Back in February, the music historian, Ted Gioia, wrote an essay on the state of American culture. He argued that many creative people want to create art (work that puts demands on people), but commercial pressures push them to create entertainment (which gives audiences what they want). As a result, for the past many years, entertainment (superhero movies) has been swallowing up art (literary novels and serious dramas).

But now, Gioia observed, even the entertainment business is in crisis. Hollywood studios are laying off employees. The number of new-scripted television series is down. That’s because entertainment is being swallowed up by distraction (TikTok, Instagram). People stay on their phones because it’s easier. Each object of distraction lasts only a few seconds and doesn’t require any cognitive work; the audience just keeps scrolling.

Our dopamine-driven brains drive us to choose cheap distraction over entertainment and art. A 15-second video causes a dopamine release in the brain, which creates a desire for more stimulus, which leads to the habit of more scrolling on your phone, which leads to an addiction to more stimulus. If distraction is swallowing entertainment in our culture, addiction is also swallowing distraction.

Gioia wrote, “The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies — because they will be the dealers.”

The phenomenon Gioia describes isn’t happening just to culture; it recurs across American life. We have access to wonderful things. But they require effort, so we settle for the junky things that provide the quick dopamine hits. We could all be eating a Mediterranean diet, but instead, it’s potato chips and cherry Coke. We could enjoy the richness of full awareness, but booze, weed and other drugs provide that quick reward. Think of all the things in American life that seem to offer that burst of stimulation but threaten to be addictive — gambling, porn, video games, checking email.

Even journalism has found ways to trigger dopamine for profit. We journalists go into this business to inform and provoke, but many outlets have found they can generate clicks by telling partisan viewers how right they are about everything. Minute after minute, they’re rubbing their audience’s pleasure centres, which feels like a somewhat older profession.

The result is we’re now in a culture in which we want worse things — the cheap hit over the long flourishing. You reach for immediate gratification, but it fails to satisfy. It just puts you on a hamster wheel of looking for the next mild stimulus, and pretty soon you’re in the land of addiction and junk food. You just keep scrolling. You just keep snacking. As the psychiatrist, Anna Lembke, writes in her book Dopamine Nation, “The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure.”

Big companies don’t care. They have become sensational at arousing and manipulating our cravings. Their goal is to keep us consuming. By offering constant temptation, they appeal straight to our dopamine circuits and threaten to circumvent our capacity for self-control. In their book, The Molecule of More, Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long write, “The sensation of wanting is not a choice you make. It is a reaction to the things you encounter.” The cookie, cat video or margarita is right there in front of you, whispering, ‘Consume me!’ You can’t resist.

Modern life makes us vulnerable to these seducers. People live overwhelmed lives, exhausted, anxious. Willpower is drained. Big Gulps and trashy TV at least provide a break. But afterward, there come the recriminations: why did I do that? So millions turn to therapists, dieticians, trainers, 12-step programmes, lifestyle experts and authors of books on habit formation in order to regain control over their desires.

The great volume of advice that flows from these people seems to fall into three buckets. First, there is the self-binding bucket. Create rules so you don’t have easy access to the things that tempt you: no phones in school. No carbs in your diet. No alcohol in the house. A woman I once knew got dumped by her boyfriend; of course, she came home with a big tub of ice cream. Halfway through the tub, she grew disgusted with herself and threw it in the trash. Ten minutes later, she was digging through the trash so she could eat some more. Finally, she poured dishwashing soap on the ice cream to help her resist temptation. Effective self-binding.

Then there is the here-and-now bucket. Don’t go searching for the next dopamine hit; enjoy the life that you already have around you. The neuroscientist, Kent Berridge, has shown that the wanting circuits in the brain are different from the liking circuits. So try to stimulate the liking circuits by amping up your enjoyment of the life you already have.

The third bucket is the higher-desires bucket. That’s based on the premise that you usually can’t control a desire through sheer willpower. But you can replace a low desire with a higher desire. Pregnant women give up alcohol because the appeal of a drink is dwarfed by their love for their coming child.

Dopamine can sometimes sound like the bad guy in this conversation, but all in all, it’s an awesome neurotransmitter. It’s what drives us to create, to learn, to build, to
improve. Dopamine pushes us to boldly go where no person has gone
before. America was practically built on dopamine. As William Casey King argues in his book, Ambition, a History, throughout most of European history, ambition was regarded as a terrible sin. But when the New World was discovered, people decided that ambition is mostly a virtue, driving us to explore.

The problem with our culture today is not too much desire but the miniaturisation of desire — settling for these small, short-term hits. Our culture used to be full of institutions that sought to arouse people’s higher desires — the love of god, the love of country, the love of learning, the love of being excellent at a craft. Sermons, teachers, mentors and the whole apparatus of moral formation were there to elongate people’s time horizons and arouse the highest desires.

The culture of consumerism, of secularism, of hedonism has undermined those institutions and that important work. The culture has changed. As Philip Rieff noticed
all the way back in his 1966 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”

We have schools to train our minds and gyms to train our bodies. We get less help training, elevating and regulating our desires. History suggests you can elevate people’s desires by giving them access to what is truly worth wanting. I imagine the cultural decline that Gioia described in his essay can be turned around if people can experience, at school or somewhere else, the emotional impact of a great film, a great novel, a great concert. It’s more desirable than a TikTok. Once you’ve tasted the fine wine, it’s harder to settle for Kool-Aid.

New York Times News Service