The Cheap Dopamine Epidemic: Stop Ruining Your Life

The Dopamine Epidemic

00:00Social media is the fast food of socialization. Porn is the fast food of intimacy. Video games are the fast food of achievement. Netflix is the fast food of entertainment. Fast food itself is a combination of fat, sugar, and salt. Ingredients that used to be incredibly scarce, that are combined and tested in infinite different ways to see, which keeps consumers coming back for more.

00:23In order to understand this cheap dopamine epidemic that we're going through, we need to have a brief history lesson. One way that societies can be categorized is by their techno economic base. Now, a techno economic base is, in a nutshell, their basic means of production.

00:40So think the horse drawn plow versus machine farming, the things that we use to manage our basic needs. And there are five of these techno economic bases. The first is foraging, which is hunting and gathering. So men hunted and women gathered.

00:55The second is horticultural, which is just simple planting where women produce most of the food. And the society's deities became female. The third is agrarian, which had animal drawn plows where women couldn't continue farming due to an increase in miscarriages, so their roles changed and the society's deities became men.

01:1680% of agrarian societies relied on male slave labor. The thing to understand with these is that whoever produced the most foods, or whoever produced the most in general, whether it was male or female, became the deities of that society. And so the agrarian society marks a massive shift in culture for that reason.

01:35This is the rise of the patriarchy, so to say. But the reason this patriarchy is a thing is because of this shift in culture where women were the deities for most of human civilization. So once this started happening in agrarian societies where women couldn't operate the horse drawn plow because of too many miscarriages, it was our Darwinian disadvantage for women to do that things.

02:00So the roles shifted again and the men started to produce more of the food. And this caused women to shift and take over more, quote unquote, traditional roles of tending to the house and the family. And now, because of the plow, there was an abundance of food.

02:16So the men didn't have to work as much. So they had more time for thinking and contemplation. And this is what led to the invention of writing and mathematics. It also led to the ascending philosophies, which we can talk about in a different video.

02:32But that's when the spiritual side started to focus solely on the ascending and started to disconnect from the descending or the physio sphere. So this is when the demonization of things like money and sex became a thing for religions and spiritual people, because they lost that connection to the great chain of being Visio sphere, biosphere, new sphere, they were focused solely on ascending.

02:56And so people still hold this mindset that material pursuits are all bad when they are not, and they are actually connected to spirit. Now, the last two bases after the agrarian were the industrial and informational. Take note here that the homogeneous species emerged around 2 million years ago, and the Homo sapiens species US emerged around 300,000 years ago.

03:20And since the industrial age started about 300 years ago, up until now, that's just a tiny fraction of what we are wired for. So this industrial age in the informational age now changes everything because we're not wired for that thing. Human life spent most of its time in these foraging, horticulture and agrarian societies where none of what we had now exists.

03:45And that is a very important to this whole dopamine thing. As the industrial age progressed, fat, sugar and salt became less and less scarce. We could trade for salt in coastal areas and produce fat and sugar at a rapid rate. Between 1920 and 1950, things continued to change.

04:01Assembly lines and 9 to 5 jobs became a thing. Thanks, Henry Ford for that and how humans work began to shift into the workforce we know today. In short, humans had more money and potential. So with more resources, with more trade during the industrial age, humans became wealthier all around.

04:19After 1950, fast food chains started popping up. Then the information age came online. The golden age of television allowed for more spread of information. Then a bit later, the internet information began to grow and spread like wildfire, continuing to fast forward and we have Google, Facebook and other soon to be massive companies competing in a race to the top.

04:39Now, these weren't all bad at first, but the desire for power caused technology to evolve in a way towards poor incentives towards power. Because everything was so new, everything was happening so fast, it had never been done before. Everyone was in that race to the top.

04:57In other words, everyone was trying to win the game.

Fat, Sugar, Salt

05:00Now back to the topic of fat, sugar and salt because we have to talk about digital fat, sugar and salt. Those resources fat, sugar and salt. Humans aren't adapted to have those things in excess were adapted for survival. And so scarce ingredients like fat, sugar, and salt spurt dopamine into our brain because we need to remember them for survival.

