Dare I a Dopamine Detox?

You despise being on your phone right. You can’t quell the urge to waste scores of hours scrolling through mind numbing apps. Social media was devised to help you stay in touch-but do you feel connected? Or is it all too overwhelming, rendering you detached from the world. Perhaps you are tired of the facades people construct online. You want to delve into productivity, pace through tasks and make progress. But you are imprisoned by the distractions that you create for yourself; you are ashamed by the inability to be focused.

More than anything else, you want to resist the urge to constantly look for instant gratification and the emptiness that follows it. So you turn to the concept of a Dopamine detox. Dopamine, wildly known as the happiness hormone is vital for humans to carry on with their lives. But the more we try to stimulate it, the weaker is the response. Explains why the first bite of dark chocolate is much more satisfying than the tenth.
Eating a whole slab in a month leaves the joy derived from a single nibble insignificant. Excessive consumption doesn’t lead to happiness; rather limiting yourself to a nibble a month leaves you with a more powerful satisfaction.
So the idea isn’t to reduce the vital dopamine hormone itself, but to abstain from impulsiveness.
Over time you are supposed find yourself enjoying your tasks more and hopefully lose yourself in the process, finding happiness the harder way-the real way.

But what if during this moratorium of social media, junk food and entertainment you find yourself losing interests in everything. Before you were worried about the pending tasks, now the tasks no longer pique your interests at all. You had labelled distractions as the scapegoat, but trying to bury yourself with work and forcing yourself to find satisfaction in it makes you sick.
A dopamine detox requires you to maintain the dopamine levels up, perhaps by going out and socialising. But the pandemic has blocked that channel out. Now you find that the detox has exacerbated your state of mind, stranding you in a mess.

Instead of an ascent from moderation to clarity and productivity, you descend to an existential crisis. You start asking yourself questions about the purpose of life, and ponder the insignificance of humans and our existence. We are just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting where the universe blows us. What is the meaning of life, why are we here?

Absurdism explains that there isn’t actually any meaning in the cold chaotic universe, and how humans are faced with the absurd being. Yet this doesn’t spell doom; by acknowledging the meaninglessness, we are setting ourselves free to give life our own subjective meaning. If nothing you do matters in the grand scheme of things, why not do something that matters to you?

However, what if you can’t recognise your raison d’être? And you find everything that you do as trivial. You don’t want to live your whole life accomplishing useless tasks and then regret not chasing your dream.
But what is your dream? Why can’t you be intensely bothered by an urge to do something? You brood for hours on what matters to you the most, what would you like to achieve. Yet nothing strikes a chord. We all are afraid of bottling our only chance at life.

Now the complacency of making a bold decision to abstain from distractions such as your phone quickly fizzes out. You were hoping for clarity, yet you find yourself in a maelstrom. The inaction bothers you, but not knowing thyself bothers you more.

Instant gratification. A dopamine detox. An existential crisis. Is there a way out?
I have been struggling to find a way out. Perhaps the solution is to fill the voids with mindless, instant entertainment and to bury yourself with daily routines. Continue with your meaningless existence like everybody else and stop playing the role of a condescending prick asking heavy questions such as the meaning of everything. Engaging in a philosophical battle in your head just paves the way for despair. Fret about it later, for now continue to engage with the apparent trivial things.

You are going to live the same cycle that society has carved for everyone; your death and oblivion is inevitable. You’re never going to rise above. Yes, existence is pain, but you’re here for the ride. Savour the suffering and get busy living. Hopefully along the way you’ll find what matters to you the most, and you get to the bottom of the absurd.