7 ms·

Fuck dopamine, we're voluntarily breaking our own brains

85 points by ak_builds 1y ago

paulcole 1y ago
The real dopamine hit comes from posting your own substack on HN.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  At least its a well earned one. Usually.
ccvannorman 1y ago
Some things never change. 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 ;-]
- barrell 1y ago
  The progress from throwing sticks to fishing rods is very different from fishing rods to ordering fish at a restaurant — and not really comparable imo
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  > Yes, our civilization rewards and encourages short circuiting effort, depriving us of the basic positive feedback loop of effort to reward. 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.
- ak_builds 1y ago
  Thank you for your feedback. I appreciate the depth. 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.
pacifika 1y ago
This is why people pick up hobbies, I think. And why hustling kills them.
- jxntb73 1y ago
  Goals, however small, give life meaning.
  - vouaobrasil 1y ago
    Only if they are truly meaningful. Going to work just to further the system never really felt meaningful to me, even if it was a goal.
uxhacker 1y ago
Does using AI kill the dopamine loop? 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.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  AI kills the fun here for me. Writing is fun. Writing using AI to help is horrible. Same with coding to some extent.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    I think that generalizes to 'creation is fun, using AI to help is horrible'.
    - barrell 1y ago
      I think that generalized to ‘AI killed the dopamine loop’ XD
    - jxntb73 1y ago
      AT is an amazing tool that can boost productivity and help with creative inspiration. If an app is making you feel sad stop using the app.
      - vouaobrasil 1y ago
        Can it really help with creative inspiration in the long term? I'd say the answer is no for most people. 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.
  - mrintegrity 1y ago
    I wrote a "funny" email to a colleague who asked for a formal request to do a task I asked him for. I took it seriously and wrote extremely formal ("Dearest Steven... " Etc). He laughed and said "did chatgpt write that?". 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.
gonzalohm 1y ago
One could argue that this is a flaw of evolution. There is a system that gives you a reward after you accomplish something and hence you associate the final result with the reward. 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
- thejohnconway 1y ago
  Evolution is not operating at the speed necessary on population to the change of circumstances we have generated over the last 15,000 years. Especially in the modern world, where it is hardly clear that the reproduction rates of the people happiest in it are higher. Probably the opposite is true. 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.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  > What I mean by all this is that evolution and our brains will find a way to evolve and change our reward system. 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.
tclancy 1y ago
“Because we've created a world where effort gets treated like a disease to be cured.” 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.
- ak_builds 1y ago
  > all I wound up learning was I would never be that good at it Every time I got competitive with my hobby, it stopped being one. I relate to you.
- aidenn0 1y ago
  > ...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.
  - jimmydddd 1y ago
    I was a musician (drummer) during my school days and took pride in being the best drummer in my school, and (I thought), probably top 2% in the world. However, if ytube was around at that time, I would have watched videos from around the world and realized that I was mediocre at best. Maybe I would have lost interest? Maybe I would have worked harder at it? Hard to say.
- voxleone 1y ago
  I'm from early Generation X and was raised with the belief that AI and robotics would—finally!—liberate humanity to pursue nobler endeavors: advanced technology, great art, and, most importantly, philosophy. 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.
jahsome 1y ago
The edgy and adversarial tone didn't really make sense until the end of the article. Then it was pretty clear what this is.
- ada1981 1y ago
  What is it?
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    There's a trend of people diagnosing themselves with medical conditions that explain away their shortcomings. In this case, the author wrote a long rant about how he believes other people are causing themselves harm through their choices of actions, but throws in an exemption for himself at the very end. 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.
    - ada1981 1y ago
      Thank you.
  - jahsome 1y ago
    Self-righteousness.
ada1981 1y ago
Why does the author use a computer and the Internet to write and distribute his thoughts? 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.
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  > It’s not the tool. You’re just using it wrong 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.
  - ada1981 1y ago
    The wrong tool for the job is a classic case of “using it wrong”.
- klabb3 1y ago
  > 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.
theusus 1y ago
Well, more output means money. AI is getting cheap, and thus we are forced to produce more in less time. And I need money to survive.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  But don't you see, that's the prisoner's dilemma? But instead of playing that game, you should find new ways to rise above the AI mass production slop, such as emphasizing the hand-craftedness of your work. Sometimes, sticking to what's right is a better path, especially since you can at least feel pride in doing so.
dysoco 1y ago
