Modern day culture is pushing all of us—especially those swallowed deep within its massive current—towards dopamine, dopamine, dopamine with increasing intensity with each passing day.
Soak up the diagram below which illustrates these modern day currents:
The danger with surrendering to this current is that it pushes us further and further into a never ending cycle of short-term pleasure seeking where we do a dopamine releasing task, which causes the neurochemical dopamine to be released, which makes us feel good, which makes us want to repeat the stimulus, which makes us do the domaine releasing task again, and so forth until it’s repeated so much it turns into a habit and eventually—an addiction.
This addiction, like all addictions, becomes increasingly hard to satisfy which leads us further and further downstream towards increasingly intense dopamine releasing sources (e.g. doom-scrolling, gambling, nsfw content, etc). And this, of course, leads to derailed lives.
Rheotaxis is the general tendency of an organism—like a fish—to orient themselves and swim against the flow, rather than with it. And the more I look at the above diagram, the more I think they’re onto something. There are many theories on why fish do this, but the one I like to believe is that they know—be it instinctually or experientially—that upstream is where better living is found.
Maybe because it leads to the development of strength; maybe because it increases their mental acuity/awareness; maybe because it’s where the more fulfilling rewards are found…
…And maybe it’s the same for us humans and we should consider reorienting, too.