Not pleasant.

That’s the only thing that comes to my mind as I sit on my chair, wondering how best to characterize my experience with dopamine withdrawal. In this moment, I feel a deep spiritual connection with a smoker trying to give up smoking: My hands tingle to tap on my phone’ screen to wake it up to life, to swipe and see that there is no notification after all, to swipe on my laptop’s trackpad and check for imagined notifications, to open up social media and see what everyone is posting, to check on the latest news of the day, to post this article the second I finish writing it.

No. Not today.

And with this begins my foray into delayed gratification, a journey that will be long and arduous, made even more so by the constant stream of content put in front of our eyes by marketers, content creators, influencers, advertisers, among others. Most of this content isn’t organic, though, but rather algorithmically tailored to our desires. Not for nefarious purposes, of course, but simply for attention and engagement.

The problem is that we as humans simply haven’t evolved to consume so much information in a controlled form. Some might argue that there is a failure of law to keep up but I wonder what such a law could even be about. After all, adults are free to do whatever they please with their time and it’s not like there is a law on how much an adult can drink or smoke. There are laws against driving under influence but so are their laws against using mobile devices while driving.

None of what is happening is illegal. I am willing to bet most of this is benign. Humans just need to learn how to handle dopamine better and that will take us a few generations to learn.

These hits are everywhere, from the sound of a notification to the vibration you feel when you like a post on social media, from the saturation of app icons to the unread badge on your apps, and so on it goes. Every little thing gives us dopamine. Got a message? There’s your fix. Got a vibration? There it is. Every ding on your smart watch, every haptic on your phone, every click on your mouse, all of it gives you dopamine. Some of these actions are useful and can be valuable, such as typing on a keyboard which we tend to do mainly while we work, while others such as social media paradigms just waste our attention.

It’s kind of like living in a world where there are boxes of pizzas, burgers, and all kinds of fast food around you with the occasional lettuce leaf tossed away in some corner. The one you crave is the one that will most likely send you to an early grave. I am talking, of course, about the lettuce leaf.

Fixes of dopamine are exciting, thrilling, and fill you with so much short term bliss that feels no different from a high. Or so I have been told since I don’t know about the latter. On the other hand, delayed gratification provides slower releases of a calmer joy which tends to be a lot more sustainable but also, frankly speaking, a lot more boring. The first, of course, leads to addiction, anxiety, suppressed perseverance, greater irritability, and a thousand other such behaviors. The latter, on the other hand, makes one more content, gives higher satisfaction, and provides more bliss at the expense of some short term inconvenience.

In all honesty, I would not have bothered with this until I noticed myself behaving irrationally to get a quick dopamine fix from my phone. That’s the moment I realized I needed a break. I refuse to be a zombie, after all. So how does this break work then?

More exercise, more salads, more meditation, more reading, more productivity, more human contact and genuine relationships. Lesser doomscrolling, lesser online contact, lesser opinion-seeking, lesser news, lesser social media. No more giving out my opinions at the same instant I have them. More personal boundaries.

Sorry Sia, I don’t want cheap thrills any more.