On Dopamine Nation

My therapist lent me this after I’d told her about some of what I’m dealing with — mostly the way certain tasks feel so unpleasant that I just don’t do them. Before she handed it over, I’d been telling her about Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and I think the two pair well.

The sense here is that so many of us — all of us? — spend our lives chasing the feeling of feeling good, and that this is actually destructive. Lembke offers the image of a balance: press down on the “pleasure” side and the pressure on the “pain” side rises to compensate, until our homeostasis tips toward a high pleasure that engulfs us, so that the moment the stimulation is gone we feel terrible. A lot of the book is about addiction, which I find fascinating. It should be obvious that pleasure and addiction loop together, and yet there’s something uncannily strange about it — as if the pleasure couldn’t be “true” pleasure given how addictive it is, except that it is.

Lembke offers a handful of strategies for balancing one’s life better, and the discussions of deliberately increasing pain (which produces a rebound of heightened pleasure) and of leaning into accepting communities (to soften shame) really resonated with me. None of this is about the book exactly, but as I wrote that last sentence I had the impression of a powerful, symbiotic relationship between pleasure and pain, and I thought of Freud, who spent the last two decades of his practice trying to work out why we do painful things at all if the Pleasure Principle demands we act to increase pleasure and reduce pain. There’s something to be said for the death drive here, rather than Eros. I have more questions about pain and pleasure now than when I started, and I don’t think I’d have come to them so closely without this book.