Future, tense: the downside of a dopaminergic mind
💥 Dopamine makes us focus on things that make the future "better", but what about the present?
Having things is uninteresting. It’s only getting things that matters.
For as long as I can remember, I was always drawn to activities that were supposed to make the future, my future, better.
As a teenager I dabbled in amateur writing, programming and role-playing games. All of these were fun in the moment, but I knew that I was doing them for the long run. I wanted to be published, I wanted to get better at coding competitions and, over RPGs, I wanted to build friendships with like-minded people.
The good times
By the time I was at university, I started to intersect my hobbies, so that I could advance on multiple goals at the same time.
I spent countless hours building a community website with a group of friends fascinated by an obscure branch of Polish songwriting. I loved that I could practice programming *and* build relationships at the same time. So much bang for the buck.
I never felt that my personality was calculating in the intellectual sense. It was happening at a deeper level. I was magnetically drawn to activities that appeared worthwhile in the sense of unlocking more possibilities in the future, be it learning how to program or learning how to juggle grapefruits.
(I learned how to juggle when I heard that this can be helpful in case you get stranded without money and need to raise funds for a ticket home.)
The bad times
Living our lives in the abstract, unreal, dopaminergic world of future possibilities comes at a cost, and that cost is happiness.
There were downsides to all this. I never connected with others as easily as some of my friends that seemed more comfortable living in the present. I was too distracted by constantly optimizing for the future.
This drive also wasn’t necessarily that productive. When I finished school and moved to France, I had a brilliant idea to learn electric guitar *and* French by only letting myself practice on French songs. It took me years of frustration to realize I don’t actually need to play electric guitar 💡.
Never enough
For them, life is about the future, about improvement, about innovation. Despite the accomplishment that comes from their efforts, they are usually unhappy.
Dopamine is the key neurotransmitter that drives our attention to things that make our future better. The quotes above and below are from 📖 The molecule of more, a book that explores the role of dopamine in steering our behavior.
Dopamine encourages us to maximize our future resources by rewarding us when we do so—the act of making our future a better, safer place, gives us a little dopamine “buzz.”
Later in the book, the authors describe the traits of people with overly active dopamine circuits:
They never relax, never stop to enjoy the good things they have. Instead, what they care about most is their passion for creation, discovery, or enlightenment. They’re obsessed with building a future that never arrives. The family crest of James Bond contains the motto Orbit Non Sufficit: The World Is Not Enough.
Oh… that explains a lot.
Dopamine scam and the broken phone
I blame dopamine for my bike crash last summer. I was changing a podcast on my phone (the podcast I was listening to wasn’t informative enough). A truck braked unexpectedly in front of me. I squeezed the handbrake, the bike stopped too hard and I flew over the steering rod. Results: scratches, a broken phone, a firm desire to be less stupid.
The dopaminergic mind is both the victim and the perpetrator of a scam. The con artist keeps insisting we need to secure a better future for ourselves. But hey, what about the present?
Conclusion
Having too little or too much of the dopamine drive can hurt.
Too little of it and I struggle to advance on any long term aspirations. Too much of it, and I keep making up arbitrary aspirations, obsessing about them and I hurt myself in the process.
What I want is the sweet spot in between; a mix of moments in the present (lazy mornings, enjoying walks just because they feel good, smiling at strangers) and moments in the zone, when I’m building with passion little colorful sand castles in the sky.
In other news
🤖 Air Canada ordered to follow through on promises hallucinated by its customer service chat bot. Expect more of these stories as hard-to-control LLMs make their way into all sorts of customer service flows.
⚡️ ChatGPT had a bad day
🎞️
looks at what you can do with the huge context window of Gemini 1.5
Postcard from London
One last quote from “The molecule of more”: For a biological organism, the most important goal related to the future is to be alive when it comes.
Take good care of your present and future selves 💫
– Przemek
This reminds me of hearing about how Millennials became the side hustle generation. A hobby was never enough, it always had to be about something more. I myself have tried to pull back the reigns on my ambitions and remind myself that sometimes a walk is just a walk and there is nothing wrong in doing just that and nothing more. Sometimes it is nice to just stop and smell the roses
I love that you're writing about this. And hey, it seems we were in London around the same time!
We have to admit that we are becoming addicts of the products and concepts that have been meticulously crafted and sold to us by corporations and institutions. Our consumer behaviour, fuelled even more by the dopamine-driven desire for more, plays right into the capitalistic playbook. It thrives on consumption.
And I love the last quote. What if we're just here to experience it all? We honestly don't appreciate the present moment enough.