Dopamine Nation
"Resettling Your Brain in the Age of Cheap Pleasures"-- We are living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. Lembke explores new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain-- and what to do about it. She illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery. -- adapted from jacket
Stats for nerds
18recommend
32mentions
27people
2021–2026years
72% recommend25% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Not OP but I've also read and recommended The Comfort Crisis.
Stepping further down the "better personal health" path, there's Outlive by Peter Attia. Stepping further down the "addiction to convenience" path, there's Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke.
Both excellent books and perspectives worth reading. (Both audiobooks are great too.)
- Humans are notoriously bad at multitasking. In the "traditional" way of writing software, you'd spend hours focused on one or two things. You'd tick one thing off the list and move to another, usually with some kind of logical connection between them. Its similar to reading a novel, one long continuous narrative requiring prolonged attention. It's exhausting in its own way, but it doesn't leave you feeling fragmentation and wrung out.
But whereas that's like reading a book, the way people are using agents is like scrolling tick tock. If you have 6 or 7 agents going, and you want to keep the pipeline full, you are constantly context switching. Your brain never has a chance to get into deep focus mode. Your attention is constantly being yanked from one thing to the next.
The same thing happens to me if I let myself get distracted at work and try to focus on too many things at once (emails, teams, Jira, actual work...). My brain feels like a fractured mess.
There are some good books on the subject if you're interested:
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains — by Nicholas Carr
Amusing Ourselves to Death — by Neil Postman
Dopamine Nation — by Anna Lembke
- > Also, sitting around doing nothing feels so much better when it's either before work or after work.
This comment reminded me of a book I read recently - Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anne Lembke. She talks about how pleasure and pain and experienced by the same region of the brain and they need to be balanced. I'd highly recommend reading that book.
- You're getting some mild heat in sibling comments here. Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation goes into a lot of detail on this exact point about parental responsibility.
There are others that touch on personal vs. societal responsibility too and the difficulties with parental/personal moderation and change (Stolen Focus by Johann Hari and Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke off the top of my head).
There is an enormous amount of nuance that goes into answering your questions and addressing your assumptions that HN is probably not a great medium for, if you're serious about understanding the answers.
- It's all about your body's natural response to dopamine highs and lows.
Social media, doom scrolling, candy crush, etc. are all high-dopamine activities. After you engage in these activates for a while, then stop, you're left at a relative dopamine deficiency, which your brain abhors. It attempts to rectify the deficiency by encouraging you to engage in high-dopamine activities, which you experience as being 'distracted' from the relatively low-dopamine-rewarded work you're trying to focus on. If you avoid engaging in high-dopamine activities in the morning, your brain WILL be more amenable to focus on low-dopamine-rewarded work.
Read Dopamine Nation for a handy primer on this.
- > Do you know if Lembke has had much success in treating addiction?
She is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University, and her writing is based on her clinical experience.
I became aware of her via her book Dopamine Nation, which is especially relevant here due to the book’s wider view of addictive behaviors and the role of social media. The book also helped me get through some of my own issues.
> Of course I am simplifying, this is a comment thread and not a dissertation.
The guidelines of this site strongly encourage curiosity and substance over generalizations and simplifications. “I don't have a choice” is one extreme, but there’s a wide spectrum of space to explore between that and “it’s their fault”.
I’d be cautious about just pushing back if you’re directing people towards a mindset that they should be able to just choose something else. This can be just as harmful. The person who doesn’t have the tools to work through their issues is driven to despair wondering what is so broken about them that they can’t overcome the problem. Getting help is often necessary.
