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November 1, 2022 - October 8, 2023
The farther away you get, the easier it is to tolerate some degree of harm in the service of the greater good. Distance insulates politicians from the immediate consequences of their decisions.
Even a future one second away is unreal. It is only the stark facts of the present that are real, facts that must be accepted exactly as they are, facts that cannot be modified by a hair’s breadth to suit our needs. This is the world of reality. The future, where dopaminergic creatures live their lives, is a world of phantoms.
Dopamine doesn’t stop. It drives us ever onward into the abyss.
Soon we’ll be able to teach the computer what we like by rating the experiences it generates in the same way we rate music and books. The computer will become so adept at fulfilling our desires that no human will be able to compete.
When mastery is achieved, dopamine has reached the pinnacle of its aspiration—squeezing every last drop out of an available resource. This is what it’s all about. This is the moment to savor—now, in the present. Mastery is the point at which dopamine bows to H&N. Having done all it can do, dopamine pauses, and allows H&N to have its way with our happiness circuits.
Paying attention to reality, to what you are actually doing in the moment, maximizes the flow of information into your brain. It maximizes dopamine’s ability to make new plans, because to build models that will accurately predict the future, dopamine needs data, and data flows from the senses. That’s dopamine and H&N working together.
The average amount of time they spent on one task before switching to another was only 47 seconds. Over the course of the day they switched between tasks more than four hundred times. Those who spent less time before jumping to something else experienced higher levels of stress and got less work done—if for no other reason than that they repeated the “switch tasks” maneuver four hundred times instead of only once after each task was completed.
no matter how brilliant, original, or creative you are, your dopamine circuits aren’t going to achieve much without the raw material provided by the H&N senses.
By spending time in the present, we take in sensory information about the reality we live in, allowing the dopamine system to use that information to develop reward-maximizing plans.
You might get a few weeks of dopaminergic thrills by buying an expensive Swiss timepiece, but after that it’s just a watch. Getting promoted to district manager makes going to work exciting at first, but eventually it becomes the same old grind. Creativity is different because it stirs together H&N with dopamine. It’s like mixing little bit of carbon with iron to make steel.
But those of us who prefer a life of happy fulfillment have a different task to accomplish: the task of finding harmony. We have to overcome the seduction of endless dopaminergic stimulation and turn our backs on our never-ending hunger for more. If we are able to intermingle dopamine with H&N, we can achieve that harmony.
All dopamine all the time is not the path to the best possible future. It’s sensory reality and abstract thought working together that unlocks the brain’s full potential. Operating at its peak performance, it becomes capable of producing not only happiness and satisfaction, not only wealth and knowledge, but a rich mixture of sensory experience and wise understanding, a mixture that can set us down the path toward a more balanced way of being human.
