The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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What's your take on dopamine detox?
Everyone's got a story about how they read so much back in the 90's/00's. But they pick up a book now, and... it's just not entertaining. We all know we can dopamine detox and make reading enjoyable again, but the corollary is quitting the hyper-stimulating activities everyone does nowadays. No TikTok, no Twitter, no mindlessly playing games while listening to podcasts. You'll be (roughly) just as stimulated after detoxing, but you'll be disconnected from the root of modern culture. Your opinions on culture will be less accurate because you're simply out of touch, like boomers reading newspapers.
OTOH, dopamine detox has huge benefits. Your mind isn't constantly bombarded with stimulation, so you can perceive subtleties and "flavor" in art more, like when you remove sugar from coffee. You perceive the world in a slower, calmer, more rational, interconnected way. You're around people less, so when you meet people IRL you're much friendlier and happy to see them. There is probably some balance to the dopamine situation, but it's hard to spot, so we mostly stimulate ourselves as hard as possible from FOMO, scared of falling behind the world.
I'm on a "dopamine detox" for 6 days of the week anyways because work, gym, side quests, errands takes up so much fucking time. This is a total 180 to how I used to live a year ago, where I was connected to the internet practically 24/7.
Being "connected" is a major fucking waste of time, effort and bandwidth. Sorry but no, knowing opinion #176785 of random twitter anon #454342 does me no fucking favors. What I gain from being a bit more quickwitted and charming by living an active, healthy and balanced life far far outweights knowing one more trivia about "the root of our modern culture", in the exact same thing you would want to be connected to the root of modern culture anyways.
So yes, a "dopamine detox" is very very recommended (even though it has nothing to do with dopamine at all). Seriously, Go Offline NOW.
However, I don't think scrolling is a heavy hitter here, the real heavy hitter for me was porn and masturbation. Stopping that was like unlocking natural adderall.
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I’ve always seen the “I used to be a reader” thing as largely LARP. People want to seem like they’re better than they are so they claim that they “used to read so much,” when I can remember from my (pre-iPhone) days in high school, and people were not sitting around the hallways reading books and magazines and so on. They were socializing, talking about the opposite sex cuties, talking about sports and fashion. At home, I mean sure I occasionally read a book, but I think I and most of my peers were watching TV, playing sports or making art or something else. Books haven’t been a mainstay of leisure activities since the advent of television.
I think there might well be benefits to disconnecting from the hyper online culture we’ve created. And to me the main benefit is in hearing your own inner voice telling you what you’re actually like, the kinds of things you actually want to do, the things you really believe in and think about the world. The problem for me isn’t that “I suddenly can’t read a book”, it’s that the firehouse of information and entertainment that we are pushed to keep track of all the time tends to crowd out the individual you actually are.
I don’t think people are suddenly aware of more subtle nuances of art either. The difference is in the fact that you aren’t viewing it with thoughts about how other people react and without the pressure of trying to fit in with whatever tribe you’re a part of.
I wasn't doing that stuff. I was reading.
Today, I'm probably 99th percentile well-read but I rarely read new books. I can't decide if this is good or bad. I somewhat agree with Hanania's take that books suck:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-case-against-most-books
I don't know. For me, reading a bunch of books to get from 99 to 99.9 percentile might not make sense. But if you haven't read seminal works of literature then it probably makes sense to read some more instead of getting more hot takes off the internet.
I'm in a similar position to you, but I still read a few books a year. I was a voracious reader until I was about 16, reading multiple fiction books a week. I'd go to a library, check out 10 books from the kid's section, read about five, and return the others(sometimes weeks late, to my parents' chagrin).
Sometimes I still devour books in a similar manner, where I'll read hundreds of pages in a week. But that's a rare occurrence. I think that's mainly because it's difficult to find books I enjoy. The majority of books I start simply don't engage me, and I can often force my way through, but I'll probably just be reading a couple chapters a week when I have absolutely nothing better to do with my time. But when I find a book I really like, I make time for it. When I was a child, I had much lower standards and there were a lot of engrossing books.
