Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

How do we survive and thrive in this new ecosystem? How do we raise our children? What new ways of thinking and acting will be required of us as denizens of the twenty-first century?

By protecting our children from adversity, have we made them deathly afraid of it? By bolstering their self-esteem with false praise and a lack of real-world consequences, have we made them less tolerant, more entitled, and ignorant of their own character defects? By giving in to their every desire, have we encouraged a new age of hedonism?

The paradigm shift around pain has translated into massive prescribing of feel-good pills. Today, more than one in four American adults—and more than one in twenty American children—takes a psychiatric drug on a daily basis. The use of antidepressants like Paxil, Prozac, and Celexa is rising in countries all over the world, with the United States t

“temporal horizons”

The question is, why do so many of us living in rich nations with abundant material resources nonetheless operate in our daily lives with a scarcity mindset? As we have seen, having too much material wealth can be as bad as having too little. Dopamine overload impairs our ability to delay gratification.

O Stands for Objectives

Seventy percent of world global deaths are attributable to modifiable behavioral risk factors like smoking, physical inactivity, and diet.

infinite appetite for distractions.” Along similar lines, Neil Postman, the author of the 1980s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, wrote, “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities, and commercials

Is it any wonder that poverty is a risk factor for addiction, especially in a world of easy access to cheap dopamine?