Hey Baby! What’s your dopamine? People are always pretending their dopamine is nobler than it is. “I really get jacked up saving the world or exercising or reading,“ they say.
Let’s face it. We’re humans and we’re trying to move up on the food chain, so we lie about what makes us tick. There are good dopamines, ones that people approve of. There are bad dopamines, ones that come with judges and jurors. However, during this time of COVID-19, people are a little less judgemental about what your dopamine is. People who normally brag about books and extreme travel, now openly admit their dopamine is Netflix.
Does COVID-19 allow us to admit or discover what our real dopamine is? And not the dopamine we’ve been marketing to our friends and family and ourselves? During non-COVID times, I deactivated my Facebook. I pushed up my hen chest and flaunted my anti-Facebook rhetoric. I told anyone who would listen that Facebook created unnatural relationships, that it prevented any real intimacy, that it addicted us to approval that should come from within. Facebook was our national dopamine and it prevented us from seeking other more individual dopamines. But as soon as COVID-19 began, I activated the Facebook dopamine vending machine and like like like like post post post share share share. I drank the dopamine of my generation and I was quenched.
Do you wish you had a different dopamine?
Do the most successful people in the world have the best dopamines? Do their chemical shots come from more noble places or does all dopamine come from our most base needs? Do the larger-than-life people get dopamine from learning French? Discovering artifacts? Doing hard work? Saving pieces of the world? Climbing up bubbling volcanos? And do we itty-bitty-little people get our dopamines from clicking BUY NOW and Facebook likes and schadenfreude?
Do you wish you had a different dopamine?
Do you wish your dopamine and came from reading Ulysses and Infinite Jest? But it really comes from watching Alias and marveling at Jennifer Garner’s perfectly symmetrical face? Do you wish your dopamine came from gathering food for food banks and not getting a good deal on shoes? Do you wish your dopamine was delivered to your bloodstream from painting the Sistine Chapel? Do you wish your dopamine came from making documentaries and curing cancer?
Do you wish you had a different dopamine?
Do you wish your children got dopamined from good grades and athleticism and not video games and Doritos? Do you wish your partner got dopamined from making you perfectly happy? Would you be a different person if your parents had different dopamines?
Is your dopamine your fate?
