Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine... from the Wall Street Journal, 8-13
Rising rates of depression and anxiety in wealthy countries like the U.S. may be a result of our brains getting hooked on the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure.
Deep in florescent-lit caverns media engineers remotely drill into your noggin to squeeze out every drop of dopamine until you’re down and dysphoric, fogged out and bleak of brain. That’s their job. They continually masturbate the entire population without touching them, seducing them instead with chimes and likes and all sorts of whacko affirmations. What we have here are blank-face zombies in all directions, and they want to eat your brains because theirs have dried up and blown away from too much screen-time.
Could a work of art cure this condition, probably not, but a house full might mitigate. Works of art stretch the attention span back out so a person can taste a well-prepared dinner, enjoy a drive in the country, or have a deep thought. Limit screen-time and reserve a little dopamine for the real things in life, outdoor adventure and exploration, family events and personal relationships.
Suddenly we realize we are all essentially on our own, each of us comparing what we see to what we already know, and social media has revealed how widely that varies person to person. Orwell predicted the contamination of language, debased as much by advertising as by politicians, and the notion that pictures can convey meaning and express commonality is reemerging in daily consciousness. Yes, art is antidote, the decontamination and recovery from all that digital diddling online.
