Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

In today’s dopamine-rich ecosystem, we’ve all become primed for immediate gratification.

High-dopamine goods mess with our ability to delay gratification, a phenomenon called delay discounting.

Dopamine may play a bigger role in the motivation to get a reward than the pleasure of the reward itself. Wanting more than liking.

While truth-telling promotes human attachment, compulsive overconsumption of high-dopamine goods is the antithesis of human attachment. Consuming leads to isolation and indifference, as the drug comes to replace the reward obtained from being in relationship with others.

Medicaid patients die from opioids at three to six times the rate of non-Medicaid patients.

With intermittent exposure to pain, our natural hedonic set point gets weighted to the side of pleasure, such that we become less vulnerable to pain and more able to feel pleasure over time.

As we have seen, having too much material wealth can be as bad as having too little. Dopamine overload impairs our ability to delay gratification. Social media exaggeration and “post-truth” politics (let’s call it what it is, lying) amplify our sense of scarcity. The result is that even amidst plenty, we feel impoverished.

That moment of wanting is the brain’s pleasure balance tipped to the side of pain.

In his book Bad Religion, writer and religious scholar Ross Douthat describes our New Age “God Within” theology as “a faith that’s at once cosmopolitan and comforting, promising all the pleasures of exoticism . . . without any of the pain . . . a mystical pantheism, in which God is an experience rather than a person. . . . It’s startling how little