This is a departure from what I've been writing about so far, but something that I've been looking into recently and that seems to make a lot of sense to me in terms of how our brains evolved and how modern life has subverted that evolution.
I stumbled across a video on YouTube about porn addiction, and I must admit my first thought was "Porn is fine, masturbation is natural, this is just prudery". It turns out though, maybe not. I'm not going to go deep (sorry) into this particular topic right now as it certainly merits a post, if not many posts, of its own. If you are interested a good starting point is yourbrainonporn.com .
The basic thrust (sorry, I'll stop now) of the argument is that we evolved in an environment of scarcity. If you saw food, especially energy-rich food like fruit, best to eat it. If you had a chance for sex, best to take it. That's how you passed your genes on. Our brains evolved to reward these behaviours with the associated endorphin rush.
Now though, we are not in an environment of scarcity. That sugar-rich food isn't halfway across a forest, it's in the shop down the road, or your fridge. You don't have to find a sexual partner from another tribe [1] , in fact you don't have to find a sexual partner at all. A few clicks on your laptop and even though you're not actually having sex, you "win" the same endorphin rush at the end.
And so we come to fairly standard addiction theory, where each rush isn't quite as good as the last and you have to find more, different, better ways to scratch the itch. It's all about the dopamine receptors, look it up if you're interested.
This can manifest itself in more subtle ways too. Let's have a look at three areas. Firstly, sport. Sport has in some ways replaced the things we used to do to survive, like hunting and fighting. Sports like football have a clear relationship to the hunt, where team mates communicate, organise themselves spatially and physically exert themselves for a common goal. Target sports like golf directly mimic throwing your spear or shooting your arrow at the prey, giving that "rush" when you nail it between the eyes, or next to the pin.
The problem is, playing sport is quite hard. You have to be fit, you have to practice the technique, you have to find a team, be picked, fit in. A bit less so in individual sports but you still have to make the effort. How much easier is it now to put on your replica shirt and turn on the TV. Cheer the goals and call the phonein to say how great "we" were or how the referee robbed "us". But while you share in the rush, you're not reaping any of the actual benefits of *playing* sport. You're not any fitter, you haven't improved your people skills by working as a team, you don't have the satisfaction of working towards a goal and achieving it.
I realised some time ago that I had a real problem with this, and you may have noticed now that I don't tweet much about QPR. In fact I generally try to find something else to do during games, something better than pressing F5 every minute to see if I win the good hit or the bad hit. In my twenties I used to go and watch a lot, which at least involving getting off my arse and into the fresh air, but it was an expression of a frustrated desire to actually play myself. You can see now, if you like, how the most "passionate" fans are often in awful physical condition.
Another area I'm very familiar with is poker. This one is something of a double edged sword though. Online poker probably did destroy my ability to play live poker. Once I was used to 6 tables at once online, live poker seemed interminably slow. But...online poker was much more profitable and live poker was always annoying to some degree simply because every table of 9 would generally have at least two complete arseholes whose only goal was to irritate people while losing as slowly as possible. Online poker gave me a career, my independence and a great deal to be satisfied about how I applied myself to it...but at one point it certainly had many hallmarks of addiction. In the end I tired of it, and to be honest I wasn't really winning much if at all towards the end. All the same, I do miss that high of winning a tournament! Now I'm more involved in sports betting I try to sweat the games at an absolute minimum - that up-down pleasure-pain reaction to every result or even every shot isn't good for you or your betting.
The last one I'm going to touch on today is interacting with people online. It is better than nothing, but it's really not as good as going out there and being face to face. In many ways it's a lot easier on the Internet, especially if you're arguing with someone. It's easier to be rude, it's easier to change the subject, if you're put on the spot it's easier to google up a link and say "what about this" than it is to actually respond to a point in real time. The same can be said of making fun of people on TV, or a good old Internet pile-on. There's also no possibility of being thumped in the face, as Richard Spencer found out yesterday. It's easy to have those "hits" without the effort of thinking about it, or reading the other person's cues, or even trying to understand what they're saying at all.
The common theme is that taking easy dopamine hits is great in the now...but not so good for you medium and long term. Taking that easy hit means you don't achieve any of the ancillary benefits of "working* for it. Get out there and do it for real. I'm going to try, and if you do go off and look at the research on porn, I'm trying out a "reboot" for myself!
[1] Not your own tribe because incest generally doesn't turn out well over generations.
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