Fuck dopamine, we're voluntarily breaking our own brains
anushkakarmakar.substack.com
anushkakarmakar.substack.com
That pretty much sums it up for me. Well put. I am at a point where I am trying to acquire hobbies to improve my happiness and there is a difficulty modifier now on a lot of things where it’s like “what’s the point”. It reminds me of when X-Box first offered the ability to watch other people play. I was grinding to get like five more points on a course to hit the 200 point requirement, so I downloaded the top ghost video for the course. That person and I were not even playing the same game; they were orders of magnitude better than I was and all I wound up learning was I would never be that good at it.
I suspect that if you had looked at a 98-percentile video instead of the top video, you would also have thought that you would never be that good at it, but in many things, being in the top 2% is attainable with effort for the top 50% or so of the population; practicing for that is just not how they choose to spend their time.
Anyone who has activated cheats on videogames enough times can attest to the fact that it takes the enjoyment away. We do have games with superficial, skinner-like rewards, probably the majority, but many still rely on the satisfaction of overcoming real challenges to reward players.
I reckon all puzzle games are like this.
Historically, there wasn’t much technical ability to dynamically adjust difficulty. So the player had to improve to progress.
But now it’s possible to engineer games that are effectively impossible to lose, yet always make a person feel like they’re barely winning (aka “fun”).
I’m not sure that swapping of objective difficulty for subjective difficulty was healthy, though.
But then it’s hard to be disciplined enough to only use it when strictly required. And it just feels unsatisfying.
That is becasue you are still lacking dopamine. One needs to erase all the dopamine stimulation in your life to truly recover. Go to a AA meeting and you will see everyone drinking and smoking saying they are "sober" and wonder why they relapse.
Learn to limit your rewards to slow, natural ones, like he says in the article. It will absolutely suck at first. It is not about the activity, it is about slowing down the strong dopamine pulses.
Dopamine doesn’t work like this. You don’t “run out” of dopamine by engaging in stimulating activities.
This is pop-science metaphor stuff, not actual dopamine science.
Define Lacking: not available or in short supply.
Lacking (I did not say "run out" you did, again exposing your bias) dopamine is exactly what causes the symptoms of Parkinson's. It is well known that people with impulse control disorders are more likely to get Parkinson's.
Even Dopamine Receptor Antagonists increase addictive behaviors.
Reports of Pathological Gambling, Hypersexuality, and Compulsive Shopping Associated With Dopamine Receptor Agonist Drugs https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
You are accusing me of all or nothing thinking but that is not what I am doing. But you seem to think that Dopamine has nothing at all to do with anything yet there it is in our body. It must do something, yes?
Every time I got competitive with my hobby, it stopped being one. I relate to you.
But reality has turned out bleaker, and it seems to be aligning more closely with the author's darker vision.
To avoid the dopamine collapse, we must reclaim effort as meaning—design systems that enhance human creativity, not replace it; use AI to challenge and collaborate, not merely to create shortcuts; and incorporate friction into learning, art, and problem-solving—not as inefficiency, but as intentional practice.
We must also teach people not only how to use AI, but how to preserve their humanity while using it.
Philosophy is no longer a luxury—it becomes a necessity.
One of the best things you can do is just not use it. There is no way to preserve your humanity while using it, at least not in the long run. Because its nature of mechanizing creativity creates feedback loops in our brains and reduces the magic of having the unclimbed mountain...so to speak. It's like trying to teach your body to feel good after having eaten too much sugar. It is beyond our capabilities and fundamentally incompatible with us.
expanding fractals. the past in the present and the inverse...
darker vision and negativity bias / optimism bias
u have the freedom of being unhappy with an AI
you still have infinite value
this may be the beauty of being disposable... ;)
> I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it.
This blog pushes the idea of “dopamine deficiency” as a real scientific concept, but it’s not an actual medical diagnosis (unless you have Parkinson’s disease). To be fair, the linked blog post implies that a doctor gave them this idea, which can happen when you go to a doctor who feels like they’re doing patients a favor by telling them they have a “chemical imbalance” or a deficiency of a neurotransmitter to alleviate objections for taking medication.
