Points and gamification begin to remodel our experience, our behavior, and how we define success. “When you substantially change the goals of the activity, that changes the activity itself,” said Nguyen.

“Do I want to be right or happy?” can even give us perspective and clarity to see another important fact: We probably aren’t right in most arguments. And neither is the other side. Time changes our worldviews.

By detaching from material things, the monks are freer to attach to a bigger thing. If everything is everyone’s, nothing takes on any special significance beyond another tool for the job. It’s gear, not stuff.

it doesn’t matter how much gas we give good new habits; if we don’t resolve our bad ones, we still have our foot on the brake. And I’d begun noticing a unique signature of the behaviors that hurt us most. We can quickly repeat them.

“There’s a model called the optimal stimulation model. It says that animals and we humans have a level of stimulation that we prefer. And when it gets below that, we search for stimulation.

But in reality, dopamine isn’t the “pleasure chemical.” And it doesn’t make us do or believe anything. “It makes us more likely to pursue reward, even in situations where that reward is maladaptive,” Berridge told me.

Third, the repetition could stop being quick.

Nguyen explained that discovering what we think is the right information feels good. The philosopher Alison Gopnik went as far as calling it an “intellectual orgasm.” That’s a line that only someone who thinks for a living could utter, but she was getting to something important. The “aha” moment feels good, like a jackpot. Confusion, on the other

But this ancient game didn’t apply just to food, said Zentall. It applied to acquiring anything that gave us an opportunity to improve our lives. This could be gaining possessions or other resources, information, social status, or whatever else made us feel good and live another day. For us to survive, scarcity brain needed to develop systems that