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Our Enslavement To Dopamine
Our Enslavement To Dopamine
Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety. There is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen, then there is no morning of hopefulness either. And so modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn. This article by Andrew Sullivan is an instant classic and my favorite of the year. Pour a cup of coffee and dig in at select/all (45 minutes).