Welcome to Dopamine Park: Surviving the Endless Ride of Instant Gratification

Imagine living in a theme park. All the rides and fast food your heart could desire. Thrilling until it’s not, right? This article takes a look at how we live in a world just like a theme park, but instead of thrills? We get dopamine.

Theme parks are supposed to be a fun thing once in a while, but who actually goes there regularly? As for for me, I was lucky to get to go on them on birthdays. Even now I see them as this ultimate form of fun in my head, despite the fact that actually I’m not so pleased about hurtling round inches from metal bars twice as fast as I’m allowed to drive. But living there?

Sure, it’d be fun for the first 24 hours, especially as a kid. The first day is great, you and your best friends have the biggest and best rides around all to yourselves. You go absolutely mad then gorge on all the food afterwards. But by the second, third day, things start to get a little stale. And by day 30? Well the thrills are going to be pretty tame by that time.
Therein lies the problem, particularly for those of us with ADHD. In the modern world, we are constantly being taunted with cheap, instant dopamine everywhere we turn, with the biggest source in your pocket. We are living in a dopamine theme park armed with lunch vouchers and passes to skip the queue. The modern world and particularly smart technology have really brought us all a lot closer to instant gratification than ever before.

Hungry? Food to your door in minutes.

Need a cab? A few swipes of your thumb will sort that. No need to even stick it up at a car any more.

Need to buy clothes/homeware/a car/another expert level brand new hobby kit/a new fishtank for your future fish? Well, that will come tomorrow if you do it now. So Do it. Do it now.

Smartphones, video games and fast food aren’t inherently evil, but they’re vessels for some of the most concentrated forms of dopamine we’ve ever known. Concentrated assaults on the senses that are fine in moderation, when your senses can recover. But if allowed to fire at will and your defenses are down? Damage can be done.

These assaults on the senses effectively offer us instant cold hard dopamine, which highlights the insidious nature of this problem. We all want to earn our pleasure and frolic. But we can’t frolic forever, because due to some old design called nature, we have a dopamine system that provides us with motivation, both at the anticipation and at the receival of a reward. Every time we get that without expending the effort, our system depletes. But we just can’t resist that shiny light, so we fly towards it until we get burnt.

And when our dopamine systems are burnt out?

We’ll just lie there staring at the smoke rising above in a haze of burnt out shame, and the world with all the wonderful pleasures that we just couldn’t hold back from, yet everybody else seems to be able to. Watching those people come through the gates of the park every day, having the time of their lives…

How to Navigate the Theme Park

1. Take the slow ride

You know those slow rides, perhaps a caterpillar train that does a slow lap around the whole park at the pace of an ice cream van? Well, despite not having the instant thrills of a triple vertical loop coaster, you’ll still get a nice trip where you can soak in some interesting sights. 

Choose your leisure wisely, even use dopamine as your get out. As in watch a film, or even just an episode, instead of 100-200 reels. Exercising your brain with something more stimulating even once per day for leisure will help keep your dopamine levels more stable.

2. Recruit a theme park guide (AI)

Having an accountability buddy has never been easier. AI assistants/guides are highly customisable and you can create your own complete setup. One way to navigate the park is to have this guide prioritise your tasks and leisure. You don’t even need to follow its suggestions like gospel, but having a guide advise you it’s a good idea to pay your bills before that reconditioned piano you just spent a day reading about can sometimes help to sway the tide.

3. Map the Park First, Then Explore

Theme parks can be navigated tactically. Be first in, rush to rides at the other end of the park to avoid queues and work your way back. Keeping your dopamine health bars full in our world of cheap thrills can also be achieved tactically. This can be done in a number of ways, you might want to “eat the frog” and complete your biggest task before you do anything other than wake up. Or perhaps you schedule in a fast-food fuelled video game session no later than 7PM, so as to still get your thrills without them kidnapping you at 7AM. 

Feel free to hit us up with any other ways to navigate the dopamine theme park. Until then, if you enjoy my way of trying to navigate the world through writing you can find more at https://afterchaos.substack.com, or my X account of the same name.