dopamine is a neurotransmitter tied to motivation, reward, pleasure, and learning. it’s not just about feeling good, but also about desire, anticipation, and what drives your behavior
we get natural dopamine from effort based rewards and experiences that build over time. this dopamine is more regulated and steady, often tied to personal meaning and growth. this kind of dopamine is slow burning and long lasting. it builds confidence and resilience over time. examples of sustainable dopamine are:
- working toward a meaningful goal
- meditation, mindfulness
- social connection with emotional depth
- acts of kindness or helping others
- spending time in nature
on the other hand, the dopamine we get from instant gratification comes from short term pleasure with little effort. it’s often used as a quick escape from discomfort. we get a spike of dopamine, but it leads to a crash afterward. instead of getting small, sustainable doses over time, you get it all at once, leading you to feel it more when it’s not there. over time, your brain starts to need more and more of the stimulus to get the same effect. this is how the cycle of addiction begins.
examples of instant gratification dopamine are:
- scrolling on social media
- eating sugar or junk foot
- chasing external validation
modern society predisposes us to chase instant gratification for a few reasons. For one thing, the shift in the way we use technology has sped up the pace of our society by miles. With the internet, everything is accessible with just a click of a finger. Have a question? Just type it into google. No more having to search through books for hours or conduct a bunch of interviews. Want to buy something? You can get it shipped to your house within like 5 minutes with Amazon. Want to start a new show? You don’t have to wait weeks for the whole thing to come out. You can binge watch the whole thing on netflix in a couple days.
not to mention our devices are literally designed to be addicting. notification, likes, and endless scrolling give us quick dopamine hits with minimal effort that train us like dogs to keep searching for another reward. Algorithms reward impulsive behavior and keep us chasing novelty. Our brains are basically trained to expect constant stimulation. Our new normal is getting all of the pleasure without any of the pain. So when the stimulation is suddenly gone, we get insanely bored or intensely anxious.
When the new normal is a readily available source of content, products, etc, society has to shift to keep up. This leads to a prevalence of hustle culture. Society rewards productivity over presence, so people work jobs that require them to work quickly and constantly even if it’s not necessarily leading to substantial progress. In this model, there’s little room for work-life balance, but a lot of room to burn out. We’re taught that rest or slow progress is lazy, so we use instant pleasure as a coping mechanism instead of building sustainable, restorative habits.
With so much information and so many opportunities available to us, we may also feel pressure to be constantly learning new things, achieving new milestones, doing cool stuff, etc. Byung-Chul Han describes this as Achievement Society. We are constantly pressured to prove ourselves to keep up with those around us. Everything’s fast these days: fast food, fast entertainment, fast relationships. Whatever you want, you expect to get with a snap of your finger. But faster doesn’t always mean better. Most of the time it just means what you get is cheaper, less sustainable, and less meaningful.
When our brains are constantly pressured to pick up the speed, it puts us in survival mode. We don’t give ourselves the time we need to absorb the information we need and let our brain form the neural pathways that help us solidify that information into knowledge. Instead, we start to look for the bare minimum and throw out the rest. So we might get what we want faster, but in reality, we just settled for what we wanted in the moment, not what would last.
But I don’t think this is completely our fault. People might argue that this generation is lazy and impatient, but I think we’re overwhelmed. all this pressure to perform without being given the time to learn and improve can only lead to burnout. On top of that, we’re held to strict, robotic standards that don’t leave room for the nuance and flexibility that’s natural to us as humans. Things move so quickly these days that we’re trained to believe there’s not enough time to work toward the long term. And when you don’t believe you can work toward the future, you settle for the simple pleasures of the current moment. It’s like building sandcastles. Would you put all your effort into recreating the Palace of Versailles on the beach if you knew the tide was just going to come and wash it away?
The obvious answer to this problem is that we need to slow down, but that’s not something we can do on our own. We need a cultural understanding of why slowing down is important in the first place. We need to make a conscious decision to choose quality over quick results, health over productivity, and deeper meaning over cheap symbolism. We need jobs that don’t treat their workers like replaceable parts. We need communities that value people over profit. We need to create a world where everything matters down to the most minute detail, or else we will keep ourselves stuck in this cycle for much longer than we intend to.
