Something Else Instead

Dopamine, desire, the attention economy, and why we ask for the wrong thing.

I like to play video games. Specifically, building games or management games with a heavy design element, that let me create an environment for my little game friends. I’ve noticed I often have the urge to get rid of the game quests and use creative mode or cheat codes so i can just build to my heart’s content. The interesting thing is, when I do that, it’s astounding how fast I get bored.

For a while I assumed this was a me problem: some failure to enjoy the thing I thought I wanted. But I’ve come to realize that I mainly enjoyed the wanting itself. The obstacles were producing my enjoyment, because what I enjoyed was the striving, the reaching itself.

Something about risk opens a door inside us. If I play my game with a cheat code, I don’t feel the earned-ness of the payoff. It feels empty somehow. Unsatisfying. And I think it’s because the safe bet has no opening, no extension of myself into the possibility of no. Risk creates an opening for the payoff to land somewhere deeper within me, a new space that wasn’t there before. The person the payoff is happening to is a different person.

Wanting, it turns out, is almost entirely unrelated to having. The things that make us happy are hard to predict, and often, I think, it’s not even the having of them that makes us happy. Desire is there to motivate us to act, to get us to seek out what we want or need. Fear of risk is a competing urge, one that tells us to hesitate before we risk losing it all. At the same time, fear is what gives striving its charge. Overcoming fear is the reason striving feels so alive. But if the fear overcomes the desire, survival is pretty much all we get. And if we want more than that, how can we amplify our want enough to tip the scales? I think the world might not be helping the process.

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There’s a neuroscientist named Kent Berridge who spent a lot of years on what seems like a simple question: are wanting and liking the same thing? Answer: Nope. They’re handled by completely different systems in the brain. Dopamine - which everyone thinks of as the pleasure chemical - is almost entirely about wanting. It’s the signal that says go get that. The actual experience of enjoyment, the liking part, runs on a different system entirely. Wanting and liking don't consult each other. And sometimes they lead us somewhere very far from what we actually need.

There’s another layer, too, when what we want is something that’s hard to ask for, or hard to believe we can actually have. Now the seeking of what is wanted is a risk. The other person might say no. They might say yes and give us the wrong thing, putting us in the deeply uncomfortable position of having to ask again, exponentially more risky than the first time. So we do what we do when things are too scary, we avoid the risk of identifying the need directly. We ask for something else instead.

I talk to my clients a lot about potato chips and broccoli. When your body needs nutrients, you feel a hunger that is slightly different in quality from when your body simply needs energy. It feels deeper and more specific. But what do we do when the thing our body is asking for is not available? We eat something else. Consider if you deeply needed, say, vitamin K. You need broccoli. But maybe you’re at a place that doesn’t have any broccoli, but they have a vending machine. You buy some potato chips. Eat one. What happens next?

You want more chips. They’re specifically designed, on purpose, to make you want more chips. It’s in the marketing copy! (Or it was, is “bet you can’t eat just one” still the Lays slogan?) And more fundamentally, it’s in the food itself. Hyperpalatable foods are created not to satisfy hunger, but to make you want more food.

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I see this pattern, in myself, and in other people, where we ask for something that is sort of adjacent to what we actually need, and then if we get it, we feel dissatisfied. Many of us then attribute that dissatisfaction to the person providing it, like well you must have done it wrong, that’s why I don’t feel the way I want to feel. Maybe I needed a different brand of potato chips.

Potato chips actually do have a small amount of vitamin K. They’re not devoid of it entirely. There’s just enough in there leftover from the original hero potato, container of all nutrients, to make a chip not a total nutritional zero. I was reading a post this morning by a new-to-me writer I’ve been really enjoying lately, Tamara. She said, “We tell people to stop seeking attention as if attention were not a basic social nutrient.” What do we do if we deeply need attention, but none is apparently available? Maybe our partner is distracted. Maybe we have been told a million times in a million ways that needing attention is wrong. Maybe — likely — both. So we ask for something else instead.

Here is where I want you to think about your phone.

Every major social platform was designed by people who understood the wanting/liking split very well, and built accordingly. The scroll is infinite not because infinite content is satisfying, but because stopping feels bad. Notifications are timed to catch you in a low-wanting moment and spike it back up. The little red number on the app icon is not there to give you information. It’s to make you want to look.

What you get when you look is not, typically, connection. It might have trace amounts — a friend’s photo, a comment that makes you feel seen for a moment — just enough vitamin K to make it not a total zero. But the platform is not trying to give you connection. It is trying to keep you on the platform. These are not the same goal, and in fact they are often in direct conflict.

This is the attention economy: a vending machine built at the scale of civilization, stocked with things that are shaped like connection and taste like connection, but engineered not to satisfy the hunger for it. Many of us spend hours a day at that machine, feeling vaguely hollow, wondering what’s wrong with us.

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We often feel the same way in relationships. Hungry, starving for attention and care, longing for the person sitting right next to us (maybe also on their phone). But in love, and in food, society condemns the starving in similar ways. Fat people are fat because they’re morally bankrupt, because they have no willpower, because they’re just too needy. Partners longing for more attention are co-dependent, high-maintenance, once again too needy. If you want love, if you want health, kill that disgusting void inside yourself that is always demanding more, more, more. So instead of saying “could we hang out and do nothing and you just focus on me? I really need that,” we say:

Could you just do the dishes for once?

Why don’t you ever initiate sex?

Everything else is more important than me.

This last one is closest to the actual need, attention, so you’ll notice it’s also the most defended. It’s not even a question.

So we ask, or criticize, and then maybe the other person does do the dishes, or tries to initiate sex, or plan a date night, and then what happens? We don’t feel better. We felt that tiny hit of vitamin K, so much less than what we needed, and on top of that tiny sense of almost-it is a huge wave of not-good-enough.

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How do we then understand this moment? I did my part, I asked for the thing, then it didn’t feel good, so it must be you didn’t really want to do it. Or you only did it because I asked. Or, worst of all, my need intensifies, and I amp up my request or my criticism, and then the message comes back and hits me all the way down to that void inside me I’m always trying to ignore. You’re so demanding. No one can satisfy you. Why should I even give you another chip? They never please you anyway.

The wound deepens. And next time, it’s even harder to ask for the broccoli some part of me actually knows I need. So much harder that the knowing part of me gets quieter and it’s hard for me to even sense what is needed. So my ask gets even farther away from the truth.

The more shallow the scroll becomes, the more unsatisfying each notification feels, the more we seek it out. Maybe we find a new platform; this will be the one that can make me feel better. Or maybe we just don’t have a big enough following, because why?

We’re trying too hard. We should be more authentic. We should write better. They don’t love us because we’re not trying hard enough yet.

Or maybe we just haven’t asked the right question.

Related post:

Why we blame