The other post also implies that a brain scan was used as part of the diagnosis process, so this is a good place to point out that brain scans are not diagnostic for ADHD. There have been a few notable quack doctors who tried to push fMRI misinterpretations as specialty ADHD diagnostic tools such as Dr. Amen, but these aren’t actually validated by anything nor have they even been shown to be repeatable.
As always: When someone starts talking about dopamine as the chemical that explains everything in life or makes claims to have a deficiency of it, realize that they’re talking about dopamine as a metaphor rather than actual science. Unfortunately people start taking the dopamine metaphor too literally and believe that any lack of motivation is equivalent to a physical lack of dopamine, which is not true.
This needs to be corrected. Parkinson is caused by too much dopamine which after being metabolized creates oxidative stress that kills the dopamine neuron. Which is why l-dopa fails to cure the disorder and actually makes the patent worse in the long run.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34184261/
I will say one can see dopamine disorders in someone behavior and correlate them to genetics and nutrition if we cared.
This is not correct. The cause of Parkinson's is not fully understood and a simple Google search or visit to any medical website or Wikipedia could explain that.
The paper you linked is an editorial (it's in the title) commentary on another artificial experiment in mice that were genetically altered to have a hyperactive pathway for generating dopamine. This is not something found in nature nor do they claim it's something found in humans.
They're simply demonstrating that if they geneticially alter mice to overexpress dopamine and induce excess dopaminergic damage in the process, they can produce outcomes that kind of look like Parkinson's
Claiming that this editorial has explained Parkinson's disease is completely wrong.
> I will say one can see dopamine disorders in someone behavior and correlate them to genetics and nutrition if we cared.
Claiming that "if we cared" we'd see that everything is caused by dopamine, genetics, and nutrition is the current generation of pseudoscience that drives blog posts like this one. I don't know when people started reducing everything to dopamine, but it's neither accurate nor helpful. The number of people who have depression or learned behavioral problems who try to explain it away as "dopamine disorder" is becoming a problem.
Did you ask me if that is all I did? I picked that becasue it is easier for the layperson to understand. I apologize for being on the cutting edge of Parkinson's research. Maybe they have not cured it yet becasue science is so resistant to new paradigms.
Yes, low dopamine causes the symptoms of Parkinson's (PD), but what is causing the low dopamine is the oxidative stress destroying the Dopamine neurons. You could have searched more about it before you reacted so strongly, but here you go:
Rethinking Parkinson's disease: could dopamine reduction therapy have clinical utility? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11319508/
and
Toxic interactions between dopamine, α-synuclein, monoamine oxidase, and genes in mitochondria of Parkinson's disease
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38196001/
"Excessive dopamine in experimental models modifies proteins in the mitochondrial electron transport chain and inhibits the function. α-Synuclein and familiar Parkinson's disease-related gene products modify the expression and activity of monoamine oxidase. "
and
Does levodopa slow or hasten the rate of progression of Parkinson's disease?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16222436/
and
Damage to dopaminergic neurons by oxidative stress in Parkinson's disease (Review) https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/ijmm.2018.340...
Besides, if PD was caused by low Dopamine, why does l-dopa, which resolves symptoms, only work temporarily and makes the condition worse? The logical way to explain this is that Dopamine is the problem. The clinical study failed to demonstrate any evidence of levodopa worsening early PD. However, the beta-CIT SPECT substudy indicates the opposite effect, namely that levodopa causes a more rapid decline in the integrity of the dopamine transporter located in the nigrostriatal nerve terminals in the striatum."
> Claiming that "if we cared" we'd see that everything is caused by dopamine,
I did not say that. But dopamine has a lot to do with learned behaviors so thanks.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462...
Your response seems reactionary and filled with your own biases.
You seem well informed, but it's difficult to take anyone so needlessly snarky and defensive seriously.
I couldn’t have comfortably done such a substantial refactor without suffering through the process of building it.
(And this refactor was much larger and more substantial than LLMs in their current state can do)
Is the language I’m using bad? Should I rewrite this other thing? Is it my colleague’s bad? Is this codebase rotten?
I see a lot of people label this as “I’m creative, I don’t do grunt work”, “I’m good at greenfield projects”, “I’m a builder” etc.
> I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it.
This ending is worse than a TV show revealing a dream sequence.
We get it, you're special, we're sheep, thank you for enlightening us.
