Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

An interesting book, mainly about addiction.

I was a little disappointed with this, because I wanted it to be more about “casual” dopamine, like overeating and spending too much time on our phones.

But it goes hard into scary addictions. It starts with (and continually revisits) a guy with a very scary sexual addiction. He created a electric genital stimulation machine and allows other people to control it over the internet. He gets addicted to this, then breaks the addiction, destroys the machine, and rebuilds it, multiple times.

Clearly, that’s not mainstream.

This is set against the author’s own addiction to cheesy romance novels, which is a little more down to Earth.

It’s never boring, but there’s just not much advice here on breaking any addictions. She doesn’t even go too deep into the science behind it all. She does talk about the balance of pleasure and pain, and how we need both (there’s a guy who gets addicted to the pain and shock of cold showers, to get a dopamine rush).

But most of the book is about actual addictions – drugs, alcohol, etc. There’s not a lot that’s new here, and it would have been way more interesting to discussion mainstream distractions that everyone uses. The hardcore stuff just wasn’t very relatable.