Our world is filled with abundance not with scarcity anymore. Drugs, foods, gambling, gaming, texting, Instagram, Youtube, and many more. The smartphone is the modern-day needle delivering us the high for the new generation.
The more dopamine something releases, the more you want something, and the more addictive it is.
We have leaned overly lean to the pleasure side and if we don’t bring back the balance of pleasure and pain, the future is going to look a lot worse.
This book is about pleasure and pain. It helps us in understanding the relationship between pain and pleasure and helps us find a healthier balance between the two.
The Pursuit of Pleasure
Addiction is compulsive and continued behavior despite its self-harm. The biggest factor in getting addicted to something is its easy access.
We are living in a dopamine-driven economy.
Food is manipulated by adding artificial flavors to satisfy our modern appetite. Digital drugs that were not existing a few years ago are in the hands of every person. It doesn’t care about how you get to your desired goal.
The art of consumption has become a drug itself. The internet promotes compulsive overconsumption. Humans are social and contagious. They do what they see others doing.
Running From Pain
People are afraid to fail. They are afraid of being exposed as not knowing.
We are living in an age where even showing kindness and helping others is framed as a strategy for personal happiness.
In recent times, we have lost our ability to tolerate even minor forms of discomfort. We constantly seek to distract ourselves from the present moment, to be entertained.
Boredom forces us to face bigger problems in life and question that seems threatening. That’s why most people can’t stand boredom. But it is often the opportunity for discovery and invention.
We all are running from pain. Some use drugs to run away from it. Some binge-watch Netflix. Some engage in porn. We are doing almost anything to insulate ourselves from pain. But this is only making this worse.
With so much technological advancement and progress, why is the rate of unhappy and depressed people rising sky-high?
It’s because we’re working hard to avoid being miserable.
The Plesure-pain Balance
Dopamine is a brain chemical involved in reward processing. It plays a role in motivation to get a reward.
A genetically engineered mouse that was unable to release dopamine didn’t seek food and starved to death. But when food was directly put in their mouth, they chew it.
Pleasure and pain are co-related
Pleasure and pain are processed in overlapping brain regions. Pain and pleasure are self-regulatory. When the balance tips off towards one side, the self-regulating mechanism comes into action to bring it back to the same level. Like homeostasis, maintaining equilibrium in the brain.
Neuroadaptation
When you repeatedly expose yourself to a similar pleasure stimulus, the pleasure side gets weaker and the pain sides get stronger. Scientists call this neuroadaptation.
The reason why people relapse even after sustained periods of abstinence is the pain-pleasure balance. When balance is tilted to the pleasure side for a long time, we crave the pleasure just to feel normal. But if we wait long enough, the brain will readapt to the baseline.
The pursuit of pleasure for its own sake leads to the inability to enjoy the pleasure of any kind. Dopamine deficient state drives craving and seeking out reward.
Addiction can be measured by how hard one is willing to work to obtain that drug.
The balance is only a metaphor
Pleasure for one person might be a pain for the other. Sometimes pain and pleasure can occur simultaneously like when eating spicy food.
Prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasure reduces our capacity to tolerate pain and increases our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases.
Our brains evolved in the world of scarcity. If there was no pleasure, we wouldn’t eat, drink and reproduce. If there was no pain, we wouldn’t protect ourselves from injury and death.
But the modern world is filled with abundance. We have not evolved for this world. So how do we survive in this new ecosystem of a dopamine-driven economy?
Dopamine Fasting
You can reset your reward pathway. It can take anywhere between four weeks to a few months. The stronger your addiction, the more time you’ll need.
Stop running from the painful stimulus and instead tolerate them.
Space, Time, And Meaning
Waiting till we feel the compulsion to engage in behavior will nearly impossible to resist. Therefore we should create a barrier between ourselves and our drugs. We add friction between desire and action.
Self-binding is a necessity in the modern world.
- Physical self-binding: Creating physical and geographical barriers
- Chronological self-binding: Restricting to consumption only at certain times of day, month, or year. Limits our use.
- Categorical self-binding: It limits consumption by sorting dopamine into different categories.
Most of us use drugs to cure our addiction. But there is an alternative path that might work as well, embracing pain.
The Pursuit of Pain
Pressing on the pain side can often lead to pleasure. The dopamine that comes from pain is indirect and potentially more enduring.
Pain leads to pleasure through the body’s own homeostatic mechanisms. Intermittent exposure to pain makes us less vulnerable to pain and more able to feel pleasure over time.
Just like pain is the price way pay for pleasure, pleasure is the reward we get for pain.
Take, for example, exercise. It is immediately harmful to cells. It increases body temperature and deprives your body of oxygen and glucose. Yet, evidence whos that exercise is the best remedy for the modern world. While lack of exercise for a long time is deadly.
We have evolved to walk tens of kilometers in search of food. A key to well-being is to get off the couch and get moving.
Remember that you’ll feel pleasure after pain. Pursuing pain is counter-cultural in the modern world. But it is the way.
Pain to Treat Pain
“ Of two pains occurring together, not in the same part of the body, the stronger weakens the other.”
Electricity is applied to the brain to treat mental illness.
“What doesn’t kill makes a man stronger”-
Friedrich Nietzche
Use pain to treat pain. Anxiety to treat anxiety.
Just as we become tolerant to pleasure stimuli. With repeated exposure, the pain becomes normal. Too much pain can also run the risk of compulsive consumption. But the right amount can create joy in your life
Radical Honesty
Telling truths can improve our lives. We are wired to lie from the earliest age. No matter who you are, we all do it.
Deception is used as a weapon as well as a shield. Lies can help when you are competing for scarce resources.
Truth-telling engenders an abundance mindset. Honesty can be an antidote to a false self. When we are no longer working as a false self, we’re more open to ourselves and others.
Also, lying is never worth the consequences.
Lessons on Balance
We are all drawn to pleasurable forms of escape. We engage in addictive drugs and behaviors that will only add more problems to our life in the future. Instead of running away from life, you should find a way to immerse yourself fully in life.
Today’s actions that seem to have no impact in the present moment are in fact taking you in the right direction.
We have more leisure time than ever before. Leisure time ensures boredom.
In today’s dopamine-driven world, we have been intolerant to delayed gratification. We want everything here and now. The easy-access dopamine doesn’t require you to get off the couch.
We all are primed for seeking immediate gratification. And it is the sure-shot way to move towards destruction.
