Biologically speaking, we feel good when certain chemicals are released in our body. We typically associate artificially stimulating this release system as “getting high,” through taking drugs or smoking or whatnot. Society has done a good job, at least where I grew up, of emphasizing the stigma around these things.
Life revolves around feeling these “highs,” regardless of whether we induce them artificially or they arise naturally. You could argue that our goal in life is purely to feel good, and evolution has used this motivator to get us to do things necessary for survival: eat, sleep, fall in love, be social, etc. But as humans got smarter, everything shattered.
One of the first things to fall was eating habits. Once people realized that sugar is what provides the “high” after eating, it became the center of all food. All these years later, we see the same thing happening with social media. Apps have targeted the exact part of social interactions that make them pleasurable (specifically the anticipation and feeling of self-worth), but have stripped away the parts that make it useful.
While these “highs” are not as directly artificial as injecting yourself with dopamine, at some fundamental level it's nearly the same. You see the same difficulty to stop and the same withdrawal symptoms when that happens. And I think the concept behind this is purely just exposure, because we’ve grown so accustomed to getting “high,” like by eating unhealthy food or scrolling social media, we can’t, or don’t want to, imagine a life without it.
What's the point here? I feel like it's difficult to identify and act upon these highs, and it's really easy to spiral downwards. This has to do with what happens when we feel high, specifically the tragic low that immediately follows. This low leaves us craving another high, perpetuating the addiction. Even worse, we grow tolerant to these highs, or in other words, we become used to the highs. Once you eat unhealthy food for a couple days, it's hard to stop, it becomes a part of your routine. It's no longer feeling good after the “high”, rather the absence of one. Addictions spiraling downwards is almost an oxymoron, because an addicted person is used to feeling extremely high “highs,” yet the result is actually an extremely low “low” right after.
This isn’t any novel idea, but people don’t think about it enough outside of the social stigma of substance abuse. Any addiction is a bad thing, and while society has done an excellent job of disincentivizing directly induced highs through drugs, it has largely avoided the same concept in social media, television, and food addictions. Prevalence in society and popular culture makes these ideas (or addictions) feel normal, just how ads of women smoking made that a common sight nearly a century ago.
I’ve repeatedly used the words “addiction” and “high,” which have negative connotations because of their association to drugs, but in reality I’ve generalized their definition to just any way of feeling good. But isn’t the objective of life to feel good? If your goal in the game of life is to maximize your highs, I argue the winning strategy is just to not play. Every high is followed by a deeper low, and continuing this “pursuit of happiness” will just lead to an ending worse than where you started. I think that the goal of life should be to maximize the “lows” instead, and the winning strategy then becomes discipline against these “high.” Do something hard right now by thinking about how good it will feel later.
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