I think the key is that you are supposed to automate whatever feels boring for you, and that should leave you more time to engage in activities that you actually feel joy for. 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.
- jdiff 1y ago
  Automating what's boring to spend more time on what brings you joy is a great idea. But using AI for that end seems counterproductive, as it seems to be reducing productivity rather than enhancing it. 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.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  > I think the key is that you are supposed to automate whatever feels boring for you 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.
AndrewDucker 1y ago
Eliminate effort in the places you don't enjoy it, concentrate effort in places you do, recognise that sometimes the places that pay aren't the ones you enjoy most, and that sometimes you don't enjoy things until you've pushed through the basics.
- ozgrakkurt 1y ago
  100% feel this. Also even if you are doing something you enjoy, your brain goes into redirection mode when you hit the hard parts. 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.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  Unfortunately, a lot of people need a sufficient mass of people who are also doing things to engage socially in the hobby. But AI is destroying that.
- barrell 1y ago
  I’m not convinced eliminating effort in places you don’t enjoy it is the right course of action. A recent example: I had to rearchitect major parts of my pipeline the other week. I find working on the pipeline very dull and not enjoyable. Since I wrote it all though, and struggled through, it was really easy for me to take it apart and reassemble it in a more efficient manner. Took maybe 30 minutes. 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)
emorning3 1y ago
[dead]
bevr1337 1y ago
> But everyone else? You're voluntarily breaking yours. I need medication to feel what you could feel naturally if you stopped training your brain that effort gets you nowhere. > 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.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  They link to a blog post where they say they claim to have been diagnosed with “dopamine deficiency”, which is not a real diagnosis. 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.
  - FollowingTheDao 1y ago
    I fault him only for his youth. becasue he is on the right track, just eager and still has a lot to learn. It is quite possible he has genetics that make Dopmaine much ore of a problem for him.
    - Aurornis 1y ago
      Dopamine is not the catch-all, explain-everything chemical he believes it is. 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.
  - ak_builds 1y ago
    > “dopamine deficiency”, which is not a real diagnosis This might change your mind: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1010930108 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1010930108
Aurornis 1y ago
> But everyone else? You're voluntarily breaking yours. I need medication to feel what you could feel naturally if you stopped training your brain that effort gets you nowhere. > 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.
- FollowingTheDao 1y ago
  >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). 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/ 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.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    > This needs to be corrected. Parkinson is caused by too much dopamine which after being metabolized creates oxidative stress that kills the dopamine neuron 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.
ndepoel 1y ago
I had this epiphany last year when I went through some old holiday pictures and saw a photo of a monument in a location that I had no memory of. So I spent some time retracing our steps on that day, based on other pictures from around the same time, and places that I knew we visited. It took a while, but eventually I managed to zero in on the place and felt pretty satisfied as I starred the location on Google Maps. 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.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  Excellent realization. AI is fundamentally destructive, and is one reason I never use it, ever. Automation was never meant to infringe upon the creative domain, only the truly mechanical.
- artofpongfu 1y ago
  You should try GeoGuessr if you haven't already. But there as well there are things that ruin the fun: "meta" knowledge, like if you see this tear in the sky, or this or that Google car then it's this country. I purposefully avoid learning any meta because that's not what makes GeoGuessr fun. The fun part is integrating several vague clues and arriving at the right conclusion.
justlikereddit 1y ago
Edgy take by young adult with same problem as everyone else, except everyone else suffering from it due to lazyness and asthenic personality whereas he suffers uniquely due to external reasons outside his own control. Lol.
Pigalowda 1y ago
I sort of get it I guess. 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.
GuB-42 1y ago
"Least effort" is the way of life, it is not just how the brain works, it is how the universe works. From the principle of least action that is maybe the most fundamental law of physics, to chemistry, to biology, to human activity. It is all some form of minimization. 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.
FollowingTheDao 1y ago
He is almost right. 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 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.
- ak_builds 1y ago
  DaTscan - this is the scan that I took. The results showed low to no dopamine release. 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.
bartimus 1y ago
Dopamine is a primal reward system. It's useless in the evolved modern world that requires rational thought, discipline and hard work. You probably wouldn't get much done waiting for a dopamine reward.
JilliaChristina 1y ago
[dead]

