Understanding our brain on desire
Meditations on planning, dreaming and overriding our base desire for predictability
Understanding our brain on desire
When you do something — say, write, work out, or study — your brain releases a small dopamine burst after completion or progress.
Over time, it starts releasing dopamine before you start — in anticipation — because it has learned:
“This leads to a good feeling later.”
That anticipatory dopamine is what we subjectively experience as wanting.
So through
... See morei can either do everything or nothing, there’s no in between
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plan for the lowest version of you.
The one who’s tired, overstimulated, and slightly dehydrated. If that version wouldn’t follow the routine, it won’t last.
- the 2am urge to reinvent yourself (Substack)
“You’re not just planning habits, you’re planning a self who never gets tired.”
- the 2am urge to reinvent your entire life (Substack)
“The fugitive moments in between our lifelong undertakings, whatever their ultimate worth, may be what we are searching for all along.”
- In This Essay I Will: On Distraction
Maybe we find life in the little pockets that swell between our ambitions.
“These detours from daily routine are, in fact, the signature moments of her life.”
- In This Essay I Will: On Distraction
Now that I no longer work a forty-hour-a-week job, I tell many people I am writing a book. It is going along, I say, but slowly. How is it that so many chores, parties, trips, assignments, and plainly wasted hours intervene? Not everyone is distracted from their most cherished goals. But I think everyone is distracted from something—it is desire’s
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Their curiosity has no staying power—it’s just the dirty runoff of a Zeitgeist that tells them to improve themselves, improve the human race.
- In This Essay I Will: Distraction