If you study the effects of dopamine on human behaviour you'd see that it pretty much controls our motivations and actions.
We get up in the morning, and want to get some sun, that's us seeking dopamine.
Or we grab our phones to check notifications and our calendars, that's us seeking dopamine too.
How about social media, same.
How about going for a run, same.
Dopamine is nothing but a chemical that helps make our synapses (connections between neurones in our brain) work better. But it is addictive stuff. Yup, all the stuff we listed, all addictions—the sunlight, social media, busy work, and running.
Simply put, how an addiction works is: imagine our brains to be a two part balance, the first part, pleasure, and the second, pain. The more pleasure we get from something the more the balance tilts towards the pleasure side, but the brain likes a neutral state, it has to maintain the balance. So it pushes the pain side down to bring it back to homeostasis (the level state), but the more pleasure we enjoyed the more pain side the level has to go to in order to maintain the balance. So that's the drop we feel after an episode of pleasure. '
After the episode of pleasure, if we wait long enough, it is all good, the balance maintains itself back to homeostasis. But if we indulge in more of the same pleasure source then the brain needs to bring the balance back to the pain side all the more. And that creates an urge for more and more pleasure from the same source. And that's the addiction cycle kicking in. The brain then needs even more potent forms of the same pleasure just to remain in balance.
Sugar, drugs, alcohol are all examples of things that give us immense pleasure in the moment without much effort, and hence typical addictive substances. While, fulfilling work, exercise, sport are all examples of things that give us pleasure too but with effort up front.
So net-net the mind will gather its dopamine this way or that, but what you can do is control the kind of dopamine you're getting and thereby the addictions or habits you build. Let's get into it.
Learning from the master
Before we get to the controlling of the sources of our dopamine, let's understand these sources a little more fundamentally: I came across Marshall McLuhan's work recently, he was a philosopher who passed in 1980. His work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He most famously, said, "the medium is the message", in his work “Understanding Media” he wrote:
"The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name." The light bulb is a clear demonstration of the concept of "the medium is the message": a light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content.
Now, imagine a time when there was no electricity, no light, the only way to illuminate the dark would have been a fire, and for night time conversations (the message), it'd give the environment a certain vibe (the medium). So in effect to engage in any meaningful activity one would need the environment that the fire creates, and when the electricity and later the light bulb were invented, it created and still does, an environment too, slightly different, more effective, yet still enabling more activity. It does so McLuhan states, "by its mere presence".
So that way, he proposed that the light during night time is a medium itself, a medium of various activities it enables. Now, zoom past centuries ahead, and he compares it to News on TV or we could compare it to News or Social Media platforms on handheld devices, all of it--a medium too but with a message. The news may bring the message of a heinous crime, while you might feel the message of the crime is nothing to do with us and many such occurrences happen daily, but you'd say so, again he suggests, because of the change in public attitude towards the crime or in our example other popular occurrences that we see on the social media and what these occurrences engender by the fact that such occurrences that have nothing to do with us are in effect being brought into the house to watch over dinner or in bed.
Okay, so what does this mean for us
As we just learnt, the light is a medium too, however, without a message. It allows us to control the message and the dopamine that follows. You switch on the light, invite a couple of loved ones, and suddenly you're in for a fulfilling night of fun and games or shall we say free therapy! So we have no issues with the light. Light is good.
But you invite, through the screens we all hold in our hands, social media into your home and you've invited all those occurrences that happen elsewhere and may not have much to do with us, into your homes. In effect, the screens / social media platforms are the medium and what we see on these platforms, the message. This medium is so closely entangled with the message that even the big tech companies can't untangle it. Our addiction, to a feed of random occurrences, is the reason they make money. This addiction is of the bad kind of course. Curiosity is good, but feeding it incoherent occurrences all day, is like lulling it into a quiet sleep.
In effect, since we can control the medium to control the message, we first need to create an environment with a medium of choice and of substance, that which will allow for better more wholistic and knowledgeable messages to enter our homes and our minds. A simple choice of reading 20 pages of a book first thing in the morning is one such medium too. One with a calm environment enabling coherent narratives with its message of knowledge and learning.
The argument that social media is not all bad
To understand this better, let's go back a little. Back when TVs were all the rage.
Sitting back at the end of the day and switching the TV on to find something interesting randomly, was and still may be one of the sought after luxuries, the epitome of I-deserve-it-because-I-am-stressed syndrome. I've had a busy day at work, I need to put my feet up and relax kind of feeling. But consider this, back when TV was in its nascency, there would be a couple of channels and you'd know what to expect where. But sometime in the last couple of decades, the programming on TV got out of hand, you switch on the tv, you'd see invariably there is something that will interest us and by a mere matter of chance, we'd spend our considerably important and exceedingly scarce leisure time on watching something we didn't intend to in the first place. And soon enough there will be ads blaring at us, telling us to buy things we probably don't need. Even now, with streaming platforms, throwing an editorial curation of programming at us vying for our attention, we go from one story to another, one genre to another, there's just a choice chaos that is extremely difficult to escape.
Social Media Algorithms have done just the same too, you sit back, anticipating a dopamine hit pull out your phone and put on the proverbial TV in the form of Social Media. And a good hour and half has past and you've done nothing but ogle at others doing stuff that you didn't know that you want to do too.
The day the big tech companies switched to the new keep-the-user-hooked-for-as-long-as-possible versions of the algorithms, the beauty of a our personal curated chronological feed of what we love to consume as media died. Just like TV is dead, I say social media in it's current form is dying. It is not long before, GenZers will understand that those random suggested reels / tiktoks that keep showing up out of no where are just like those ads on TV we as millennials detested. But I digress, coming to the point, the point of it all is that Social Media platforms as a medium create an environment and that environment is that of bent heads, staring at screens, barely listening, away from the serendipity of a wholesome conversation with the people we love most.
Read that again, the environment Social Media platforms create at most social gatherings, which by the way are the cheapest-best therapy you'd find but that's a story for another time, is of bent heads, staring at screens, barely listening, and away from the serendipitous joy, calm (or revelry of parties) and wonder we intend to find in social gatherings.
Leaving your inputs to chance is a colossal mistake
Now, McLuhan also said and is the point of it all, "we shape our tools, thereafter our tools shape us". In our context, we have the power to shape our inputs (the source of our dopamine), and we ought to take control of it, because if we leave it to chance or worse yet to the big tech companies, we should fear, that those inputs will shape us and our future. Including our kids and thereby the future of the planet.
In future programming: this essay has been about understanding the mediums we use in our lives, I’d also pick up in another article the topic of how to go about controlling the mediums on offer.
Now that I’ve given control back to you. Let’s look at some cool things to allow you to control your inputs.
Stark Library: I manage a digital library, you can subscribe to it here if you’d like. It would give me immense pleasure that my labour of love, which is collecting the best the internet has to offer in one easily manageable place, is being put to good use.
Art Products: I also create art products along with writing these essays, here are a couple of bookmarks that I created last week. Consider buying it? It is going to allow you to take breaks in your reading and is going to make you smile every time you use them. Here’s a sneak peek:
Photos from Gardens and Parks: Another area of interest for me has been running, it is a medium too, of reflection, of health and of enjoying the outdoors. Lately, I’ve combined that with the love of photography, here is a photograph I took of my favourite place to run at, you guessed it, Lodi Gardens. I’ve also started posting images from Gardens and Parks in this new home of my images from Gardens and Parks I visit, an Instagram profile called, Photos from Gardens and Parks, yup that’s a mouthful, but I gotta do what I gotta do.
Hope you enjoyed the article today. Until next time, see you when I see you.
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