85 points by ak_builds 1y ago

paulcole 1y ago

The real dopamine hit comes from posting your own substack on HN.

bravesoul2 1y ago
At least its a well earned one. Usually.

ccvannorman 1y ago

Some things never change. 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 ;-]

barrell 1y ago
The progress from throwing sticks to fishing rods is very different from fishing rods to ordering fish at a restaurant — and not really comparable imo
vouaobrasil 1y ago
> Yes, our civilization rewards and encourages short circuiting effort, depriving us of the basic positive feedback loop of effort to reward. 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.
ak_builds 1y ago
Thank you for your feedback. I appreciate the depth. 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.

pacifika 1y ago

This is why people pick up hobbies, I think. And why hustling kills them.

jxntb73 1y ago
Goals, however small, give life meaning.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  Only if they are truly meaningful. Going to work just to further the system never really felt meaningful to me, even if it was a goal.

uxhacker 1y ago

Does using AI kill the dopamine loop? 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.

bravesoul2 1y ago
AI kills the fun here for me. Writing is fun. Writing using AI to help is horrible. Same with coding to some extent.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  I think that generalizes to 'creation is fun, using AI to help is horrible'.
  - barrell 1y ago
    I think that generalized to ‘AI killed the dopamine loop’ XD
  - jxntb73 1y ago
    AT is an amazing tool that can boost productivity and help with creative inspiration. If an app is making you feel sad stop using the app.
    - vouaobrasil 1y ago
      Can it really help with creative inspiration in the long term? I'd say the answer is no for most people. 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.
- mrintegrity 1y ago
  I wrote a "funny" email to a colleague who asked for a formal request to do a task I asked him for. I took it seriously and wrote extremely formal ("Dearest Steven... " Etc). He laughed and said "did chatgpt write that?". 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.

gonzalohm 1y ago

One could argue that this is a flaw of evolution. There is a system that gives you a reward after you accomplish something and hence you associate the final result with the reward. 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

thejohnconway 1y ago
Evolution is not operating at the speed necessary on population to the change of circumstances we have generated over the last 15,000 years. Especially in the modern world, where it is hardly clear that the reproduction rates of the people happiest in it are higher. Probably the opposite is true. 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.
vouaobrasil 1y ago
> What I mean by all this is that evolution and our brains will find a way to evolve and change our reward system. 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.

tclancy 1y ago

“Because we've created a world where effort gets treated like a disease to be cured.” 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.

ak_builds 1y ago
> all I wound up learning was I would never be that good at it Every time I got competitive with my hobby, it stopped being one. I relate to you.
aidenn0 1y ago
> ...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.
- jimmydddd 1y ago
  I was a musician (drummer) during my school days and took pride in being the best drummer in my school, and (I thought), probably top 2% in the world. However, if ytube was around at that time, I would have watched videos from around the world and realized that I was mediocre at best. Maybe I would have lost interest? Maybe I would have worked harder at it? Hard to say.
voxleone 1y ago
I'm from early Generation X and was raised with the belief that AI and robotics would—finally!—liberate humanity to pursue nobler endeavors: advanced technology, great art, and, most importantly, philosophy. 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.

jahsome 1y ago

The edgy and adversarial tone didn't really make sense until the end of the article. Then it was pretty clear what this is.

ada1981 1y ago
What is it?
- Aurornis 1y ago
  There's a trend of people diagnosing themselves with medical conditions that explain away their shortcomings. In this case, the author wrote a long rant about how he believes other people are causing themselves harm through their choices of actions, but throws in an exemption for himself at the very end. 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.
  - ada1981 1y ago
    Thank you.
- jahsome 1y ago
  Self-righteousness.

ada1981 1y ago

Why does the author use a computer and the Internet to write and distribute his thoughts? 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.

loloquwowndueo 1y ago
> It’s not the tool. You’re just using it wrong 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.
- ada1981 1y ago
  The wrong tool for the job is a classic case of “using it wrong”.
klabb3 1y ago
> 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.

theusus 1y ago

Well, more output means money. AI is getting cheap, and thus we are forced to produce more in less time. And I need money to survive.

vouaobrasil 1y ago
But don't you see, that's the prisoner's dilemma? But instead of playing that game, you should find new ways to rise above the AI mass production slop, such as emphasizing the hand-craftedness of your work. Sometimes, sticking to what's right is a better path, especially since you can at least feel pride in doing so.

dysoco 1y ago

I think the key is that you are supposed to automate whatever feels boring for you, and that should leave you more time to engage in activities that you actually feel joy for. 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.

jdiff 1y ago
Automating what's boring to spend more time on what brings you joy is a great idea. But using AI for that end seems counterproductive, as it seems to be reducing productivity rather than enhancing it. 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.
vouaobrasil 1y ago
> I think the key is that you are supposed to automate whatever feels boring for you 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.

