There’s a concept in computer science known the Explore – Exploit algorithm. Explore, meaning to search for and discover novelty, and exploit – to take advantage of the familiar.
Both, of course, have their advantages. Exploring allows you to find new things, previously unknown to you. Of course, this discovery process inherently has its own uncertainty and cost. Exploiting allows you to tap into your database of experiences, along with an associated reward you exprienced (and hope to experience again).
In the book The Molecule of More, Lieberman discusses how dopamine, the reward chemical, doesn’t derive pleasure from the experience itself, but from the expectation of it. Dopamine is released when the Experienced Reward exceeds the Expected Reward, also known as the reward prediction error.
Dopaminergic Reward = Experienced Reward – Expected Reward
Therefor, the first time you discover something, is probably the only time your dopamine would spike – with diminishing returns thereafter. There is an inherent reward to novelty and discovery. This is the prerequisite; the magnitude of the dopamine release is based on the salience of the experience – how novel it is, and how impactful to your senses.
Of course, the discovery process is taxing. Sensibly, taking the risk of venturing into unknown territory is afforded when there is much to gain, and enough time and resources and margin for risk.
The modern world has every incentive to hi-jack this system. The promise for novelty has never been easier to deliver – confined in a boxed pixeled screen. Content is endless; dopamine, limited. So we spend hours of screen time with algorithms designed to deplete our inherent reward system. I read about a thought experiment somewhere of an alien viewing your life from a birds-eye (x-ray enabled, of course) view, incapable of viewing what’s on your screen; how confused must they be when they see a third of your waking life is spent staring at this thing?
Dopamine is necessary, without a doubt, to experience a component of the elusive happiness we seek. It makes us “look to the sky”, chase for more, even for the divine. The problem comes from it’s ability to distract and to truly experience that which is infront of us.
Evolution has rewarded the gene that seeks more; new partners, to seek new food, a new place to camp, etc. Charlatans and marketers make their living off of this molecule – the results rarely ever live upto the first feeling of anticipation.
Knowing this; dopamine can be thought of as a fuel for desire. Many of us desire many things, but the majority of us would settle for experiencing it vicariously through a TikTok, or deem the price you pay for it not worthwhile.
Dopamine gets its power when it is tied to action. Going back to the explore and exploit phenomenon, its sensible to explore when there is much to gain and enough resources; I conjecture this system operates at its peak during our youth. It’s no wonder teens seek to change the world or seek to embody the universe, when many in their middle age would settle for a beer and paid bills.
The definition of reward should first be established. With evolution in mind, survival and procreation, and it’s prerequisites, should be the ultimate rewards. Sex, hi-jacked by PornHub. Energy, hi-jacked by Frito-lays. Attention, hi-jacked by Instagram. So in what form should we attain these things to help release the reward hormones related to the here and now? Keep in mind, your experience, and the emotions that colour it, is all via the interface of your mind; your mind only has so much dopamine and oxytocin; no level of technological progression will increase that (sustainably). That’s another way of saying what we all already know; experience is subjective. Our minds establish a baseline of what to expect, and soon enough it all becomes expected; resetting the hedonic treadmill.
Lets then look at those core necessities and figure out what we really need (and what we shouldn’t seek to fulfill it/spend our dopamine on).
- Sex:
- We need a partner to procreate with; probably in a monogamous setting to help with child-rearing and emotional support
- What we don’t need is access to thousands of naked people, quickly accessible, quickly becoming societally acceptable, and to waste an orgasm to something almost non-existent to us. Constant seeking out of an imaginary partner or affair to chase the feeling of love or lust.
- Information
- We need information to guide us to make correct choices, especially information when it becomes necessary to think beyond second orders. To know something exists beyond what is directly accessible/visible to us.
- Unnecessary stream of information with no direct correlation to our life. The scope of this is too wide, but my favorite mention is sport stats (come at me sport fans).
- Food
- Healthy, nutritious foods that supply us with energy in a sustainable way.
- Fried food to hi-jack evolutionary propensity for fats, salt to replenish your electrolytes (Frito-Lays, combining the need for the previous 2), sweets for sugars, over-eating to compensate for our ancestral uncertainty of another meal. David Huberman mentioned, to understand how dopamine works – think about your next time eating chips. The dopamine isn’t being released to savour the experience of that one bite, it’s demanding for more.
- Wealth
- Salt first helped us preserve our food, and then our need to hoard. Wealth is about having access to enough to overcome a slow period of aquisition. It then became enough grains from a harvest to put you through winter. And eventually enough assets to weather a recession and not throw you on to the streets. Enough to give your child a headstart on life. The basic luxuries of life; a roof over your head in a decent neighbourhood.
- What it became; status signaling of what you hoard. Flashy things which typically only have merit due to their inaccessibility (think; shitty designer clothes). Debt to finance such flashy things, twice removing us from the thing we truly need. Taking risks that can get you out of the game (as Nassem Taleb call’s the uncle point – or an absorption barrier).
- Reason
- Of course, all of the above is tied to our innate desire to even continue life. Partly, we act in pursuit of pleasure and avoid pain. Partly for our human dependents. Partly for God or higher power. Partly to pursue our desire to build and create.
- What we don’t need is distractions; other people’s agendas, false pursuits, dead-end careers with artificial incentives.
- Shelter
- A safe, adequate place to live with amenities that promote a healthy lifestyle
- We don’t need mansions. We don’t need to travel constantly to seek out new settings. The 7R gene that makes one more prone to dopamine driven behavior, found more common in our migratory ancestors, didn’t survive due to it’s seeking of new places, but it’s likelihood to promote survival-seeking behavior in these new settlements.
Dopamine helps us achieve the first, but it doesn’t let us enjoy it when we have it. Once we attain it, we have to learn to be grateful for it; the embrace of a loved one will pump oxytocin, savouring a bite of chocolate, etc. Dopamine is a hormone predicated typically on what does not really exist (especially in the now).
Optimizing the reward system is then a balancing act of expectation management and basking in your wins. Your dopamine system vs. your opioid system.
I have always been criticized for having a pessimistic mindset, but the expectation errors have always been more rewarding from a dopamine standpoint – and it seems pessimists often also have a higher chance of attaining their desired goals as they carve plans rooted in reality.
To counterpoint to enjoying your wins is the tying of the end-goal to your reward system. If dopamine is ephemeral, your wins, and the feeling of reward, will also fade. Soon enough, you’ll think “was that it?”, and your mind will learn that it is let down with winning altogether. This happens often, I can say I am only now getting over this same slump, where the targets I had were nowhere near as rewarding as I thought.
The ideal way, then, would be tie the process to the dopamine system. By granularizing inputs, big enough to be challenging, small enough to be attainable, each small accomplishment that leads to your greater goal will be perceived as rewarding behavior. The checklist. The hour. The day. Accomplishing each step would eventually realize an end-result, or often may not. This is why systems are more important than goals; and understanding that which is outside our control, what lies in the future, shouldn’t be tied to your happiness (at least exclusively).
I haven’t written in a while, so there’s a few tangents I’d like to explore myself:
- The relationship between salience and memory; how a movie you’ve forgotten can have the same exhilarating effect
- How to reset the dopamine system, it’s relationship to mindfulness meditation, purposeful deprivation — “dopamine fasting”, etc.
- How to really tie the process with the reward system; building systems of intrinsic motivation