PSA:
Olympia folks! I will be signing books at Barnes and Noble on April 18th from noon-4. Say hi ✨👋
This is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor.
It’s best to start at the beginning:
The Work of Art Part 1: A Brief Intro to Capitalism for Artists (Who Want to Kill Themselves)
The Work of Art Part 6: The Artist and Instagram, a Love Story
I consider myself an adult child, which means I am part of a twelve-step recovery program for the Adult Children of Alcoholics. You know how, when your friend joins AA, and then they can’t stop talking about it, and it’s almost like a cult has abducted them? I’m that friend with ACA, so bear with me #sorrynotsorry. Being an adult child means that I can fall prey to addictive tendencies—codependence being one, Instagram being another. I didn’t quite understand that I was addicted to Instagram or social media (and the compulsions it incited, like compulsive spending) for a long time. I knew that there was something very unhealthy in my dynamic with Instagram, but it took reading Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke, a book my partner recommended, and listening to this interview with Andrew Huberman and Anna Lembke for me to actually categorize that relationship as an addiction.
Let’s consider what addiction is. To oversimplify it, your brain is filled with neurons, and they communicate through electric signals and neurotransmitters. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. Dopamine is connected to how we process rewards, which, if you think about our caveman selves, was very important for survival. Hunting was dangerous. It could get you killed. So you needed motivation to get up off the cave floor and go hunt. This is why dopamine is perhaps more powerful when it comes to the motivation for a reward rather than the reward itself. Dopamine powers the want.
Contrary to popular belief, getting high doesn’t actually produce dopamine; it triggers it. You generate the high yourself. Substances that are more addictive trigger the release of more dopamine, which is what makes them more addictive.
Another important thing to know about our brains is that pleasure and pain coexist. Read any Greek poet or any play throughout the centuries, and you’ll see lyrical illusions to this scientific fact. Thousands of lines of poetry can be summed up in one sentence: “I want you so bad it hurts.”
Dr. Lembke writes:
”Imagine our brains contain a balance—a scale with a fulcrum in the center. When nothing is on the balance, it’s level with the ground. When we experience pleasure, dopamine is released in our reward pathway, and the balance tips to the side of pleasure. The more our balance tips, and the faster it tips, the more pleasure we feel.
But here’s the important thing about the balance: It wants to remain level, that is, in equilibrium. It does not want to be tipped for very long to one side or another. Hence, every time the balance tips toward pleasure, powerful self-regulating mechanisms kick into action to bring it level again. These self-regulating mechanisms do not require conscious thought or an act of will. They just happen, like a reflex…We’ve all experienced craving in the aftermath of pleasure. Whether it’s reaching for a second potato chip or clicking the link for another round of video games, it’s natural to want to re-create those good feelings or try not to let them fade away. The simple solution is to keep eating, or playing, or watching, or reading. But there’s a problem with that. With repeated exposure to the same or similar pleasure stimulus, the initial deviation to the side of pleasure gets weaker and shorter and the after-response to the side of pain gets stronger and longer, a process scientists call neuroadaptation. That is, with repetition, our gremlins get bigger, faster, and more numerous, and we need more of our drug of choice to get the same effect.”
It is human nature to seek pleasure, but we are biologically programmed to seek balance. Our drive for constant and never-ending pleasure, then, is also a drive towards pain, the very thing we’re trying to avoid.
So let me put all of this together with a little hunting analogy!
Your little caveman ancestor went hunting one day and brought down a mamoth with her buddies. They ate a lot of really good food and felt REALLY REALLY GOOD. Her brain learned that if she goes hunting, she gets food, and therefor experiences pleasure. But all that really good food, resulted in her getting hungry again and she started to feel pain. So she needed more food and needed to go hunting again. The dopamine gets triggered not when she actually kills the mammoth, but when she grabs her spear. It doesn’t wait for the meat that’s been roasting on the fire, it’s what gets her out the cave door and out on the hunt. It’s the drive. It’s the wanting.
