“Our technology has exceeded our humanity.” – Albert Einstein
To master impulse control, understand this:
Dopamine is a hungry beast, and the more you feed it, the hungrier it gets.
Case in point…
Two weeks ago, I created my first-ever dating app profile.
As an aside, I don’t know why I was so biased against dating apps, for so long.
As it turns out:
- They work.
- They’re actually pretty fun.
(who knew?)
(right, probably a lot of people…)
Anyway, point #2 was unexpected.
And, once I realized I was actually enjoying the app, I started using it a lot more than I thought I would.
That’s fine, for now:
It’s new and shiny and seems to be yielding results, so no real harm done.
The problem is, the more I found myself using the app, the more I found myself using everything else that triggers dopamine, too:
YouTube, television, social media, even texting.
Turns out, dopamine doesn’t discriminate:
It’ll eat whatever you feed it, as long as you feed it more dopamine.
The end result is something like a sugar addiction, where the more sugar we eat, the more sugar we want, and our body doesn’t care if the sugar comes from candy or chocolate or straight from the damn cane, it just wants more.
So it goes with techno-dopamine:
More Hinge doesn’t just equal more Hinge, it equals more everything…
(Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, junk food, pleasure, pick your slowly-corroding poison)
…Which equals less impulse control, which equals less productivity, lower performance and slower progress.
The solution?
Starve that fxcker.
Or, at least put it on intermittent fasting.
The less you feed the dopamine monster, the smaller its appetite, and the more controllable it becomes…
…Which equals more impulse control, which equals more productivity, higher performance, and faster progress.
Enjoy.
– T
P.S. In case you missed it on Friday:
Here’s a clip from Naval on the dangers of cheap dopamine.
“The challenge of modernity is avoiding the fruits of modernity.” – Naval Ravikant