I was truly enjoying it until the author decided to throw out a middle finger.
This is a classic example of someone misinterpreting the science and coming to believe that their state is not their fault. They believe it is entirely inflicted upon them by a medical condition, whereas other people are responsible for their actions and outcomes.
This might change your mind: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1010930108
It is quite possible he has genetics that make Dopmaine much ore of a problem for him.
He has rolled up his personality characteristics and learned behaviors and decided to blame it all on dopamine, then took it a step further and decided it must be all genetic and external to his actions.
But then he goes even a step further than that, and decides that his condition is not his fault, but everyone else who is in a similar position has done this to themselves through lifestyle choices.
> I fault him only for his youth.
From reading his post titles he’s a plus or minus 30 year old man, not a youth.
I have written several articles about my problem in depth. Dopamine deficiency is the simplest way to put it.
Just keep an open mind that others are struggling there with you ;)
Yes, technology is the way we circumvent effort to deliver results (e.g. to live longer, healthier, and with less pain/fear.)
Yes, our civilization rewards and encourages short circuiting effort, depriving us of the basic positive feedback loop of effort to reward.
It's been like this since the invention of the wheel and fire. It's up to us to find and/or create meaningful (and effortful) lives, and it is more sustainable to focus on the path than the destination; every zen text teaches this.
This article started off strong but ended up quippy, spiteful and shallow. Still, I appreciate the effort ;-]
You are right, it ended with a spiteful tone and I should have chosen better world.
I see a lot of people questioning if dopamine deficiency is real. And maybe some more context would help.
1. I am one of the early IVF kids in India. My life is tracked. 2. Do you know 80% of IVF kids born in 90s and tracked have mental health disorders? 3. I have struggled socially all 28 years of my life. I only felt two emotions - happy and sad. Never experienced a mania, so never ticked the box of bipolarity. 4. In 2021, I was told that DaTscan might help. But I couldn't afford back then. 5. In 2023, finally got it done. Results showed little to no release of dopamine.
I was forced to learn about dopamine and when I see the younger generation getting into a certain cycle (of course not as dark as my article), it makes me feel sad. Because it reminds me of how hard it is to get out of that space.
I have piles of reports that prove 'dopamine deficiency'. Yet the comment section is not fully convinced.
I am fortunate that my life is tracked.
So yes, this is the thought process that led to that ending. No one teaches us to care about our bodies and I hope that changes some day.
To some extent, but so far before AI it has been at a speed and magnitude most people could handle. With AI, they can't.
> It's been like this since the invention of the wheel and fire. It's up to us to find and/or create meaningful (and effortful) lives, and it is more sustainable to focus on the path than the destination; every zen text teaches this.
You are ignoring again the magnitude of the effect of AI, which is much worse than previous technologies. One can always focus on "the path" but Zen teachers also teach practicality: why make your life complicated? AI makes things complicated unecessarily.
Humanity developed agriculture because it requires less effort than hunting and gathering for feeding a given population. We developed machines because it is less effort than doing things by hand, etc... If your dopamine system rewards doing things with less effort, it is working properly.
The caveat is that doing something with less effort does not mean doing less, it can also mean doing more with the same amount of effort, including personal development. It doesn't mean you should AI everything or be sloppy, just not glorify effort as some intrinsic quality, the result is what matters.
I don’t think so.
I still spend the hours — because it needs to sound original. It needs to feel authentic. I have to add my own personal parts to the story.
I still struggle writing it.
The AI helps, but it doesn’t replace the work. The dopamine’s still there — because I’m still in the loop.
FWIW my context is coding as a hobby/entrepreneur. It’s not my job.
You cannot blame "AI" for your own lack of trying...
Wittgenstein would absolutely love it!
It doesn't surprise me that those of us to have failed in keeping up with the constantly-evolving AI tooling, would also make it part of their newly-refined, all-human identity. IMHO, similarly to how hating popular things does not make you cool, not using AI does not make you a joyous independent creator to bravely hold post in the treacherous world of AI slop! It sounds more like a fantasy than coherent creative position. We're still in the early days when it comes to creative writing comprehension in AI. You may or may not be surprised that there's very little to show for in terms of evals when it comes to that. Unlike coding and maths, fiction is yet to be recognised as verifiable domain. (Probably due to probability distribution in fictional outputs not necessarily converging the way of related objective rewards!) However, some labs are working it! There's a huge market for creative writing aids, as it'a necessary to everything from education (as story-telling is what makes studying worthwhile) to political work.