Also, I don't think there's ever been a "classic" that I've really enjoyed. The closest would probably be Animal Farm, Dune, and Lord of the Rings, but those were still books I forced myself through. The books I burn through are the modern page turners, stuff like Cradle or Dungeon Crawler Carl that are really popular on Reddit and have tons of action and tension. Sometimes non-fiction too, I like Frans de Waal's pop sci on animal intelligence a lot.
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I see similar comments on sites like this from time to time—“Oh, I hardly ever read anymore, no matter how hard I try”—and I always wonder if the speakers just discount reading Internet content for some reason. I also don’t read books like I did in the ’90s, but I spend an average of 5–6 hours per day reading on my phone, plus whatever additional time I spend reading on my computer.
I would certainly hope that reading on the Motte is more "useful" than the majority of wastes of cellulose that line the shelves of bookstores.
Yeah, if you're just looking at memes on /r/aww, that's a different matter, but my phone is a fucking portal to nearly the sum of human knowledge, it's a skill issue if someone can't make that improve their lives in some capacity.
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“Dopamine detox” in the sense of abstaining from hyperstimuli and distractions and lesser pleasures is something everyone should do. It’s a spiritual practice in every religion. There are basic psychological reasons for how it works: the mind is limited, so learning something undesirable takes the place of something preferable; the mind is efficient, so it will choose easier pleasures over difficult pleasures; the mind is habit-forming, so it will form habits around easier pleasures rather than difficult pleasures; the over-justification effect will reduce your motivation to do difficult things after satisfaction from easier things; the difficult pleasures in life are vastly more satisfying than the easier pleasures, but we can’t easily grasp this with our limited mind, so we have to accept it on faith until we are
mystically resurrected from the deadpresented with these high experiences.Trivial examples:
two bored kids in a math class, and one can use his phone. The bored and abstaining one will eventually and sporadically have his interest piqued by math, because that’s the only interesting thing going on. The one with the phone has no such motivation to ever pay attention in the classroom.
A man’s friends and crush are on the other side of a mountain, while he sits bored in a cabin. He will, one day, trek the whole mountain out of sheer human need. If he instead has a ton of distractions and drugs, he will never take those steps on the narrow path.
One person’s friends are reputable and wholesome. They give each other attention and affection for their good works. Another person’s friends are disreputable and corrupt. They only have fun being edgy and doing drugs. The former person’s character will change because only prosocial activity is reinforced; the latter person will be dragged down by his comrades, and wind up ”learning” that deleterious things are important — some of his mind is essentially worthless now, those months were a write-off.
One man is captivated by a virtuous crush, and molds his life so that it is aligned with what the crush wants. Another man is captivated by promiscuous women who just want to have fun. The former is going to be better for the longterm character and life of both.
The term “dopamine detox” is misleading, I think everyone here knows that, we can just call it mental purification or something, or mental detox. It’s not so much about longterm lowering of dopamine as purifying and filtering cognitive expenditure for that stimuli which leads to the highest reward. There’s no reason at all to bring in neurotransmitters here especially when we barely understand how dopamine and serotonin synergize.
Agreed. Alas, I must confess that even coffee is a superstimuli which staves off the boredom.
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With regards to the first part of your post, about dopamine - I don't have knowledge about that. I barely even have a pop-sci understanding of brain chemistry. So I make no claims about that.
But this does remind me of a subject I talk about with my friends a lot.
I am an extremely avid reader. I have never personally known anyone that reads as much as I do. I have always been this way; it's what I won in the "lottery of fascinations." Accordingly: I've never had the feeling of "I should be reading more" instead of gaming, scrolling, etc. I do those things some as well, but I read without having to make myself do it. And I don't find scrolling hyper-enjoyable compared to reading at all. I read a lot more than I scroll. I'm not making myself do that by an act of will, it's my real preference.
People have often said to me: "I should read more. I always want to read more than I do." And I get the sense when they say this to me, that they are imputing some sort of virtue to the act of reading, instead of doing other things. I think this is connected with the idea that people should be productive, that they should continually be improving themselves or producing something; and that commonly, reading books is thought of as a way of doing this.
I don't think that's untrue. I do think that it is better to improve one's self than to not do that; I think it's very easy to start doing "mindless" things and piss your life away in that way. Having said that, it's not as though reading is the only way to do that. One of my friends is a painter, and she paints often, and is continually trying to get better at it. She tries to read, and feels like she's forcing to, and I don't think that she has to do that. She could just as well not. The point is: if I tried to take up painting, I'd probably feel like I was always making myself do that, too. If you are of the mindset that people should do those improving things, painting is probably just as good as reading.
