What is missing from life? The dopamine problem.

 I saw franc moody in the Applo, Hammersmith. His biggest hit was Dopmaine. It felt so profound as we were all there getting flooded by the stuff the lyrics were about. It was our fuel. It felt like this is what life was all about. And then after, normal life, and I was stratching for that amount of dopamine again. It made me think...

What is missing. There is always something missing!!

I used to think I was a slave to the system. I thought I was a slave to consumerism. I thought I was a slave to money. A slave to the workplace, bills, to landlords, to the economic machine. Then I realised I was actually a slave to vices, to beer, drugs, music, women, porn, looking at women, desiring women, needing women. Even poetry and art and film and music, I've felt a slave to them all. But now I realise I am just slave to dopamine. Even if I transcend the dopamine, it still drives me. Even if I shed all sense of being and all notions of what I am and who people are and what the world is, there is still a desire to become something, to own something, to be in a particular position. There is still a desire to attract. Dopamine still runs the game. Even if I put aside the childish notions of wanting to be famous, to be a rock star, to be an actor or poet or writer or anything, because I know that even under their veils of sophistication, the clothing they wear to make themselves seem more meaningful and super-ego, they are still dopamine goals. And if I remove all sense of dopamine, to have no desire or fulfilment, then life starts to seem very hollow. Even eating has no real joy in it without the dopamine. Survival has no satisfaction. I already know there is no meaning to any of this life we're living, we create meaning often with a story, a clickbait story that offers lots of dopamine. Adam and eve gave us sin but you can be the hero of your own story and live in heaven – dopamine!! It's all dopamine, wrapped up in packages that hide it.

I am enslaved by dopamine. I am poisoned by it. Yet I need it. It is like being poisoned by my own dinner. Without it, I will die. With it, I turn older and uglier and unhappier and experience more suffering and become toxic. Is there even any point in asking if there is any escape from it. Because I don't think there is. There is either a life drip fed by dopamine enough to survive a toxic free yet meaningless and flavourless life. Or there is the other life, where you poison yourself into a spiral of desire and satisfaction and more desire and more satisfaction until you reach an early grave.

I need to be starved of dopamine by force. I have no power over it. Even when I exercise to get fit and healthy, and change my diet from cheese burgers and pizzas to salads and beans and healthy soups, it is still all for the rewards of dopamine. It kind of puts the question onto the meaning and purpose of life. Are we even meant to be happy? The Stoics were probably right. Being happy is not the goal. Living with virtue is. In a way, you can cheat code yourself but giving yourself dopamine from your sense of self righteousness in choosing a path that does not reward it. - and then you still get it anyway, because of its inescapable nature that even the promise of reward is a reward, and you will still get the dopamine. So if you get it even if you avoid it, and it is your reward no matter what, then why not choose the dopamine not wrapped in all that virtuous looking covering? What difference does it make that you drank tea instead of wine. Or that you worked out instead of masturbated? The answer might be “to make you healthy” but why be healthy? “Because it feels good.” Well that's dopamine talking. To the brain, the result is the same, isn't it?