05:23We need to see them as important. So once companies discovered this mechanism, they can now test these different things fat, sugar and salt in infinite different ways to see which kept the customers hooked and coming back for more. I mean, just think of how many fast food restaurants with quadruple patty burgers and queso Chalupa, burrito tacos, like all the combinations of those things that continue coming out with new products and promoting, so it keeps you going back to Taco Bell, McDonald's, Carl's Jr, etc.

05:52that's what we're talking about here. But the thing is, is that this is also reflected in the digital world at a much faster rate because it's digital. It's not physical. It can happen a lot faster. So when these internet companies decided to adopt an advertising model for their growth and their monetization, they quickly realized that inflammatory headlines, negativity and things like that led to capturing and retaining the most attention.

06:19So now all they had to do was serve more users what they thought the users liked or they paid the most attention to. And in comes the for you page, the thing that you're stuck scrolling all day. So in the digital world, we can think of fat as fear mongering, sugar as quick and desirable promises, and salt as absolutist tick takes.

06:39In many cases, not all cases. The internet companies test combinations of these, and the algorithm feeds us as much as we want until we're mentally obese. Fear induced content spurts dopamine into our brains and narrows our thinking because we need the information for later survival.

06:55Now, here we are. Quick money, quick sex, quick knowledge, quick food, quick entertainment. A ticking time bomb that feels good at first but feels terrible later. But there's more to the story. Dopamine isn't all bad. We living through a second Renaissance after all.

07:11The Renaissance came after the Dark Ages, by the way, the internet and social media for conscious and intentional individuals seeking truth and growth is the key to doing work you love and taking back control of your life.

The Molecule Of More – How Dopamine Works

07:28Now we need to talk about how dopamine works because this is an extremely popular topic across social media. But I don't think many of the videos do it justice. So we're going to start with a quote from Daniel Z. Lieberman, who is the author of The Molecule of More, which is a book about dopamine in a broad sense, saying something is important is another way of saying it's linked to dopamine.

07:51Why? Because among the many things it does, dopamine is an early warning system for the appearance of anything that can help us survive. But the thing here is, is that most people don't understand dopamine, and because they don't understand dopamine, it tends to control their behavior.

08:06It tends to control their life. They can't become aware of the thought processes that are happening when that cheap dopamine is spurted into their brain, and they can't work to reverse that problem. And they don't know how to reverse that problem because they can't see any other way.

08:19Dopamine isn't the pleasure molecule. Dopamine is the molecule of more. But dopamine isn't the only neurotransmitter that provides feedback based on our behavior and perception. There are two types of neurotransmitters. The first are the down chemicals or the here and now.

08:35So when you look down, what do you see? You see everything in your pari personal space. Things that you can grab, possess and control, things that are within your possession, the here and now. Chemicals associated with what's in your immediate space allow you to savor, enjoy, or fight and run away from what you are experiencing.

08:54So these chemicals are things like oxytocin you're up in nephron, adrenaline, serotonin, endorphins and endocannabinoid endo and cannabinoids. And then the second type of chemical is the up chemical or just dopamine. So you can look outside.

09:10You can look to the sky. You can look in the windows while you're shopping. You can look at the advertisements on TV. You can look at this constant feed called social media. And you can even look at your memories of the past. Vacation that make you desire it.

09:24Now, what do all of these things have in common? They are things that you don't have, things that are in your extra personal space. Dopamine motivates you to pursue, to control, and to possess what you don't have but want because it could be useful for your survival.

09:39And the thing here is that it may not be useful for your survival now, but it was in the past because in the past it was wise to gather more resources. It was wise to have more sex and therefore more offspring, because you're trying to push your bloodline this far into the future as you can, or else you go extinct as a species and other things like getting a horse and a sword because it allows you to fight battles and win.

