Dopamine Addiction and a Generation of Depression

115,000 people or 1 individual.

Without any context, who do you think is more likely to succeed?

115,000 is roughly the number of people employed by Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat. Every single one of these employees exists to make you spend more time staring at your phone to generate more advertising revenue.

Do you think you can win?

…Millions of years of evolution makes us want to connect with other humans. We are tribal and social animals.

Social media has drugified human connection by contributing to all the features that make something addictive. Access, Quantity, Potency and Novelty.

Access: Previously, you had to go find the people. Most of which would be average looking and average interesting. Now you swipe right and left.

Quantity: Eventually you run out cocaine, you never run out of TikTok videos.

Potency: Drugs become more potent when combined with other drugs. You can now combine beautiful images with sex, gaming, music and gambling. It’s easy to see how multiple addictive substances can combine to become more potent.

Novelty: The brain is hypersensitive to things that are new. Especially if it is something we’ve liked before but with a slight variation. Think about the prevalence of TikTok trends and the AI algorithm exploiting this functionality of your brain to serve you 47 videos in 15 minutes with the same sound, dance, theme or music.

Can you tell I hate TikTok yet?

Here’s the problem…

Pleasure and pain are processed by the same part of the brain, the reward pathway.

When we do something pleasurable, dopamine is released, reinforcing the behaviour. Regardless of our enjoyment, the brain doesn’t like this. It works very hard to maintain homeostasis — an equal balance of pain and pleasure.

When dopamine production fades we don’t just return to baseline.

We first travel an equal and opposite amount to the opposite side of the pain/pleasure scale.

Evolutionarily this makes sense, eating berries makes us feel good. After long enough without eating berries we start to feel hunger, a sensation triggered by low dopamine levels, forcing us to seek more food and survive.

Just like any drug, continued use down-regulates dopamine production and transmission. Resulting in smaller highs and larger crashes. This is why we need more potent drugs or more of a drug over time to get the same effect.

The easiest way to demonstrate this is alcohol tolerance.

Because our brains are also bombarded with so much societal dopamine, primarily through social media, we are forced to aggressively down-regulate dopamine production. This results in the chronic deficit state where we need to use social media just to feel normal.

So here is what you get for playing this game against 115,000 people:

• Chronically low dopamine levels, granting less pleasure from other rewarding activities

• A requirement to spend more time using the applications to feel “normal”

• Increased likelihood of depressive episodes

• Daily experience of withdrawal symptoms: anxiety, intrusive thoughts, euphoric recall, irritability and restlessness

…so, are you winning?