On dopamine
(I am not going to speak from an exact medical standpoint)
How do you feel when : you eat snacks or junk food for the first time ? you stay late at night watching your favorite Show ? When you play a video game ? when skip classes or procrastinate ? watching +18 content ?... let's call this a happiness shot.
Now how do you feel when : you finish reading a long book ? when you finish all the tasks you had to do that day ? when you eat a home cooked meal ? when you stick to your gym plan ?... let's also call this a happiness shot.
I started to wonder if both of shots where of the same beverage, what could be the reason most of us prefer the first one ? it's easy : the effort to reward ratio. Our brain is made to work efficiently and waste the minimum energy, so for our +200 000 years old lazy ass ape brain, if you can achieve the same goal, with less hassle, why would he like the longer road ? If it was for our brain only, we would have lived exclusively from sugar. Another reason is that society evolved to make our life easier, our brain does not make a difference between going out to socialize and staying at home playing video games, or between eating fast food and home cooked meal. here is how our brain sees it : Socializing vs easier socializing, eating vs easier eating...
If we exclude the health reasons, one would argue that there is no harm in going the easier road, but here is the catch, the easier road almost never gives you a delayed gratification that is present on the hard road.
I am no complotist but the current social media companies, etc... wants to control us through stripping us from our freedom and good habits : you stay watching reels, tiktoks, or whatever all day, every short video is like a whole new world with a new experience, every time you watch a video you forget the last one, and it goes on and on.... They stripped us from our patience, our attention span, and now with chatgpt, they even want to strip us from our ability to think : Before these existed, if you wanted to live an experience you had to go out and live the real experience, with its good and bad. Now you can stay safely at home, and watch cute little dogs in the first video and in the second one some guy being killed, you lived two extreme opposite experiences in one go. I had one guy ask chatgpt is 00:00 12 pm or am, this tells a lot about how our brain can be tricked.
What can we do to fight this ? two things : reduce our dopamine resistance by reducing exposition to high dopamine low effort and low reward activities, and concentrate more on the delayed gratification and rewards that comes from those tedious and seemingly boring tasks : instead of eating outside everyday, you can eat the weekend if you managed to cook successfully the whole week.
Next subject is going to be be the 25 crisis and what defines success in life.