Ok feel free to ignore if you don't wanna get into it, but what are the things people get wrong about dopamine that bother you? I'm curious
Dopamine is not a reward or happiness neurotransmitter, it's implicated in many processes (including things totally unrelated to the subject, like motor control) but if anything it's more associated with forecasting and search and surprise than with reward. So getting tons of stimulating little boosts of input from tiktok or whatever cant blow out your dopamine pathways or whatever people claim it does. Dopamine detoxes are also not really a thing, quitting social media and appreciating slowness and presence are rewarding because theyre less stressful and overloading, not because social media is like "too much pleasure" or whatever people think.
For those asking, this is a very nice primer on the subject:
and you know I'm always gonna trumpet Jesse Meadows on all things critical adhd studies:
and in fact Jesse is working on a book on this subject, so please subscribe to their substack to follow them as the project develops!
edit: oh shit they just dropped a new piece on the subject!
The myth that we all need "dopamine detoxes" from social media apps (because they're supposedly TOO pleasurable and TOO rewarding to use) only serves the interests of social media companies.
These apps overstimulate, isolate, and depress us. Our problem isnt too much pleasure. Pleasure is not the enemy.
Yeah, and like, compulsive behavior is not a pleasure thing. Nobody who played WoW for hours everyday for a decade did it cuz they were having fun. They did it cuz it felt like progress; cuz each quest was this (intentionally)frustrating but trivial little Task that sent you out to see some new place and maybe discover some resources for your crafting and, no matter how frustrating it might be, it would EVENTUALLY be done, and you could move on to something else(until they made them all into dailies, at which point it became a job-simulator and people started leaving en-masse). The emotional payoff is more like scratching an itch or working a job than anything else; it's "THAT'S Over with!" not happiness.
And you see the same manipulative design in social media. This is why Twitter started throwing all that "For You" stuff into your feed(so you'd never catch up with it and "be done" for the day, so you'd spend more time on the app), this is why Instagram shows you, like, 5 posts from the accounts you're following and then jumps to showing you random accounts, and it's why TikTok's interface is the frustrating autoload horrorshow IT is(I've never had an account on that but I have clicked through to a vid a few times).
None of this is to induce "pleasure"; it's to INTERRUPT your brain's "task complete" function so you spend more time on the site, and far from making you feel good this actually stresses you the fuck out cuz, when a task takes more time than your brain thinks it should that causes Frustration, and the longer the task takes to complete after that point, the more Frustrating it gets.
