The Displeasure Chemical

How dopamine and the news ruined our brains

In past communiqués from the Chazzy’s World foxhole, where I’m holed up with my collections of Colombian emeralds and looted Prussian art, I’ve delved into psychology and neuroscience. Those were met with rave reviews for their engaging blend of pseudoscience, outright falsehoods, and physiognomy. So, I’ve decided to put my lab coat back on and delve back into the worlds of science and the mind.

You’ve probably heard of dopamine. It’s the Ken Burns of neurotransmitters: a boring thing that somehow achieves fame because people think it makes them sound smart. In popular culture, dopamine is often described as “the pleasure chemical,” or by its scientific name, 4-Loko. Dopamine is commonly thought to produce happiness in the brain. A related theory, called the anhedonia hypothesis, holds that dopamine deficiency causes depression. These are both widely disproven conclusions. They were derived from 1950s experiments on rats, similar to the faulty science which believed male orgasms to be real.

Now, we know dopamine actually gives us the feeling of “motivational salience,” or the desirability of an outcome. In other words, dopamine tells the brain how rad or grody something would be, and directs our behavior towards or away from it accordingly. 

Everyone knows social media is dangerously good at tapping into our dopamine circuitry. While posting cringe might not give us pleasure per se, it neurochemically feels like something worth pursuing again, creating reward cycles that keep us coming back for more. Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of User Girth Growth at Facebook, famously admitted that he feels “tremendous guilt” for creating “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops” that are “destroying how society works.” And he’s not just saying that. People who know Chamath report that he is so wracked by regret, he can barely work at his new company, which uses urethra imaging to identify workers who require fewer bathroom breaks. 

There exists now an untenable situation. Consuming media, be it social networks, YouTube, television, even print, fills you with unsustainable amounts of dopamine, leaving you bereft and searching for more when you’re done. Since every piece of news is designed to maximize motivational salience, each day brings a new most important thing, a new deepest desire, a new greatest fear. Your behavior is modified each time at the chemical level, until you are left too dizzy and disoriented to take a step forward. Matt Taibbi, whatever you think of him, got it right in his June 12 blog post: “The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias,” he writes. “We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains.” We are simply expected to care too much about too many things.

The greatest invention in the dopamine industry was the timeline. Taking its design cues from the Modernist grid, it achieves the same standardizing effect. On the newsfeed, everything is flat: Your uncle Bob cooked salmon tonight. A passenger airline crashed killing 171 people. Someone you barely remember from middle school is cursing out his girlfriend for leaving with their daughter. Income inequality reaches a level not seen since the French Revolution. Here are some sandals you might like. On the timeline, big and small are the same size. We lose our ability to judge the magnitude of problems, like a toddler who cries at the same volume whether he’s fallen off the swings or dropped a Cheerio.

This phenomenon has carried itself to other media. In the mid-20th century, the theorist Marshall McCluhan wrote that “the medium is the message.” In other words, what you’re watching matters less than what you’re watching it on. Now, he news you see matters less than the axons it causes to fire. If you’ve watched cable news in the last decade, the networks which must compete with cable, or the legacy newspapers which have cannibalized their smaller peers in a desperate quest for survival, you have participated in a grave psychological experiment about the stamina of attention. It’s like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, if instead of waking up to a beeping alarm clock, he saw an OLED display telling him today was the most important day in the history of man.  

We probably are in exceptional times. A pandemic rages due to exceptional incompetence from our leaders. The glaciers melt and the sea levels rise. Income inequality rises to Bastille-storming levels. The warning bells of fascism clang, as unidentified troops storm our cities in response to the biggest riots in decades.  A serial child rapist who was close friends with two presidents is killed right in front of us. But we don’t know how to react anymore. We just wait for tomorrow to surprise us with its fresh horrors. We’re like Nigel Tufnel with his Marshall amp, jamming away with the volume at ten. And just when we think there’s none louder… this one goes to eleven!

But there is a solution. Delete the apps. Check the news once per day. Sleep with your phone in the next room. Pack your things and go. Drive your car into a tree. Pull four of your teeth, leave them on the driver’s seat, then torch it. Buy a few acres down in a land that no man or beast happily calls home. Let your beard grow long and knotted, your cheeks hollow and ruddy, your skin tough and tanned as pit leather, your eyes as black and blank as chips of obsidian. Find an old mule, all bones and hide. Ride it until it collapses, making its final bed in a bed of primrose and juniper under an ochre sun. Keep walking, as fleeting as a shadow, the few memories of you fading like bootprints in riverbed silt, as free and nameless as the wind.