Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

by Will Storr

It seems brain and body respond in positive ways when we are actively making progress with our lives, pursuing the plots that give them meaning. The neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has argued that the brain’s dopamine reward system, which guides our behaviour by giving us little druggy hits of pleasure, is more active not when we seize the prize that we’re after, but when we’re in pursuit of it. Meanwhile, work by geneticist Professor Steve Cole and his colleagues is beginning to suggest that our physical health might improve – risk of heart disease and neurodegenerative disorder going down; antiviral response going up – when we’re successfully engaged in pursuits that are meaningful, a state that Aristotle called eudaemonic happiness. ‘It’s kind of striving after a noble goal,’ he told me. ‘So it’s heroic behaviour in a literary sense?’ I said. ‘Right. Exactly,’ he said.