Can we escape the tyranny of dopamine? - Marie Dolléhttps://maried.substack.com/p/can-we-escape-the-tyranny-of-dopamine
Thoughts on the search for meaning and reclaiming our attention.
“We no longer live in the attention economy; we live in the addiction economy. The dopamine economy. The economy of instant gratification. Every day, it's a frantic race to capture what has become our most precious resource: our brain's time. We're bombarded with notifications, alerts, and endless content. Everything is designed to hook us, to pull us back again and again, for another hit of pleasure.”
“This is the great carousel of the 21st century. Scroll. Click. Like. Replay. A brief rush of euphoria, quickly replaced by another craving. A cycle of consumption that never truly satisfies. By the end of the day, all that's left is emptiness.”
“We are drowning in an endless stream of information, and paradoxically, it's no longer the abundance that's the issue—it's discernment.”
“And that’s the key difference: AI calculates, humans intuit. Where machines rely on algorithms, we notice the subtleties—the unspoken cues, gut feelings, and instinctive decisions that slip through the cracks of code. It's in these finer details that our true uniqueness lies.”
“We may be at a turning point—a moment where true wealth is no longer measured by how much attention we can capture or how much dopamine we can generate by the minute, but by our ability to appreciate, understand, and create meaning.”