Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Dr. Anna Lembke uses deeply personal and real patient experiences to illustrate in vivid language the current state of our dopamine addiction. Like Oliver Sacks, she shows us the world of our patients in a way we can easily see ourselves caught up in. Unlike Sacks, Lembke’s patients suffer from something we all most certainly fight against daily. The allure of the easy dopamine fix. Modernity has given us a lot of conveniences. A lot of them make our lives more comfortable, efficient, and productive. Modernity has also given us the convenience of easy consumption of, well, everything. That ease of access allows us to feed our dopamine need without end. What’s worse is that capitalism is the nitro injection that takes overconsumption to epic levels. We are constantly seeking an escape in numerous forms. The epidemic of dopamine addiction has been exasperated by a new entry. Since the internet was introduced, digital dopamine fixes have been in the palm of our hands. What is worse is that some of the smartest among us are being employed to keep us in the grips of digital addiction instead of solving things cancer. All of this reminds me of Blaise Pascal’s observation, "All human evil comes from a single cause: man's inability to sit still in a room." Lembke combines the science of dopamine addiction with the kind of anecdotes and nomenclature that we can all understand. You can’t leave this without seeing where the pull of a dopamine fix creeps into every corner of your own life. Maybe we all need a little more boredom and detoxing on a regular basis. Lembke recommends a step further. Actively leaning into the boredom and pain to build the muscles that have atrophied away in our overindulgent culture.