But if reading was enjoyable, and now it isn't, you can do other things as well. Personally I think it's bad to be a phone zombie, but there are probably things you can find stimulating, that can keep you away from your systems without it feeling like a huge effort. Furthermore: you may reach a point in life where you've mostly got it made (see @Walterodim below), and when you're not working, you might as well chill as you like. Only you can decide if there's anything wrong with that.
As a final thought: maybe I just haven't gotten dopamine-toxed enough to need detox, and so I can't relate to the thrust of what you are saying; but other people may be able to better.
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Personally I see it as two seperate issues.
First, phones/videogames/social media are addicting. I find myself messing around on my phone long after it is fun, just cycling between apps. For whatever reason that's hard to quit, even if doing almost anything would be more entertaining.
Second, I still read. Usually just before bed (highly recommend doing this instead of phone use before bed). But learning to enjoy books is hard if you don't read a lot. I don't think it's any different from other media; you have to develop and choose books that are to your taste. I distinctly remember reading many books as a kid and not liking them (I was a more voracious reader then). There are still books I read because I think they are valuable but not particularly viscerally enjoyable. But if you want to compare they joy from reading to the dopamine rush of social media, you need to read books you enjoy reading.
Sounds silly, but I think people have the tendency to choose books because they should read them rather than because they want to read them (self included). Go read a book meant for entertainment if you need a fun replacement to social media. Or don't be afraid to put a book down. Reading isn't inherently a slog, but some books are.
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I have given it some thought and keep returning to the same question - what exactly am I trying to solve for? What do I think I'm depriving myself of by playing XCOM2 while listening to a podcast instead of reading a book or sitting in quiet meditation? As near as I can tell, the main thing I'm missing out on with this choice is some aesthetic sensibility that reading the book is what a smart, educated, in-control person should do.
To each their own, but when I do my best to look at my life objectively, I just don't see anything important that I'm missing out on with entertainment choices. I'm fit, healthy, monetarily comfortable, have great friends, a loving wife, and a generally placid, upbeat demeanor that friends and colleagues tell me they appreciate. While I do have some sense of nostalgia for the days when I consumed books voraciously instead of occasionally picking one up that catches my eye, I'm hard-pressed to figure out what would be different if I read more and listened to podcasts less. I like podcasts! I still learn things! When they're interesting enough, I go dig into the relevant information.
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I think it's full of shit.
Unless you've overdosed on dopaminergic drugs (why'd you steal grandma's Parkinsons meds, the opioids look very different, oh wait she's detoxing from dopamine far more effectively than you can), then it's not an excess of dopamine that's causing you issues.
Even hand-waving that away and coming to the problem of super-stimuli in general, just because something is a super-stimulus does not necessarily mean that that's a bad thing.
Movies are super stimulus compared to live actors. Nobody particularly cares to blow up Hollywood on those grounds alone.
Reading a book is superstimulus compared to staring at a campfire and gossiping, and books weren't part of the ancestral environment. Anatomically modern humans 100k or even 10k years back out weren't cracking open tomes of literary fiction.
I have ADHD, so I have no need for excuses of modern superstimuli to account for my attention deficit, it was obvious from birth. And yet I read voraciously then, because it was more appealing than everything else, and I still do, even if my tastes have evolved and become far more niche. I'd read even more if there was more content that aligned to my particular interests.
McDonald's may be lowbrow, but it's an observed fact from its popularity that it's more appealing to most people than caviar is (and caviar's reputation as fancy is recent, it used to be peasant food and even served for free as an appetizer to coax you into ordering a drink in some parts of Russia), and while Japan has McDonald's, they don't have an obesity epidemic. Since we don't know why that's the case, we can hand out ozempic to Westerners and let them eat delicious food at cheap prices without killing themselves
Even something as genteel as coffee was once the source of enormous controversy:
https://www.ncausa.org/about-coffee/history-of-coffee#
I'm pretty sure the current Pope has a cellphone.
