On dopamine hits

In the pursuit of profit, we miss
ourselves in the process.

Do not forget the richness within.

I can feel the pull of the dopamine hit waiting to happen. As soon as I open the app, old patterns ripple through my body, begging me to please scroll down a bit further. It’s been a good while.

One difference is that, for now, I am still able to just notice this and not fall for it. I can decide to react differently, hopefully carving new pathways in my mind.

My goal: To have a choice. To not be a slave of the attention miners fighting for the precious resource that is my awareness.

The way the things are built now, it is a war. We are each individually playing our roles as foot soldiers — cannon fodder, manipulated to give it all away in the name of some obscure ideal, unaware that despite the illusion of countless followers and likes, the only benefited is the webmaster coding the landscape in which the game is played.

I find myself constantly debating from two different fronts. On one hand, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the internet is broken — social media, in particular — and is failing to deliver the freedom and societal enlightenment it promised in its early days. On the other hand, even in the instances in which it is succeeding (which, to be fair, are a lot), it still seems to me as if the success is built upon the same broken principles that feed my first point.

In short, today’s internet is a zero sum game. Because even in those cases in which a person is outputting only beneficial content to their viewers, most of this output is released inside platforms that are actively weaponizing such content in a variety of ways, aiming to maximize profit.

There was a time in which I thought it possible to hijack the machine and use these same principles for profit making and instead use them to maximize goodness, though this is a moral slippery slope that I don’t feel ready yet to slide through without falling for the trap in its premise — what is ‘good’ in the first place, and who gets to decide that?

The funny thing is that, as much as I complain, I am still certain that I will share this in the same spaces that prompt me to write about this. I still don’t have the balls to throw it all away, but I’m learning.

My always-hopeful self likes to think that this limited perception of mine is due to a lack of a better perspective. So, please, if you have a better perspective, do share it with me.