Dopamine management medication will lead to a renaissance of human ingenuity and scientific discoveries and a big crash for social media and gambling sites (and in fact most online activities) but everyone will start becoming more robotic and even less social. Think GLP-1 inhibitors except for thinking more deeply and for longer periods. If not 2025 very soon.
haha this is gonna be an interesting one for sure.
it's crazy how us humans yearn for magic pills for the highs and the lows just to get ourselves in a healthy baseline
and as bryan johnson's experiments look like, it all comes down to our consistency in eating healthy, exercising regularly, and resting enough - those three alone will net you better health than most people - and it's hard to get into habit of doing those since we all got distractions around us.
I had a discussion with someone on here about the magic pills and how they are a crutch for the 3 items you mentioned. They ranted about how helpless humans are and how unfair it is for them to have will themselves to be healthy
Friend: "i kept getting fatter, and more diabetic, so i got a continuous glucose monitor, and it basically told me how bad it is to eat [sugary] cereal in [sugary] milk right before I got to bed"
Accepting causation is difficult to recognize when it requires personal change.
Fully agree on consistency, unfortunately I realized after a while that my anxiety was preventing me from being consistent and after getting some medication, I was able to get back into all these habits.
Concerning "thinking more deeply and for longer periods." There is a WSJ article about drugs for focus but how addictive they are
"As Mark Moran was facing another 90-hour week as an investment-banking intern at Credit Suisse in New York, he knew he needed help to survive the rest of the summer. His colleagues gave him a tip: Visit a Wall Street health clinic and tell the staff he had trouble focusing.
Ahead of his first appointment, he filled out a five-minute questionnaire. One of the questions asked if he had trouble staying organized, another, if he procrastinated. He then met with a clinician who said his answers suggested he had attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. He left with a prescription for Adderall."
I feel the dogged persuit of a task and obsessive curiosity might be more closely related to addiction than to self control. A good balance of productivity from the self control and the obessive curiosity of human nature might be needed for ascension
I've heard many reports of GLP-1 reducing addiction behavior, but more like alcohol and gambling. Never heard anyone reporting on social media reduction. IMHO it looks like it should, I just haven't seen any data / anecdotes.
Sounds like they're describing the opposite of CNS stimulants though. People take meth and coke and go on se, gambling binges. Something that moderates and manages dopamine in a way that breaks the hold gambling and social media has on people's brains would be very different. Something that dulls the retative mini-bursts of dopamine hits you get with every click and scroll.
> People take meth and coke and go on se, gambling binges. Something that moderates and manages dopamine in a way that breaks the hold gambling and social media has on people's brains would be very different.
Simplifying a lot here, but people with ADHD are statistically more likely to exhibit addictive behaviours because the addiction provides dopamine that their brain otherwise has trouble getting. Treatment with prescribed CNS stimulants is very effective at preventing those behaviours because the brain no longer has to engage in the addictive behaviours to obtain sufficient dopamine.
Here’s one study where patients reported significantly lower rates of alcohol and drug use over at least a one year period.