10:04And again progress your bloodline and survive. So what's the issue and what do we do? The issue is that we are so dopamine overloaded by the abundance of information forged by game theoretic principles, that we've lost touch with reality. Relationships suffer because you possess a partner thanks to a dopamine fueled motivation, but you fail to reprogram your habits to appreciate and savor that relationship after the honeymoon phase.

10:29And we can apply this honeymoon phase to almost any area of life. And we need to learn how to deal with that. Like when you're motivated to go to the gym, you kind of get in this honeymoon phase with the gym, you're focused, you're making a lot of progress.

10:40It's called newbie gains. You make a lot of progress really quickly, and once that fades out, a lot of people quit because they get demotivated because they're seeing slower progress. So this is the shift from superficial pursuits to a philosophical sense of mastery.

10:56When you're getting into a relationship and after that honeymoon phase, or you're going to the gym or you're starting a new hobby or habit, and you see that quick progression and you're just into this new interest, eventually you have to appreciate it.

11:10You have to master your craft. You need to focus on the boring fundamentals and show up to them every single day. And you need to move from dopamine to those down chemicals that allow you to savor and appreciate what you have. And if you don't know how to appreciate and savor what you have watched the last video called Why Your 20s Feel So Meaningless, where I talk about how to find more meaning in your life.

11:34But for now, as you're watching this video, you just need to understand that dopamine is the anticipation molecule. So if we want to enjoy the things we have, we must train our minds away from the future oriented and move back to a sustained state of present oriented.

11:49In other words, be more. Soak in the present moment. Adopt a mindfulness habit, go on a walk, stare at a leaf, and find joy in the translucent web of life encapsulated in such a small green object. That's the main habit you're probably missing now.

12:03Dopamine detoxes help. For this reason, you kind of remove all external more you. You remove yourself from even potentially desiring anything, and you get stuck in this state of boredom. So you're forced to find the appreciation in the boredom.

12:19But you don't have to do a dopamine detox. You simply have to change how you approach, use, and leverage the technology that is destroying most people's lives.

The Holistic Solution: Long-Term Gratification

12:33Here's the thing dopamine isn't a bad chemical. It is the driving force behind success and failure. The difference is long term versus short term gratification in that sentence isn't to be taken lightly because that difference is massive. Short term gratification or cheap dopamine leads to entropy, long term gratification, or earned dopamine leads to central entropy.

12:57For what we're concerned with here is the gradual decline into chaos, uncertainty, and disorder. So you can think anxiety, overwhelm in that inescapable bubble of negative thoughts that seems to only get worse and worse because we can't make sense of the world anymore, usually due to dwelling on the surface for too long now.

13:13Entropy or reversing entropy is the upward battle we are all facing as humans. It is maintaining, creating, and improving order and certainty so you can think how challenge leads to fulfillment flow in the sense of purpose or control over your life.

13:27Now, since social media is such a large and important part of our lives and often necessary at this point, that's what I want to focus on. While social media can turn toxic fast, it's difficult to ignore that it's an integral part of how we do and will work, how we communicate, and how we stay on the same page as everyone else so we can improve as a society.

13:48Now, of course, that last part is heavily being taken advantage of. Nobody seems to be on the same page if they just let the algorithm show them any and all information and they just shut off and they go into that wall scene where they have like that helmet on when they're drinking soda from it, if that's even know they're laying in the like capsule thing just watching TV.

14:07All day and they're being drip fed this like, pleasurable stuff and big drinks and whatever. It is very dystopian. If you just let social media control your life and you don't, your rate if you're not intentional about the information that you're consuming, your life is going to be frickin terrible.

14:23Because the thing with that in the past, the the unconscious boomers, when you talk to them, you're just talking to a TV now, Gen Z and millennials, when you talk to them, the unconscious ones, you're just talking to some polarizing social media feed when you talk to them.

14:40If you can predict exactly what they're going to say next and they aren't willing to budge on their beliefs, you're talking to a social media feed. Now that poses a very big problem, because if you are conditioned by this social media feed and the algorithm continues to show you this short term, gratifying content that keeps you in a state of stress and survival, you can see the problem with that.