The prevailing image in popular culture is that addicts are all hedons, running around like Greek gods seeking wine-soaked orgies. “Addict” evokes imagery of gluttony, excess, and grotesque consumption. And given the science, this makes sense. After you get hooked on the dopamine release triggered by a good thing, you need more and more of it to get the same high. But I don’t think that what we’re seeking when we go to our substances of choice is an uncontrollable urge for pleasure.
Instead, I think we’re desperate to avoid pain. And pain and pleasure live together. They’re an ouroboros, each ending where the other begins.
Anna Lembke says in her interview with Andrew Huberman:
“When I talk to people about their addiction, sometimes their initial foray into using a drug is to get pleasure, but very often it’s a way to escape their suffering…” She goes on to say in her book, “Beyond extreme examples of running from pain, we’ve lost the ability to tolerate even minor forms of discomfort. We’re constantly seeking to distract ourselves from the present moment, to be entertained. As Aldous Huxley said in Brave New World Revisited, ‘the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant . . . failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’”
But why would we be trying to distract ourselves from the present moment? The present moment for most people in the developed world is pretty great. We have enough to eat, we have a roof over our heads, and we have generally enough disposable income that we can go to dinner with a friend occasionally. In America, you can drink water straight from a faucet pretty much everywhere (except Detroit or Native American Reservations), and sure, our health care system is cost-prohibitive and broken, but a hospital is not allowed to turn you away. I am not trying to dismiss the massive inequality rampant in our country, only to point out that, relative to our ancestors, we live a life of relative comfort. So why are we all behaving as if we’re in extreme suffering?
I think it’s because we’re not distracted with the work of survival, and we can now turn our attention to our deeper, more existential wounds. Or rather, run headlong in the other direction.
Life Is Maintenance
(I know this song is about AIDS, but it might as well be about all of us who are existentially lonely and use drugs - social media, weed, alcohol, shopping, porn - to escape the prison of our aloneness)
In Sarah Polley’s film Take This Waltz, the main character, Margo, leaves her husband, who is portrayed as a really good guy. They’ve been together for a decade or so, but she’s young! She’s curious! And her husband is old news. Their life is just life. There’s no real drama or problems, but it doesn’t have any mystery. So when she runs into a charming, handsome bike messenger, she develops a fascination with him, then a longing, and finally a full-blown affair. She leaves her husband for the new guy, and then a year later, you see in a montage that her new life mirrors her previous one. They’re not having as much sex, and they both seem a little bored. Gone are the sexy days of sneaking around! Life has a way of sneaking its way back in. Then, Margo gets a call saying that her ex-sister in-law, Geraldine, a recovering alcoholic, has gone on a bender, and her ex-niece has asked for her. When Margo returns to her old house, her old family, Geraldine, in her drunk wisdom, says, “In the big picture, life just has a gap, it just does. You don’t go crazy trying to fill it.”
Last year, I traveled with my partner and friends Henry and Kaisa and their two-year-old daughter to Portugal. I was really struggling with work and the fact that we’re expected to have these jobs that take up our whole lives! We were sitting around drinking wine, and I complained that in the time we have left after work, we must do our laundry, go grocery shopping, or get the oil changed. Was this life? Had I been duped? Where was the glorious adventure I was promised?
These friends of mine are humans and deal with the facts of being a human in the world: sorrow, grief, love, frustration, but they are, on the whole, pretty content people, and I admire that about them. So I asked my friend Henry how he handled having a job and the daily duties of being a husband and a father. How did he find meaning? How did he manage to live?
He said that he’d been watching the new Mr. and Mrs. Smith show, and there was a line that struck him.
“Life is maintenance,” he said.
