Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.

When I went through medical school and residency in the 1990s, I was taught that people with depression, anxiety, attention deficit, cognitive distortions, sleep problems, and so on have brains that don’t work the way they’re supposed to, just like people with diabetes have a pancreas that doesn’t secrete enough insulin. My job, according to the th

Not that you’ll find that in any psychiatry textbook. It’s just something I’ve noticed after decades seeing patients: When people get better, everything holds together and has a rightness. Jacob had a rightness to him that day.

Economist Mark Aguiar and his colleagues wrote in an article aptly titled “Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men,” “Younger men, ages 21 to 30, exhibited a larger decline in work hours over the last fifteen years than older men or women. Since 2004, time-use data show that younger men distinctly shifted their leisure to video gaming an

Deifying the demonized is another form of categorical self-binding.

addicts are bored or frustrated problem-solvers who instinctively contrive Houdini-like situations from which to disentangle themselves when no other challenge happens to present itself. The drug becomes the reward when they succeed and the consolation prize when they fail.

In medicating ourselves to adapt to the world, what kind of world are we settling for? Under the guise of treating pain and mental illness, are we rendering large segments of the population biochemically indifferent to intolerable circumstance? Worse yet, have psychotropic medications become a means of social control, especially of the poor, unempl

As Immanuel Kant wrote in The Metaphysics of Morals, “When we realize that we are capable of this inner legislation, the (natural) man feels himself compelled to reverence for the moral man in his own person.” Binding ourselves is a way to be free.

Specially trained psychiatrists and psychologists are now administering hallucinogens and other potent psychotropic agents (psilocybin, ketamine, ecstasy) as mental health remedies. Administering limited doses (one to three) of psychedelics interspersed with multiple sessions of talk therapy over many weeks has become the modern equivalent of shama