Dopamine Nation Dopamine Nation

This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about the relationship between pleasure and pain, and how understanding that relationship has become essential for a life well lived.

If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon to a website near you.

Scientists rely on dopamine as a kind of universal currency for measuring the addictive potential of any experience.

We also need the lived experience of human beings.

Who better to teach us how to overcome compulsive overconsumption than those most vulnerable to it: people with addiction.

Kent Dunnington wrote, “Persons with severe addictions are among those contemporary prophets that we ignore to our own demise, for they show us who we truly are.”

It refers to the addicted person’s secret engagement with drugs, alcohol, or other compulsive behaviors, hidden from view, even in some cases from their own.

and had a flash of insight that reading about sadomasochistic sex toys in the wee hours of the morning was not how I wanted to be spending my time.

Addiction broadly defined is the continued and compulsive consumption of a substance or behavior (gambling, gaming, sex) despite its harm to self and/or others.

I have a kind and loving husband, great kids, meaningful work, freedom, autonomy, and relative wealth—no trauma, social dislocation, poverty, unemployment, or other risk factors for addiction. Yet I was compulsively retreating further and further into a fantasy world.

The Dark Side of Capitalism

One of the biggest risk factors for getting addicted to any drug is easy access to that drug. When it’s easier to get a drug, we’re more likely to try it. In trying it, we’re more likely to get addicted to it.

To be sure, increased access is not the only risk for addiction. The risk increases if we have a biological parent or grandparent with addiction, even when we’re raised outside the addicted home. Mental illness is a risk factor, although the relationship between the two is unclear: Does the mental illness lead to drug use, does drug use cause or unmask mental illness, or is it somewhere in between?

Trauma, social upheaval, and poverty contribute to addiction risk, as drugs become a means of coping and lead to epigenetic changes—heritable changes to the strands of DNA outside of inherited base pairs—affecting gene expression in both an individual and their offspring.

These risk factors notwithstanding, increased access to addictive substances may be the most important risk factor facing modern people. Supply has created demand as we all fall prey to the vortex of compulsive overuse.