This hit me like a punch to the gut. I want life to be a thrill! A tremendous explosion of light. But in the end, Henry is right: a lot of it is maintenance. To survive, we must maintain our health by eating well and cooking; we must move our bodies so they don’t fail us in old age; we must keep our friendships so we remain in community; and we must maintain our jobs so we can navigate our capitalist society. It’s a lot of fucking maintenance.
Anna Lembke says in her book:
“My patient Sophie, a Stanford undergraduate from South Korea, came in seeking help for depression and anxiety. Among the many things we talked about, she told me she spends most of her waking hours plugged into some kind of device: Instagramming, YouTubing, listening to podcasts and playlists.
In session with her I suggested she try walking to class without listening to anything and just letting her own thoughts bubble to the surface.
She looked at me both incredulous and afraid.
“Why would I do that?” she asked, openmouthed.
“Well,” I ventured, “it’s a way of becoming familiar with yourself. Of letting your experience unfold without trying to control it or run away from it. All that distracting yourself with devices may be contributing to your depression and anxiety. It’s pretty exhausting avoiding yourself all the time. I wonder if experiencing yourself in a different way might give you access to new thoughts and feelings, and help you feel more connected to yourself, to others, and to the world.”
She thought about that for a moment. “But it’s so boring,” she said.
“Yes, that’s true,” I said. “Boredom is not just boring. It can also be terrifying. It forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose. But boredom is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we’re endlessly reacting to stimuli around us, rather than allowing ourselves to be within our lived experience.”
Addicted to Fear
In ACA, there’s a list of traits the adult child has acquired because of their history. Number 8 is that we’ve become addicted to excitement. Initially, it said “We’ve become addicted to fear,” but the words have since been changed. This always makes me think about my dad and how I think he, too, was addicted to fear.
How many times have you heard someone say that a person is unhoused because they are lazy? Probably a lot. But anyone who thinks our houseless population is lazy is very misinformed. My dad probably worked harder during the twenty years he spent houseless than he ever did in his cubicle in the Denver Tech Center. But it was a different kind of work. He was working to feed himself. For survival. He had to walk miles in all types of weather for food, a bed, a computer, and his mail. Simple things like getting a driver’s license were a months long endeavor. You can’t get a driver’s license without an address. It might have changed, but one of the few places to get a mailing address if you were houseless in Denver was the St. Francis Center, and you had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get your mail there and keep getting it.
Daily tasks that, for you and me, are an annoyance, were a herculean effort for him. In a weird way, I think that was what he wanted. I think it was comforting for him. He had to work so hard for everything you and I take for granted that he had no time to worry about anything else. No time to feel empty or to consider the existential questions that plague me: what if I love the wrong person, what if I will never be forgiven, what happens when I die here, who’ll be my role model after my role model is gone? There was no time! There was only the next thing. He experienced fear-induced presence. A kind of avoidant enlightenment. An addiction to fear (and addictions to other things). Which is just another way of saying: terror of emptiness. Because it was when he felt empty that my father often used. It’s when I feel empty that I use, too. Scrolling the internet in mindless fear and insecurity is not all that different in essence from what he did. It just doesn’t hurt other people so much.
In Dopamine Nation, Lembke states, “Thirty-four percent of Americans said they felt pain ‘often’ or ‘very often…The question is: Why, in a time of unprecedented wealth, freedom, technological progress, and medical advancement, do we appear to be unhappier and in more pain than ever? The reason we’re all so miserable may be because we’re working so hard to avoid being miserable.”
What is it about the present moment that’s so miserable? And why do we fight it so much?
Don’t let me be lonely!
I know I’ve already talked about Erich Fromm before, but honestly, his book The Art of Loving so perfectly describes everything I’ve felt in my life that I can’t stop evangelizing him. In his book, he argues that we’re all so miserable because we’re alone.
We are distraught because we’re existentially separate and there’s nothing we can do to bridge the gap.
We’re alone because I have a body and you have a body, and there is no way for me to belong to your body or you to mine. We can get close, but we will never inhabit each other’s souls.