Sounds an awful lot like boredom to me. And I'm intimately aware of what that feels like, and would not for a moment trade the fruits of modernity for it. While boredom hasn't been cured, it's more bearable than it ever has been. If I need human company, I can keep my phone away, and I have ADHD, what's their excuse?
You're arguing aesthetics more than anything else. There's no reason to prefer black coffee over coffee with sugar barring personal taste and diabetes, humans like sugar. Some of us also like to be contrarian hipsters. I drink my coffee any way it's served, because I don't care.
It's a problem when one lives two completely different lives depending on if one is hooked or not, and especially when one of those lives is objectively better than the other by most personal and societal metrics.
And why shouldn't it be considered bad if people cannot choose to adhere to an aesthetic solely because their will is attenuated? I'm no puritan, but something isn't working here for a lot of people.
That's why I took pains to clarify that superstimuli are not necessarily bad, it's that the ones that people get into a hubbub about that are being selected for being bad for you in some way.
Modern music is superstimuli, fucking Mozart is superstimuli. Food with spices added is superstimuli. The main consideration is that this form of enjoyment far outstrips anything in the ancestral environment, not that its bad for you. We just call them out more when they are. If it could make a caveman or medieval peasant fall to their knees, it counts.
Just because you like an aesthetic doesn't mean the universe is obligated to make it easy. I'd love to be ripped, I don't blame smartphones for not being there.
If you think smartphones are a distraction or you prefer hiking over Netflix, then find out a way to minimize smartphone use. They are not so utterly overpowering that you have no other choice, not in the way someone can turn you into a heroin addict against your will.
We do have solutions for willpower, I happen to fall outside the normal range for it/executive function to the point it's a detriment in my life, so I get to take ADHD meds. Ozempic, if it wasn't amazing enough already, has evidence suggesting it solves the issue of addiction in many cases, such as food addiction, gambling and even alcoholism (!!)
What you are not going to achieve anything with is "dopamine detox", which besides being a frankly retarded name, doesn't seem to provide any longterm relief to its adherents. The majority who try it end up back on the phone after a few days. Try something else, and the problem isn't that big of a deal in the first place for most.
I don't share what seem to be your firm beliefs here. I think the jury, so to speak, is still out on the effects of smartphones on attention spans or the brain generally. I think it's going to take a longer time than we've had to know. No matter how thrilling and convenient they become.
I was filling out the ACX survey the other day and I ticked the boxes to indicate "I didn't have the internet growing up." I was in my mid-thirties when I got my first smartphone. I have read your views elsewhere that the good old days weren't so good, and perhaps from the perspective of current comfort that has a certain ring of truth ("They had no refrigeration or antibiotics or even sanitation, etc etc") but I also believe you personally are rather an extremist when it comes to modernism (I use that word idiosyncratically {my phone is telling me that is not a word} to mean something like futurism and a love for technology). I could be reading you wrong, of course. (That's probably a pun.)
I sometimes long for the idle days of youth, not so much for me because I have memories. But that my boys don't have this. Ranging up and down pecan groves with the shells crackling under my sneakers, just wandering in the woods looking for arrowheads or sitting still up in a tree hoping to see wildlife. I'm sure this sounds maudlin (it does even to me as I type it) but my teenagers might well never have these experiences of stillness and just observing the world. Of course you may counter "What's stopping them?" and you'd be right on the surface, but I often ask them on weekends if they'd like to go for a walk with me (we live in a very walkable, pretty interesting area near a massive forested park) but the tune of their electronics (YouTube, whatever's on Prime, their PS5) is inevitably far more attractive. Just teens being teens? I'm sure that's part of it; that certainly must be part of it. And of course old man's gonna old man.
I feel the same about drugs like Ozempic in that their long-term effects are not yet known. One always pays the piper eventually, at least in my experience.
Neither did I. My parents were luddites about things like giving their kids phones or internet access, I was probably past 16 when I first got a decent smartphone and a broadband connection. It's too long ago for me to resent them for it, but it was a stupid decision then and remains that way.
So I certainly am not so young that I don't remember a time when television and books were your best bet for entertainment, I happen to remember being rather dissatisfied with that state of affairs, and even more when it was artificially prolonged. I certainly didn't enjoy nature much at that time, but maybe it's all the mosquitoes that sour me on them.
