How to escape the dopamine cartel

We are at the rapidly advancing edge of a new post-entertainment culture

We seek to entertain ourselves, like we always have, but we are increasingly failing to do so, while continuing to remain captive to our mediums.

The traditional critique against mass entertainment was that it was passive (e.g., TV series, movies, video-games and sports). Today however, with the proliferation of scrolling and short-form videos, entertainment has evolved one step further than mindlessness to encompass ceaseless activity: scroll and swipe non-stop in pursuit of a never-ending and ever-eluding award.

The combination of the two breeds a zombifying form of a distraction, which in turn, creates the most powerful addiction our society has ever collectively experienced. 

Like addicts, the more reliance we create on our stimuli, the less pleasure we ultimately receive from them. This creates a state of anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure, which, in turn, begs the question: why pursue the activity if pleasure cannot be derived from it? 

Because, at that point, the stimulus is solely pursued to avoid the tormenting effect of dopamine deprivation².

People cannot stay alone with their own thoughts for any significant stretch of time before they start suffering. 

And, silence is not even the baseline for suffering anymore. People cannot bring themselves to watch a feature-length film without experiencing withdrawals. I observed it first-hand.

Recently, I went to the movie theater with my partner. We grabbed our warm, buttery popcorn along with our fizzy drinks and reclined in our seats to enjoy a two-hour long action movie. Midway through, our immersion was repeatedly disrupted by the constant and increasingly frequent flashes and pings of phones going off around us. People were starting to lose attention, reverting back to their shiny rectangles for their momentary hits of dopamine, before promptly putting them away again in an attempt to pretend they could focus on the plot.

We are medicating ourselves away from reality.

And what do we do when technology and passive entertainment are not enough to address this suffering, the stillness that we cannot bear? We find another, more potent stimulus to mask the pain—or we simply reach for chemical substances to ingest.

After all, everyone seems to have ADHD nowadays, right?

A report by the CDC found that from 2016 to 2021, prescription stimulant fills saw a significant rise, spiking during the COVID-19 pandemic³.

More worryingly, data from the FDA highlights that prescriptions for stimulants almost doubled from 2011 to 2022, with the bulk of the growth being observed in adults⁴.

We—well, most of us—do not need stimulants to focus. 

We are already overstimulated to the point of numbness. 

And the cause for our inattention lies before our eyes. 

Regardless, every year, millions of us reach for drugs to treat our pseudo-ADHD—to help us focus amidst the chaos of distraction by ramping up our minds and bodies to match the speed of the external environment and the demands of our hectic lives. 

This is a recipe for disaster. 

Why can’t we simply accept that technology and life in general hold us hostage and that we are suffering the greatest collective behavioral addiction the mankind has ever seen?

Perhaps because such an environment that we have found ourselves in—those modern addictions—has sucked dry our desire to find meaning and pursue goals that fulfill us.

Once we accept that, and see things as they are, we can begin the arduous process of disengagement and change.

Of course, this is not easy, for as long as we viscerally rely on our technology and drugs to numb the pain, we create more incentives by the Dopamine Cartel⁶ (or the Attention Merchants, as described by Tim Wu) to continue their devious practices. They understand how attention works and leverage it to the detriment of the individual in favor of their profits.

The truth is simple: If attention is finite, and it is an economic resource, then there will undoubtedly be a fight for this limited resource. And there is a fight happening, of ever-increasing intensity, continuously, tirelessly, to consume you, as you continue to consume. The Attention Merchants⁷ are forced to use increasingly sophisticated means to grab and imprison your attention. As technology improves, so will the Cartels’ ability to exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities.

But there is still hope.

An enriched environment is needed to escape addiction

Unless you have a sufficiently enriched external environment, you generally cannot brute force yourself out of an impulse-driven (or behavioral)^8< addiction.

In this context, the famous rat study is frequently quoted: Puhl et al. (2012)^{9/sup>, concluded that a stimulating and enriched environment reduced the chances of rats getting addicted to cocaine. Meanwhile, rats that lived alone, with equal access to cocaine but without a rich, exploratory environment, became frequent, and eventually addicted, users of the drug. In this study, the addiction in question was substance-related, but, fundamentally, even behavioral addictions are chemically-modulated in the brain. If you can avoid, and even escape, a drug addiction with the aid of an enriched environment, then the same principle, with more potent results, can be applied to our modern impulse-driven addictions, many of whom involve the use of technology.}

Find solace in the enduring fundamentals

Many traditional aspects of life can be described as enriched environments. The most important and fundamental one to the individual is the family unit. As the saying goes, everything starts at home—the good and the bad propagate from within. From there, the forces that interact and engulf the family units, religions, cultural traditions, and social connections converge to create the bigger picture that dictates the level of engagement that an individual experiences. The more dynamic, diverse, positive and lasting that experience is, the less the chances of addiction become.

Enrich environments can be found everywhere because they share the same characteristics. They offer stimulation, positive relationships, safety, growth opportunities, novelty, autonomy, and a sense of purpose. 

Our goal should be to cultivate those attributes.

Make a conscious effort to ground yourself in real life; to touch grass; to have dinner with your family without the presence of phones; to go for long walks in nature, without listening to music or a podcast; to immerse yourself in long-forgotten traditions and religious practices (if you are religious).

Use the fallback method to replace scrolling

If you are in deep trouble, rather than deleting all forms of entertainment and social media from your devices, which is almost certain to elicit a potent, negative psychological response, you can try falling back to traditional entertainment mediums, such as movies, documentaries, and easy-to-read fiction books, before making more significant changes. 

The goal here is to gradually retrain the mind to pay attention to stimuli for longer periods of time, without succumbing to the constant impulse to switch to something else or scroll away.

• People can no longer pay attention at the movies. Buy a ticket and go watch a movie while doing your best to resist the desire to look at your phone.
• Do your reading on paper books, rather than e-books.
• Getting out of the house as much as possible. Sports are still a thing. Gyms exist. Walking in nature is potently anti-depressive.
• Take up a hobby that requires paying close attention to, such as painting, sculpting, or playing a music instrument.
• Visit museums, art galleries, or historical sites.
• Host a game night with friends and family.
• Find something that gives you meaning and chase it relentlessly.

In a world fighting for our attention, the key to reclaiming our focus lies in embracing activities that we find innately meaningful and which allow us to grow both physically and intellectually. But, to do that, we need to want to change—and change is difficult, lengthy, and painful, but ultimately rewarding.

Footnotes

1. Gioia, T. (2022, December 28). The State of the Culture, 2024. The Honest Broker. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024
2. Gioia (2022)
3. Danielson, M. L. (2023). Trends in Stimulant Prescription Fills Among Commercially Insured Children and Adults—United States, 2016–2021. MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 72. https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7213a1
4. Center for Drug Evaluation. (2023). Prescription Stimulant Medications. FDA. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-drug-class/prescription-stimulant-medications
5. And, to my unscientific opinion, it contributes to the rise of chronic disease and permanent burnout, but this is a story for another time when I have more data to back-up my claims.
6. Gioia (2022)
7. Wu, T. (2016). The attention merchants: The epic scramble to get inside our heads (First edition). Alfred A. Knopf.
8. There are two main forms of addiction: substance-related addictions and behavioral ones.
9. Puhl, M. D., Blum, J. S., Acosta-Torres, S., & Grigson, P. S. (2012). Environmental enrichment protects against the acquisition of cocaine self-administration in adult male rats, but does not eliminate avoidance of a drug-associated saccharin cue. Behavioural Pharmacology, 23(1), 43–53. https://doi.org/10.1097/FBP.0b013e32834eb060