And some people need a certain number of others who are also doing the same thing for the love of it. We are a social species after all. AI is taking that away.
But I have to guide it: “just list the changes,” “use English English,” and so on.
The fun’s still there — because the thinking is still mine.
It made me irrationally angry, no, I spent two minutes of my own brain power to come up with those five sentences. This kind of thing happens constantly now, everyone assumes everyone else uses gpt's for everything and I find it a bit depressing to be honest.
AI however brings it to a horrific next level, and really emphasizes the mass production of art.
The problem is that most people need to feel that they are doing something original, and AI takes that away. AI doesn't help anything, except in the short term and maybe for some people who can compartamentalize it. But those people are few and far between indeed.
Certainly it would be more rewarding to create paper from scratch and walk the earth handing his ideas to people? He could even create his own written language from scratch!
The way to get the most out of AI is not to simply automate away things you love; it’s to go bigger and try to solve bigger actual problems while using AI.
I teach an advanced university level course in how to write books with AI. It’s amazing to watch students (some traditional published authors) unlock new levels of flow and creativity.
It’s not the tool. You’re just using it wrong.
Famous techno-optimist trope.
What if the ”tool” is marketed as something that can replace not just labor, but taste, decision making, and craft? Another recent tech development: Whose fault is it that social media is full of engagement bait and influencer social posturing? Is social media a tool? Are the recommendation systems, which promote thin perfect bodies to teenagers with low self esteem, just a tool? After all, they just ”help” you find content you’re likely to engage with.
Note I both agree and disagree with you here. I use AI too but I am very cautious to not let it ”take over”. It’s even hard to define what that means exactly. And that’s for someone who grew up without it. Imagine school today, with all the pressures of being a teenager from peers and teachers, and having access to free AI from companies who plan to rent it back to you later once they turn the value extraction knob.
I think this is the key. Who’s driving?
If you are deliberate about what you want to own, focus on, and create yourself, you can consciously decide how AI help you bootstrap, scaffold, and critique your work to help you go farther.
If you aren’t, and you just tell AI to do it for you, you’re just ordering that Biryani. And heck, maybe that can be OK too. Sometimes you just need a meal you aren’t wanting to work at.
Social media can be a tool.
The recommendation systems are not tools to help you as much as they are a tool to increase shareholder value - occasionally those goals align, often they diverge.
No.
Some people get great results with AI, others don’t.
But it doesn’t follow that for those for whom it doesn’t work “they’re using it wrong”. Maybe it’s the wrong tool for the job, while it’s the right tool for another job (like the one you described).
Stop pretending AI is universally useful for every use case and it must be the user’s fault if it doesn’t actually help.
Ah yes, a slop teacher. Teacher of how to make slop. Can I buy your online course on how to make money from my slop?
Struggle builds character or whatever.
The things I enjoy aren’t because I’m the best at them. I don’t care that software could crush me at reading or playing games. Or a robot can lift more weight than I can or hike a trail faster than me. A robot could surely crush me at laying out on the beach and snorkeling.
Comparison is the thief of joy. Enjoy what you want without thinking about how much worse you are than someone or something else.
Cook because you like it or have to do it for financial reasons. Write because you enjoy it (or have to for financial reasons). You get the point.
If your hobby is programming by all means disable AI assistance and spend hours coding, but for some people it might feel like a chore sometimes or just be their day job. Allowing them to automate that process further so that they can have more free time reading a book or doing woodworking doesn't feel that bad.
I disagree with that. The problem is, if you really think about it, even some of the initially boring tasks can be interesting if understood in a certain light, and the fact that we couldn't automate them before meant that we had the opportunity to stumble upon them.
Also, there is also satisfaction for many people to finally finish a task that they really slaved over.
Automating wasn't a problem when computers did only truly rote tasks. But AI spilled over into the creative domain and people should not automate even the boring parts of that because there are hidden rewards to sticking through those, because they are not truly as rote as they seem to be.