As you correctly state, I think modernity is the best things have ever been, though I can happily acknowledge that people can have different tastes and there are certainly normal people who still pine for the uh, pines, and love being outdoors and on the trail. It just isn't my cup of caffeinated beverage. The majority of people do have that option, like your kids, and find other things more attractive. I understand that can be painful for you, given how dear that experience is to your own heart.
This kind of belief always confuses me. Many people seem to have an adversarial relationship with the universe, as if there's some ironclad law of Equivalent Exchange, and that because a simple pill has had so many positive benefits, there must be a catch somewhere, maybe it causes brain tumors fifty years down the line or something.
Thankfully, that isn't how things work. Semaglutide/Ozempic was known to be safe when it was first approved for diabetes a good while back. Then said diabetics began to lose an incredible amount of weight. Some drugs for diabetes cause weight loss, but not nearly as much, some even cause weight gain. This was so surprising they looked into it further and then were so blown away they decided to apply to the FDA for another trial to treat just obesity alone.
And then, after it was approved for that purpose, doctors noticed it was suddenly curing alcoholism and gambling addictions. It's basically an anti-superstimulus drug to a degree.
It is also extremely safe, the only negative consequence of note is occasional constipation in some people, and loss of muscle with the fat, which is a common issue for any treatment that causes rapid weight loss, be it gastric bypass surgery or fasting. The benefits still outweigh the risk enormously.
Your suspicion is highly unwarranted, all the more because other people with the same kind of suspicion have done their best to find something horribly wrong with it and failed to turn anything up.
The universe is apathetic, not evil. We can occasionally find ourselves a good thing, ozempic seems to be one of them.
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From experience, more accurately. I've done this myself, I was stuck with a shelf full of Dickens for 2 weeks without internet. The mental effects are real, even for someone who ticks the "ADHD" boxes.
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Dopamine in all its forms is a thing. You would need to make a serious lifestyle change and be happy with it to step back from it.
I've looked into this, done detoxes (including meditation retreats etc). If in your heart of hearts you don't wish to leave the dopamine alone then you won't.
Oxytocin is meant to be a curb on dopamine. If you have a good social network and feel loved and happy and safe, perhaps you'll be able to curb it.
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I suppose there are probably objective experiments that prove it, but I don’t know how true it really is that TikTok is hyperstimulus compared to books. Sure, sometimes I open a book and the words look like a blur and I don’t have the attention span to continue, but sometimes I scroll on these dopamine apps or play a video game and feel the same feeling, that I just don’t care to do it and everything’s boring.
I strongly suspect that while there’s a core of scientific truth, much of the whole theory surrounding dopamine up/downregulation is conjecture built around a kind of minimalist, de-stress, meditation-heavy wellness lifestyle that is largely a class signifier more than anything else.
It’s kind of like the moment in The Road where the kid who never grew up pre-apocalypse tries Coca Cola and it’s so good because he’s never had it before and is presumably used to much plainer and less flavorsome food/drink. We have this idea that if we live some ascetic lifestyle (forced or by choice) that even the ‘simplest’ pleasures - a good strawberry, a classic novel, an old black and white movie, a beautiful sunset - will be so much better because we’re not constantly experiencing pleasure.
I’m very skeptical that that is true. I think, instead, that some people are able to enjoy life more than others, and that this is likely largely biological/genetic.
In support of your point, here is Dostoevsky writing long before even the most elementary super stimulus:
Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don’t know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we ... yes, I assure you ... we should be begging to be under control again at once. I know that you will very likely be angry with me for that, and will begin shouting and stamping. Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your underground holes, and don’t dare to say all of us—excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that “all of us.” As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what’s more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don’t even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don’t want to write more from “Underground.”
Writing as mass literacy in Russia began to appear, Fyodor saw his generation being divorced from life based on ... Books.
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Both these statements are true. The baseline for pleasure is roughly fixed from person to person -- some people are just happier than others -- and because it's fixed, our brains will adapt to any lifestyle/level of stimulation and balance it out. If you suddenly read nothing but 1800s novels, you'd be bored as hell for a week, but eventually the brain will adjust and the novels will hit harder.