15:02The combination of fear and desire pull you away from the present moment, and entropy increases. What you thought was a harmless post was actually a combination of 50 short posts you read in unison that silently induces chaos in your mind. You regress, you stay the same.

15:18You lock yourself into a paradigm of political ideologies and static opinions that aren't conducive to achieving anything worthwhile in your life. Now, if the incentives of social media companies were different, we would all be in a much better place.

15:31But we are too deep into the hole now, and it's wise not to trust anyone, especially a mega corporation, with increasing your quality of life that's on you.

Creating New Digital Environments For Success

15:39Now really quickly, I want to talk about creating new digital environments for your success because as we talked about earlier, digital information can spread and is created extremely rapidly. And if this isn't conscious by you, if it's not intentional, if it's not curated, then your life is moving in the negative direction by definition.

15:59But we can take advantage of that because since we have access to all of this information, we can be intentional with what type of content that we consume that leads to more entropy, or more order, or more certainty or more success in our lives.

16:15I want to start with this. Have you ever heard of the Broken Windows theory? It's pretty fascinating. In a nutshell, there was an experiment done where they studied two different environments. One with intentionally broken windows and one that looked clean and tidy in the area where they installed new windows and cleaned the area up.

16:32Crime decreased by about 50% in the area where they broke windows and created a mess. Crime increased. So why does this happen? Because your environment heavily conditions your behavior on the internet. We're constantly exposing our minds to an area with thousands of broken windows a day.

16:50Digital environments condition your mind much faster than physical ones because there's more information available. Now here's the kicker few people realize that you chose to put yourself in that environment, and you, as an intentional individual, can create a new one.

17:06Your environment conditions who you are. But most people forget that you create your environment.

Becoming A Value Creator – The Life Of Earned Dopamine

17:16Social media is one of the greatest technologies available to us. And I don't mean to brag, even though I kind of do. That's why I'm saying it. But social media has rarely been toxic or inflammatory to me. It's like when I see something toxic or inflammatory, I just scroll past it.

17:31I'm sure some of that sticks in my mind and influences my behavior in one way or another, but I would say that 95% of the time, social media has been the engine. It's been the fuel for any success that I've had in life. Because you can learn anything, you can build anything.

17:46You don't need permission anymore. You don't need credentials anymore. You don't need to be an expert. You don't need to be a degree or have a degree. You simply need to have something valuable to share. You need to have a mindset that wants to collect valuable skill and insight from social media, and therefore, you have as many good and valuable inputs into your head as you want.

18:11Just through searching and curating. And then you produce valuable outputs so you can contribute back to it and hopefully turn social media into something better by your own personal efforts. And you help other people in the meantime. And as you can see, as if you've watched any of my other videos, if you want to turn that into some kind of income, if you want to achieve the ultimate goal of being paid to be yourself, or if you want to follow the Alan Watts quote of sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing, it's more than possible now because just think about it.

18:46Social media allows you to learn almost anything, challenge your understanding, and seek new perspectives to get closer to truth. That allows you to build a business or independent source of income. You have indirect access to 5.5 billion people you can help in exchange for another form of value, like money or attention, that can be used to lead more people down a path of long term gratification, creating a ripple effect.

19:08Now, if you want to understand all of this stuff in simple terms, you can get the one person business launchpad via the link in the description. It's 50% off through Black Friday weekend, and this course finally answers the question that I've been asked so many different times.

19:23It's like, okay, I get the one person business concept, but how do I actually start? So this is like a beginner level, very foundational. What kind of software do you start an LLC? What about taxes? What skills do I learn? What interest do I use?

19:36What kind of product or service do I sell, how do I sell it, etc. etc. just all of that stuff laid out for you in plain simple terms. So check that out in the description if you're interested. And the last thing social media allows you to do is to find potential employers, investors, team members, or connections.

19:52So creating high value content does the heavy lifting for you. Now the thing there and I'm building cortex at the moment, my software startup and having an audience obviously makes it a lot easier. You have potential customers already. If I wanted to find investors for it, which we're not doing, I could pretty easily.