Fromm states:
“The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness…The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers. Hence, to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp the world—things and people—actively; it means that the world can invade me without my ability to react. Thus, separateness is the source of intense anxiety.”
Fromm believes that we seek union in either a passive or an active way: through masochism or sadism. Fromm writes, “The masochistic person escapes from the unbearable feeling of isolation and separateness by making himself part and parcel of another person who directs him, guides him, protects him; who is his life and his oxygen, as it were. I am nothing, except inasmuch as I am part of him.” I’d argue that the vast majority of us fall into the masochism camp, and we attempt to seek union through sex, drugs, capitalism, or the desire to fit into the dominant culture.
While writing this, I am on a plane. I like to watch action movies on planes because I don’t want to do a disservice to a cinematographer or the director by watching a highly crafted film. Marvel movies are inelegant and made to make money, so it’s okay if I am only half paying attention. I randomly decided to watch Thunderbolts because I think Florence Pugh is a goddess and her character is fun.
I kid you not, these are the opening lines of the film:
There’s something wrong with me.
An emptiness.
I thought it started when my sister died, but now it feels like something bigger.
Just a void.
Or maybe I’m just bored.
They send me a job. I clock in, clock out…
I thought throwing myself into work was the answer.
But I’m not focused and I’m not happy, and I don’t have purpose.
And without purpose, I’m just drifting like a river.
Say what you want about Marvel movies, but they are both a product and a symptom of our time. They speak to the anxiety we feel and cater to our changing brains. The scenes cut every ninety seconds because that’s how long we can focus. This movie is creating the malaise that Pugh’s character complains about. We need constant change and stimulation. We need action and distraction; otherwise, we succumb to boredom or the void. And the void is suffering.
We seek to ease our suffering through pleasure, which only increases our pain and drives us to despair.
Lembke attests to this. She writes,
“Global deaths from addiction have risen in all age groups between 1990 and 2017, with more than half the deaths occurring in people younger than fifty years of age. The poor and undereducated, especially those living in rich nations, are most susceptible to the problem of compulsive overconsumption. They have easy access to high-reward, high-potency, high-novelty drugs at the same time that they lack access to meaningful work, safe housing, quality education, affordable health care, and race and class equality before the law. This creates a dangerous nexus of addiction risk. Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have shown that middle-aged white Americans without a college degree are dying younger than their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. The top three leading causes of death in this group are drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease, and suicides. Case and Deaton have aptly called this phenomenon ‘deaths of despair.’”
Social media exacerbates our despair. Humans have always sought belonging in order to survive. When we’re born, we’re not fully cooked. The first three months of an infant’s life are often described as the “fourth trimester.” We deeply depend on our community for survival. Some of our first smiles are really just attempts to please and appease. Love me and feed me, don’t leave me! But historically, our drive for belonging was mitigated to the realm of the material. We had to physically enter society to gauge whether or not we belonged to it. Now we can measure our sense of belonging in likes and follows without leaving our house.
Jaron Lanier, author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts states,
“When we are afraid that we might not be considered cool, attractive, or high-status, we don’t feel good. That fear is a profound emotion. It hurts. Everybody suffers from social anxiety from time to time, and every child has encountered a bully who used social anxiety as a weapon of torture, probably because behaving like a bully lessened the chances that the bully might become a target. That’s why people, even those who would normally be decent, tend to pile on to a victim of social anxiety torture. They’re so afraid of the very real pain that social anxiety brings that they can lose sight of their better natures for a moment.”
Social media is structurally designed to play with this pain. Like, this was done on purpose. It’s not a scam or a conspiracy theory. Highly paid people, like ex-presidents of Facebook, have admitted to building a system that profits off your emotions.