This is intuitive. Reverse it: If things didn't work this way, wouldn't the average person be bored out of their minds 2000 years ago? If we can mindlessly scroll TikTok and only feel moderately entertained/content, wouldn't some European peasant feel an absurd lack of stimulation 24/7 back then? If the brain does not balance stimulation like this, this logically has to be the case. Otherwise, the average TikTok/Twitch user must be absolutely thrilled the whole time, which doesn't pair with experience. They watch streams with a bland expression, apparently not more excited than an old man reading the papers.
OK, reverse it again: why do people who have access to TikTok (ie. are not diligently disciplining themselves to avoid it) and who use modern social media still read classic novels or long-form, low-stimulus, black-on-white text at all? Why are we here? For some people it might be some heroic effort to strip themselves of any modern dopamine hits, like that guy who asked for help to make his screen black and white last week. But most don’t seem to have that issue. It just doesn’t take any effort from me to be here over TikTok; I’d rather be here, and that’s not because I think this place is ‘better’ for me, it’s because I think it’s genuinely more entertaining.
I think people extrapolate from the mouse orgasm-button experiment (?), but TikTok isn’t an orgasm, which is inherently more pleasurable than not-orgasm. That TikTok is more pleasurable than reading is unclear, scientists can measure brain activity but this doesn’t fully answer the question.
I don't use TikTok either; Gave it a shot, but the app felt boring.
Do you know a lot of people that regularly read for fun? Maybe I'm in the wrong places but everyone I've met says, "I want to read more but it's too difficult." Reading is considered a past-tense thing; something we all used to do, but which nobody can really enjoy nowadays except (usually) people into science fiction and fantasy.
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I think this misses some gradation. The core claims, that people have a relative set-point of happiness and that hedonic adaptation negates the pleasure of many things, those I think are true, but I also think they go too far. I don't have empirical evidence for this, only personal experience and appeals to others to consider their personal experience. Nonetheless, a few examples:
Food - I really love burgers. After decades of life, having tried many different foods, including expensive Michelin Star restaurants, fancy steaks, high-end sushi, there is still nothing that hits better for me than just a really good cheeseburger. I don't seem to have experienced any hedonic adaptation on this front, in fact. Every time I bite into a perfectly cooked burger, it is delightful all over again, the same way that it has been since I was a kid. I do not think simply eating bland foods could result in me enjoying those bland foods the same way I enjoy regular cheeseburgers.
Flying - On this one, I will grant that there is massive hedonic adaptation, that the first-time experience of anything is very different from doing it again and that things can start blending into the background. Nonetheless, I have traveled a lot, and first-class international flights still give me a sort of childlike joy. The sense of traveling thousands of miles while having genuinely good food and a cozy place to sleep doesn't seem to be something that I can just adapt to and not notice. I do not think people that take the same trips, but are stuck in steerage, actually have the same experience and relationship to flying that I do.
Work - Having worked in manual labor prior to having a real career, then a decades in research labs, then a decade in software, I am very confident that I do not fully adapt to my conditions. I fucking hated grad school. It made me miserable. I didn't hate my postdoc quite as much, but man, it still made me miserable, almost to the point of despair at times. I didn't adapt to this being my norm, I was just way less happy than I was after I switched careers and got an easier job with way more monetary reward.
Relationships - Seriously, there's just no goddamned way you're going to convince me that I have a set-point that I return to. Not even close. No way. Being single sucks, being in a bad relationship sucks even more, but being in a happy marriage is awesome. You might get so accustomed to being in a relationship with someone that makes you unhappy that you forget that there are other options, but really, you're going to be much less happy than in a good relationship. I don't know how anyone that has had a chaotic, messy, toxic relationship and then later a fantastic one could think that they just arrive at a set point.
My own life makes me pretty thoroughly reject the idea that I have some happiness set point that I move back towards. While you're not going to be comically jubilant at literally all times of the day even with a very good life and it may be possible to still have nice peaks when you're not happy with life, the differences in the valleys are genuinely enormous.
Humans vary a great deal, and the hedonic treadmill and recalibration has strong evidence even if it doesn't overwhelm literally every human. Consider yourself lucky it doesn't seem to be an issue for you.