20:10I would think it's a lot easier to hire people because you have an audience and referrals of great people that can come and work for you. So starting any kind of business, I believe, should come after starting a one person business and just learning all the skills that you need to learn, especially when you don't have any money or cash flow.

20:24Yet. Another thing is that you don't need a large audience to do this. Yes, my audience has grown over the 5 to 6 years that have done this, but it's been 5 to 6 years of me doing it full time. Now, the thing with those three things that I listed off, being able to learn almost anything and challenge your understanding with longer form content, being able to build a business and acquire new skills to do so, to distribute your value, and then finding potential employers if you want to get a job or investors or team members.

20:52All of those things are skin tropic. They take time and effort. The reverse, the entropy and chaos you were so used to by providing meaningful inputs and outputs, they are earned dopamine. They lead to greater complexity in order, allowing you to spot more opportunities, solve more problems, create more value and profit in a meaningful way.

21:11So since the social media companies won't change their own incentives, it's up to you to create your own, your own order, your own environment, your own catalyst for success. So here's how.

Curate Your Digital Environment

21:22In three steps. The first is to curate your digital environment. Because the first offender here is to short form content. It can be useful for quick insights, but can quickly devolve into a rabbit hole of memes and meaninglessness. The problem is that we no longer challenge our beliefs and understanding with books and articles whose incentives aren't to become a New York Times bestseller, or to create the most inflammatory engagement bait headline if their main intention is status.

21:49And that's the main intention. Because everyone is chasing status in one way or another, then the information they distribute will be tailored to that. So what I'm saying there is if the main intention is status, them acquiring status, then the article or the book or whatever it may be is probably mostly useless if they don't have the intention to help and increase order in the reader's mind, or go more long form, go more in-depth, create more understanding and challenge in the world, then it's probably not worth reading.

22:20Most of your time spent on the internet should be dedicated to long form content that challenges, expands, and nurtures your perspective. Read longer. Read about more difficult concepts. Read things that don't confirm your beliefs just to make you feel good.

22:33Reading can easily be confused with mental masturbation when it is so much more than that. I would encourage you to go watch one of my more recent videos on reading. I think the thumbnail has me with a black line over my eyes that says read more books or something of that nature.

22:49I go over my book recommendations. Inside of that. I would argue that most of your future success is dependent on this single habit. Read longer things. In other words, consume content that is in your development and not the other way around.

23:03Unfollow accounts that you know aren't serving your growth. Find longform writing videos and podcasts that you enjoy listening to. Follow those long form creators on social media because they write better short form content that helps fill in the knowledge gaps of their long form.

23:17If they're only on short form social media like TikTok, that's all they do. No newsletter, no YouTube channel, no podcast, or they don't write longer form content like if they're on X or Instagram, if they don't write like threads or carousels or things like that, then a lot of their growth comes from being polarizing, being inflammatory, being kind of engagement baity, which is not bad all around.

23:41They're probably not trying to do it, and they're probably teaching something a lot better than people that are just posting memes and other things that don't really serve you side for comedic purposes. But I think you get what I'm saying. So the more that you curate your digital environment, the more you promote entropy or order or certainty, the more you reduce.

23:59Or yeah, reduce entropy in your life, the less you fall into this chaos, anxiety and overwhelm.

Focus On A Meaningful Project

24:07Now the second thing, after curating your digital environment is to focus on a meaningful project. Why? Because a project is ordered. You need to order your mind. Your projects frame your attention. When you're working on something and you're building something, that's what you're focused on.

24:23Distractions are hard to penetrate. If the project is actually meaningful, it's how you get into the flow state. That's how you become obsessed. Projects are your building blocks for a better future. And as Nouvel said, go do something great and your network will instantly emerge.

24:37The other thing is that now that you have good inputs because you're curating your digital environment, you need to use that for good outputs. Otherwise it just creates more entropy in your mind. If you're not actually producing with the ideas and information that you gather or read or consume, if you aren't balancing consumption with creation, then you still get mentally obese.

24:58You still gain mental fat because you're doing the nutrition, you're eating the food, but you're not exercise. Rising dopamine doesn't just come from consuming information because information isn't limited to the things you read and hear. Your habits.