A similar narrative, that we can automate tedium and focus on joy as a society are also kneecapped by the fact that these tools are being used to automate people out of jobs. Those people are not being supported by the tools that are eliminating their paid positions, leaving them with actually 0 time to enjoy their lives. It also further empowers the employers in the employer-employee relationship which was already being abused to hell and back.
He believes he's different, as his condition is the result of genetics or something, which means he does not deserve any blame for his situation, unlike everyone else.
If I offer you a shortcut, your brain is going to take it, easier reward, right?
And yet this has probably been a problem for ages. Nomad hunters probably had a huge dopamine rush after hunting. Then agriculture was invented and for some people getting food was just spending hard earned money at the market. And I don't think they fucked their dopamine system
What I mean by all this is that evolution and our brains will find a way to evolve and change our reward system. We will find other things that feel rewarding
So yes, it is totally possible that we have been fucking it up with respect to our biology for thousands of years. In fact there is a pretty substantial body of work and evidence that hunter-gatherers are happier than than people living the post agricultural/industrial lifestyle.
I don't see how, because making your brain feel better these days is not tied to survival. There is no differential in survival probability to change the short-term reward system. In fact, the current capitalistic technological system rewards it.
We are being given dopamine faster and easier on purpose. The dopamine you get from painting something yourself is no different than the dopamine you get from letting AI do it. The whole point of the modern, technological world is to get us more dopamine and faster. Our dopamine pathway is a profit center.
This is the same story with sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling, social media and...
Stress.
Stress triggers dopamine release via cortisol. In acute stress this is no problem, but with chronic stress the dopamine receptors get down regulated. Yes, you see, you actually can get addicted to stress. Any adrenaline junkies out there? You are actually looking for dopamine.) This is where I feel news addiction can come in for some people. 24x7 stress from anywhere around the globe.
This is how the modern world makes money,
He thinks, and states, "I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it." Nah brother, 99% of people are driven by impulses they have no control over, and technology/modern life is just making it worse. Just go to any Starbucks in the morning. You think people are there for the taste of the coffee? Nope, they are there for the drug. Now it is possible his nutrition and genetics make this more of a problem form him, but no one chooses addiction.
He also says in an older article "After a few therapy sessions, doctor appointments, and even a brain scan, I found my answer—dopamine deficiency. There’s no cure, but there’s treatment."
I have been working in nutritional genetics and with my own Asperger's, OCD and Schizoaffcetive Disorder for the last 20 years. I can assure you here is no way to be diagnosed with a dopamine deficiency (and no brain scan for it either). I could see if he had gene testing that found mutations in DDC or somewhere else that inhibited Dopamine production, but he is just a kid, grasping at straws. I know this because I was him at 33. I do not fault him for it, I praise him. Because at least he is thinking about it
It turns out I have a mutation in my CBS gene which limits the rate P5P (B6) binds to the enzyme (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/rs773734233) which. creates a functional B6 deficiency with several down stream effects. I made several assumption that were wrong in the past, but they all led me to my treatment, and saved my mind and also my life.
he is blaming the individuals for their addiction, this is immoral. Blame the dealers of dopamine who know exactly what they are doing and public health for doing nothing about it.
I appreciate your knowledge and would like to share more information with you to get your perspective. How can I do that?
Another information that might help is, my life is being medically tracked since I was born. I am one of the early IVF kids in India. I have always been exposed to reports that I don't think I would have come across otherwise.
Lol.
Since the monument in question was somewhat relevant to my work, I shared the picture in my company chat and asked if anyone had seen it and knew from the top of their head where this was. Almost immediately one colleague threw the picture into an AI reverse image search and instantly came up with the answer where it was and what the monument represented. I was incredibly annoyed at that; not because someone was able to come up with the answer much faster than I did on my own, but because it took the FUN out of the whole thing.
That's when I realized that my instinctive dislike for AI is because it takes the fun out of everything for me. The process of figuring out where this photo was taken was much more rewarding than the eventual answer. Similarly, when programming I take pleasure out of figuring out difficult problems and coming up with elegant solutions for then. Writing the actual code isn't the interesting or difficult part, and I don't need an AI to do that for me. AI is being hyped up by people who are not interested in the process of learning and understanding and who just want a quick shortcut to the answer, completely missing the point in my opinion.