Cheap Dopamine and the Path to Fulfillment

What is Dopamine and What Makes it Cheap?

Dopamine is a neurochemical found naturally in the brain. It is a reward chemical that encourages us to seek things that would have helped us survive as hunter-gatherers - food, sex, and comfort/safety basically.

In the right doses, it motivates us and makes us happy, driving us forward.

However, in the modern world, access to dopamine requires minimal effort. This easy or 'cheap' dopamine resets our pleasure baseline so even with an abundance of pleasure we don't feel good - in fact, we need to sustain that level to just not feel bad - and thus addictive behavior can occur.

Because of its easy availability, cheap dopamine is often used as a distraction from the discomfort of unwelcome emotions or the dissonance of living an unfulfilled or misaligned life.

This starts a vicious cycle of avoidance of pain until we forget the pain even existed, making it all very difficult to unpick.

When we can’t deal with a certain pain, we compensate by compulsively distracting ourselves from that pain. If we do this long enough, we eventually become aware only of the distraction, not the pain.
~ Mark Manson

Sources of cheap dopamine include things like:

• Netflix/ Youtube/ Television

• Video Games

• Sex/ Dating/ Porn

• Junk Food

• Social Media

• Alcohol/ Other substances

• Gambling

These can ruin lives but with awareness, they can also be used as tags or markers for dissonance or an emotion that needs to be processed or reflected upon.

Additionally, none of the sources of cheap dopamine are inherently bad. The issue comes with the easy access and overuse of it and unfortunately, the reality is that in a modern stressful non-stop world they are more often than not a net negative.

Cheap dopamine is one of three types of distraction when it comes to fulfillment and winning at life - others include 'Scarcity Distractions' like not having enough money or poor health and the final one is 'Insidious Distractions' which include things that are validated for by society but are still being used in a negative manner - these could include workaholism or chasing a 6-pack for example.

As disastrous as this all sounds, the way that we use cheap dopamine is also how it can lead the way toward fulfillment and self-actualization.

And, in the right context, any of them can form part of an enriched and fulfilled life but we'll get to this...

How Cheap Dopamine Can Lead You to Fulfillment