracy.” That didn’t arise out of nowhere. To a large degree, that’s the social media algorithms surrounding you only with people with whom you agree, and Otherizing people with whom you disagree.
It’s all part of their goal. They want you to get locked into the site, constantly scrolling, constantly interacting, constantly consuming, constantly getting that drip drip drip of sweet dopamine.
Speaking of keeping you locked in…
Netflix, YouTube, Video Games, and More: Entertainment Gets Scientific
Ever since I got my first iPhone 3G in 2008, I’ve had silly timewaster games on them. First it was Labyrinth, then it was sudoku, then crosswords, then Threes, then pictocross. But over the last couple of months, I’ve realized how devious these games are, even without the pay-to-win traps.
This is a simple example of a greater entertainment industry that has gotten the desire for your captivation down to an absolute science, to maximize the attention it can get from you.
It’s Netflix automatically going from one show’s episode to the next, then showing you a trailer for the next show it predicts you’ll watch. It’s Twitch always having people on, playing the game that you want to see. It’s YouTube always ready with a new recommendation for you to jump right into when you’re done with the current video. It’s your favorite video game, providing you with the next achievement, the next level, the next expansion. It’s p*rnography, more available now that ever before and absolutely free, to consume and to create.
Don’t get me wrong. I love our streaming entertainment ecosystem. If you would have told me when I was 11 that I could have every episode of The Muppet Show, Ducktales, and Chip ‘n Dale’s Rescue Rangers, plus a few dozen amazing superhero movies AND Flight of the Navigator available at a moment’s notice for $8 a month, I would have punched you in the face for lying to me.
Spotify is an amazing thing, giving you access to roughly the entire history of recorded music. Audible has some of the greatest accomplishments in literature and thought, some of them even read to you by Alan Cumming. With audiobooks and podcasts, the daily work commute or weekly lawn mowing has gone from wasted time to educational space, enriching your life as you wait for a red light or trim around the Japanese maple.
But it all forms what I’m terming the distraction industry: a constant stream of things to keep you occupied, consuming, engaged. And your brain evolutionarily wasn’t prepared for the amount of stimulation that can get thrown at it all day long.
Sometimes you need to just turn off every distraction and just exist. Go outside, stand with your bare feet in the grass, feel the sunlight on your skin, and just listen to the world around you.
A few weeks ago, I started to write this piece as an experiment on myself. I was going to cut out the timewaster games during work hours, put the iPad with videos out of my office, and listen only to classical music for a week.
I think I made it two days before I gave in. You don’t know how dependent you are on all of this stuff until you try half-measures to give it up. It started as playing some pictocross after Evan went to bed, then one of my favorite Twitch streamers one day while working, then it’s 100% back on.
So on Sunday, I deleted from my phone every game, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, Reddit, all of it. Then I went outside and started planting some grass seed.
I’ve found one of the big things that helps this transition period is to do something in physical space, without distractions or earbuds. Get out in your yard. Plant a garden. Do some home improvement projects, where you can concentrate on measure-twice-cut-once without a podcast pulling your mind in different directions. Work with real things, with your hands.
I’m on day 4 of this current iteration, and I still feel the pull of the distractions occasionally. I’ll glance at my phone to prepare to pull up Twitter, or feel the pull of COVID content on YouTube.
But I can’t begin to describe the difference I feel already. I’m able to concentrate on difficult work projects again. I’m able to disconnect at the end of my work day and not feel like I’m being pulled in 600 directions by the constant stimulation. I’m able to relax and play with my son or read stories to him before bed, without the jitter of the latest Twitter outrage bubbling around my head.
This isn’t particularly scientific, but look at my Fitbit stress management scores the day after I got off all of the above:
That’s the highest score I’ve ever gotten, and I absolutely feel every bit of it.
Here’s my recommendation: try it for a week. Make a deal with yourself that at the end of the week, if you don’t feel better, more present, more alert, you’ll reinstall everything, but in the meantime make it all go away. If it’s still installed, its siren call will be too strong.
Go a week without sugar, without social media, without constant music and podcasts, without video games, and see how you feel. Be objective, be honest.
The only thing you have to gain is your time, better spent, doing things of actual value. And with how few days we are given in this life, that’s the best gift you can give to yourself.
Such a brilliant essay! Lots to ponder here... I was just asking my daughters if they could do without their phones for 3 days. You know the answer. I'm grateful not to have been raised with a TV and to not own a smart phone. Generational difference me thinks. Great job Joshua!