Besides, those concepts do not claim that happiness and joy can't exist. Otherwise opioid addicts would eventually stop outright as they get bored. They certainly develop tolerances, but the actual enjoyment remains the same with ever increasing doses, it's downregulation in other aspects that makes them need bigger doses till the point the side effects become lethal.
Plus the recalibration works both ways, it might well be that even a day or two is enough to reset your enjoyment of a cheeseburger, whereas if you were (somehow) given a dozen cheeseburgers in a row and an infinite stomach, you'd be rather bored of them by the end if you went through like a train.
The problem is the application of downregulation theory to subjective experiences. The hedonic treadmill applies to opioids, the suggestion that TikTok is more pleasurable than some arbitrary other kind of media is complete, evidence-free conjecture, because unlike opium the amount of enjoyment obtained from media is very dependent upon many different factors. You’re also confusing the hedonic treadmill with novelty. They’re related but not the same thing. The hedonic treadmill is solely about returning to a biological baseline happiness, it says nothing about differences between media or why using TikTok everyday would make looking at a sunset less fun.
I think people are largely happy or unhappy, and the ‘hedonic treadmill’ is mostly about the ways in which that naturally unhappy proportion of the population cope.
What is the hedonic treadmill but a consequence of a series of subjective experiences?
A disabled person experiences the utter horror of being disabled. He's still disabled later, and subjectively experiencing all the issues that brings (alongside coping mechanisms), and yet his mood trends back to where it began. The same for the suddenly rich lottery winner, though presumably the more modest but sustained gains from those who earn a lot of money (I don't think the studies were on net worth, rather income) leads to higher well-being longterm.
These are almost certainly not the same as the downregulation of opioid receptors in addicts, but they're all examples of the body's stubborn desire to achieve homeostasis. It's the ultimate Nothing Ever Happens Chud of all time. Then when shit does happen, I come in.
It's all homeostasis, be it becoming inured to a single form of once novel stimuli, or to the gestalt impression of all the things that act on your mood.
Some people are certainly happier or unhappier by default than others. What the hedonic treadmill claims is that they tend to revert to whatever that default is. It does not rule out variance between people or even within the same person, simply that in the latter case it will almost inevitably converge.
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I guess this is the core of what I'm objecting to. As mentioned, I buy that the claim that the treadmill and recalibration are real, but I am very skeptical of any purported evidence for the idea that it's totalizing. To be a bit snarky about it, I think it's basically a coping mechanism, similar to the misinterpreted evidence that happiness and satisfaction don't improve above a certain income. That might be nice if it were true, that once you're above some threshold it doesn't matter anymore, but when I search both myself and the people I see around me, it just seems pretty clearly false to me. Does it not feel that way to you?
The hedonic treadmill is very much not a cope. Paraplegics recover to baseline happiness in months and so do lottery winners. It's one of the more robust findings in psychology.
But claims that money doesn't buy you happiness are bunk, it does, even if it has diminishing returns and is more of a log scale. There have been plenty of recent papers on it, of pretty high quality. Obviously when you get into the realm of multi millionaires and then billionaires, good luck getting a proper sample size, but for anyone who doesn't have 7 digits or more, money will make you happier, just not linearly.
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I share this scepticism. I scroll tik-tok and YouTube shorts when I have literally nothing else to do. I'd rather read new posts on themotte, read a long form story that exceeds 1000 pages, listen to a multi hour podcast while playing a 100 hour save file on a video game, or watch a good movie.
I choose the long form stuff because I usually enjoy it more. I have a frustrating lack of short term things I enjoy. Lately I've just been playing sudoku to kill 5-10 minute waiting spots. But I find it very unsatisfying.
Yeah, I mean clearly the fact that we’re here reading 20,000 words a week of other people’s cultural commentary suggests wordswordswords can be as or more compelling than TikTok.
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You cannot detox from dopamine, but nitpciking aside, it is always good to be less stimulated and extremely thoughtful, I wish I could do it successfully so I do wish you luck. Reducing screen time besides work is always great.
As for "news", I have read enough political material to know what is what in the world thanks to being on this forum so I do not need to read the news, you can always check stuff out occasionally but there is no benefit in knowing everything if you cannot do much with it, as internet surfing does make you worse at whatever you do. Quitting and then being really really mindful should be ideal.
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