AndrewDucker 1y ago

Eliminate effort in the places you don't enjoy it, concentrate effort in places you do, recognise that sometimes the places that pay aren't the ones you enjoy most, and that sometimes you don't enjoy things until you've pushed through the basics.

ozgrakkurt 1y ago
100% feel this. Also even if you are doing something you enjoy, your brain goes into redirection mode when you hit the hard parts. 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.
vouaobrasil 1y ago
Unfortunately, a lot of people need a sufficient mass of people who are also doing things to engage socially in the hobby. But AI is destroying that.
barrell 1y ago
I’m not convinced eliminating effort in places you don’t enjoy it is the right course of action. A recent example: I had to rearchitect major parts of my pipeline the other week. I find working on the pipeline very dull and not enjoyable. Since I wrote it all though, and struggled through, it was really easy for me to take it apart and reassemble it in a more efficient manner. Took maybe 30 minutes. 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)

emorning3 1y ago

[dead]

bevr1337 1y ago

> But everyone else? You're voluntarily breaking yours. I need medication to feel what you could feel naturally if you stopped training your brain that effort gets you nowhere. > 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.

Aurornis 1y ago
They link to a blog post where they say they claim to have been diagnosed with “dopamine deficiency”, which is not a real diagnosis. 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.
- FollowingTheDao 1y ago
  I fault him only for his youth. becasue he is on the right track, just eager and still has a lot to learn. It is quite possible he has genetics that make Dopmaine much ore of a problem for him.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    Dopamine is not the catch-all, explain-everything chemical he believes it is. 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.
- ak_builds 1y ago
  > “dopamine deficiency”, which is not a real diagnosis This might change your mind: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1010930108 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1010930108

Aurornis 1y ago

> But everyone else? You're voluntarily breaking yours. I need medication to feel what you could feel naturally if you stopped training your brain that effort gets you nowhere. > 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.

FollowingTheDao 1y ago
>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). 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/ 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.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > This needs to be corrected. Parkinson is caused by too much dopamine which after being metabolized creates oxidative stress that kills the dopamine neuron 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.

ndepoel 1y ago

I had this epiphany last year when I went through some old holiday pictures and saw a photo of a monument in a location that I had no memory of. So I spent some time retracing our steps on that day, based on other pictures from around the same time, and places that I knew we visited. It took a while, but eventually I managed to zero in on the place and felt pretty satisfied as I starred the location on Google Maps. 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.

vouaobrasil 1y ago
Excellent realization. AI is fundamentally destructive, and is one reason I never use it, ever. Automation was never meant to infringe upon the creative domain, only the truly mechanical.
artofpongfu 1y ago
You should try GeoGuessr if you haven't already. But there as well there are things that ruin the fun: "meta" knowledge, like if you see this tear in the sky, or this or that Google car then it's this country. I purposefully avoid learning any meta because that's not what makes GeoGuessr fun. The fun part is integrating several vague clues and arriving at the right conclusion.

justlikereddit 1y ago

Edgy take by young adult with same problem as everyone else, except everyone else suffering from it due to lazyness and asthenic personality whereas he suffers uniquely due to external reasons outside his own control. Lol.

Pigalowda 1y ago

I sort of get it I guess. 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.

GuB-42 1y ago

"Least effort" is the way of life, it is not just how the brain works, it is how the universe works. From the principle of least action that is maybe the most fundamental law of physics, to chemistry, to biology, to human activity. It is all some form of minimization. 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.

FollowingTheDao 1y ago

He is almost right. 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 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.

ak_builds 1y ago
DaTscan - this is the scan that I took. The results showed low to no dopamine release. 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.

bartimus 1y ago

Dopamine is a primal reward system. It's useless in the evolved modern world that requires rational thought, discipline and hard work. You probably wouldn't get much done waiting for a dopamine reward.

JilliaChristina 1y ago

[dead]