And now, thousands of very smart, very capable people from all over the world are paid a lot of money to learn precisely how to measure your responses to certain stimuli, and ensure that you’re delivered a curated set of inputs designed to trigger the desired response. And the desired response is something that makes Meta, TikTok, or Google money. This could be something more benign, like buying a Procter and Gamble product, or it could be more insidious, like supporting a specific politician. And, more often than not, the stimuli that create the best response are things that trigger a negative emotion.
Lanier explains:
“The core process that allows social media to make money and that also does the damage to society is behavior modification. …If someone gets a reward—whether it’s positive social regard or a piece of candy—whenever they do a particular thing, then they’ll tend to do more of that thing. When people get a flattering response in exchange for posting something on social media, they get in the habit of posting more. That sounds innocent enough, but it can be the first stage of an addiction that becomes a problem both for individuals and society… It’s not that positive and negative feedback work, but that somewhat random or unpredictable feedback can be more engaging than perfect feedback. If you get a piece of candy immediately every time you say please as a child, you’ll probably start saying please more often. But suppose once in a while the candy doesn’t come. You might guess that you’d start saying please less often. After all, it’s not generating the reward as reliably as it used to. But sometimes the opposite thing happens. It’s as if your brain, a born pattern finder, can’t resist the challenge. ‘There must be some additional trick to it,’ murmurs your obsessive brain. You keep on pleasing, hoping that a deeper pattern will reveal itself, even though there’s nothing but bottomless randomness.”
Similarly, Lembke says that gamblers have increased levels of dopamine when they lose. “My patients with gambling addiction have told me that while playing, a part of them wants to lose. The more they lose, the stronger the urge to continue gambling, and the stronger the rush when they win—a phenomenon described as ‘loss chasing.’ I suspect something similar is going on with social media apps, where the response of others is so capricious and unpredictable that the uncertainty of getting a ‘like’ or some equivalent is as reinforcing as the ‘like’ itself.”
Social media plays on our natural response: uncertainty. And the likelihood that we might lose, lose money, lose friends, lose social status, keeps us playing the game. And it’s not just the uncertainty and the randomness, it’s also fear, sadness, rage.
Lanier says:
“Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than its own enhancement. Yet, the result is an unnatural global amplification of the ‘easy’ emotions, which happen to be the negative ones. If it turns out that certain kinds of posts make you sad, and an algorithm is trying to make you sad, then there will be more such posts. No one will necessarily ever know why those particular posts had an effect on you, and you will probably not even notice that a particular post made you a little sad, or that you were being manipulated. The effect is subtle, but cumulative. While scientists sometimes dive in to try to glean insights, for the most part the process takes place in darkness, running on automatic; it’s a new kind of sinister shadow cosmos.”
But we’re hooked! We can’t stop. I said this last week but it bears repeating: the average young person will spend 25 years of their life on screens. In the words of Thom Yorke, we’re not living, we’re just wasting time.
So, what’s happening is doubly dark.
Social media takes away our time and enjoyment of our time, not only while using it, but also in our periods of withdrawal.
TL:DR:
When we’re scrolling through social media, we are manipulated into seeing posts that negatively impact us.
The uncertainty and randomness of rewards keep us coming back. “Maybe this time my post will acquire x number of likes!” Or, “Maybe this time I will see something that makes me laugh!”
The uncertainty and randomness of rewards trigger both pleasure and pain.
Each time we reach for our phone to check social media, we get a hit of dopamine. But the more we use social media, the higher our dopamine baseline rises, meaning we need to use more to get the same high.
When we’re not using social media, we’re in withdrawal, meaning we’re experiencing pain. This makes us anxious and discontent. Which then triggers us to relieve that pain by seeking pleasure, and we return to the apps.
White, cis, male, billionaire bros with hair implants actively invest in keeping us trapped in this cycle.
If owning everyone’s attention by making the world terrifying (images of planes crashing, people with different political opinions destroying our earth, or potentially making it unsafe to be “us,” is what earns the most money, then that is what will happen, even if it means amplifying bad actors.
If we want something different to happen, then the way money is earned has to change.