25:11What you do conditions your mind in a positive or negative direction. You can either work on a project that acts as a puzzle piece to your ideal lifestyle, or you can fill your boredom with memes and pleasure that lead to disorder and chaos.

25:23If you don't have a project to build, chances are you are already working on a project, someone else's one that was assigned to you by a teacher or employer. You'll spend eight hours building their dreams, but won't spend one hour building your own.

25:36If you're always building someone else's project, you are not in control of your mind because your mind is framed by the project that you're working on, the thing that you're producing, the goal that you're trying to achieve. Your mind literally interprets the world based on the goal that it has in his mind.

25:51If you're only goal is to wake up and go to the job, most of your time is spent trying to numb the pain from that thing. You're not building towards anything more. If you have a business that you're pouring effort into every single morning, then you experience a lot more serendipity in your life because you notice new things that can be applied to your business to improve it.

26:09It's the entrepreneur versus the employee mindset. You don't have to be an entrepreneur to have an entrepreneurial mindset. You can still be an employee that has high agency. That's the term. That's the difference between the two is agency.

26:24How often are you doing your own thing and working towards your own goals, whether it's in the company or it's not? Are you a slave or are you free? Is the question that I'm asking. And I'm not saying physical slavery. I'm saying mental with attention.

26:39Are you riveted to someone else's dream

Earn Your Control And Freedom

26:41or are you building your own? That leads us into the third point. After curating your digital environment, building a meaningful project, the last thing is earning your control and freedom. The question now is what do you build? And I'm assuming you're starting from scratch, so you have a little money saved up.

26:56You may have a few skills, you have the ambition, but you don't know where to start with building your own thing. And the thing is, is that we're not in the industrial age anymore. We're in the information age. Getting a job and investing your savings isn't the only option.

27:09In fact, if you couldn't tell people were losing trust in the conventional past promises to secure their future, it's one of the worst options because your time, energy, and emotional well-being are at the control of the boss and your beliefs shape your reality and the opportunities available to you.

27:24And if you haven't seen or just don't believe that teenagers of all people are getting on TikTok or getting on social media and they're building multimillion dollar apps, million dollar products, million dollar services, all of these things that they're just able to do because they took the time to study and they practice and they iterated.

27:43And the whole argument of, oh, well, not everyone can build a social media audience. That's just plain wrong. Most people who've been consistent on social media in any meaningful amount have gone semi viral at least once. They've had 10,000 to 50,000 to 100,000 people.

28:00View one post. And if you're simply consistent and can try to replicate that, it doesn't matter how large your audience is, you're still getting in front of a ton of people that can see your products or services, and you don't need that much traffic to make the glorified $10,000 a month, especially as a one person business.

28:1750,000 $100,000 a month isn't a lot for an actual business. Now, as a one person business where you're still able to do this now thanks to technology, social media, and all these things popping up, that's a lot of money for one single person.

28:31So in business case, anyone would scoff at 10,000. Well, not really, but many people would scoff at $10,000 a month as a business, but as one person, that's quite good and it's more than doable. All new wealth is being generated in the digital space, the idea space, the creator economy, a place where people aren't limited by their connections or physical location because they can reach anyone with an internet connection and if you have the right skills like writing, marketing and building, which I teach in one person business launchpad and to our writer links in the description,

29:04all you have to do is get what you build in front of a micro fraction of people that perceive what you built as valuable. So create the content you want to see in the world. Build the product you want to see in the world. Create the content that stretches your mind and encourages you to grow as a writer.

29:19Attract like minded people to your interests by building an audience. These are the people you can help the most. Build the product that contributes to the development and self-actualize of others. Promote your product to your audience because you don't have a boss to do it for you anymore and earn your freedom.

29:34That's it for this video. Thank you for watching. I hope it was beneficial. I had a lot of fun creating it. Like subscribe. Check out the links in the description for Free Life Reset Planner if you join my newsletter. That's it! Thank you again.

29:45Bye.