Dopamine Detox

DNF @ 33%

Absolute, unhelpful nonsense.

This “book” is more like one of those blog posts on predatory websites that swear to offer all the answers to life’s problems while bringing nothing of any substance or value to the table. The only people who will benefit from it are those who want lives full of all work and no play - and even then, only those who are neurotypical and already have cushy, comfortable, privileged, financially secure lives.

Lessons proposed by this book include:

• Don’t rush and hustle and try desperately to make money; think patiently and play the long game (and I guess just pray you can pay your bills in the meantime).
• Don’t check your emails or use message notifications; just let everything rot until later (better hope you didn’t miss something important from work or family).
• Don’t eat so much junk food; just buy healthier foods, which the author never acknowledges as being more expensive and ironically requiring more time “wasted” to prepare it.
• Don’t communicate with your friends online; go exercise instead.
• Don’t play video games or watch YouTube or start a series on Netflix; write a book or do work instead.
• And if you think you enjoy those recreational activities, you’re invalid, and your brain has been “hijacked.”

Give me a break, here!

This nonsense claiming to be a book is garbage at best and actively harmful at worst. It oversimplifies everything in a manner which often comes across as dystopian and as if the moral is that life sucks and anything fun (or the enjoyment thereof) is evil and dysfunctional. Also, poor and/or mentally disordered individuals don’t exist. OCD? ADHD? Never heard of ‘em. People who can’t copy Jeff Bezos and wait for several years for their dream business to become profitable while eating multi-million-dollar losses along the way? Y’know, the majority of people in the world? Nah, we don’t exist. (This book literally uses that as an example of good forward-thinking!)

But more than that, the reason I DNF’d this garbage: it began to feel like being actively gaslighted with how frequently the author insisted readers’ brains are “being hijacked” and repeated shallow points that amounted to “fun bad even in moderation, work good always, you are being hijacked even if you don’t believe you are, you are not satisfied by leisure activities or the internet even if you think you are.” No, just no.

When I reached the point where it instructed:

Using your action guide, complete the prompt below by being as specific as possible: My brain is being hijacked when

I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and knew I couldn’t finish reading this, even though I was only even still hate-reading for how bad it is. One paragraph later, this decision was cemented with:

When you are calm and focused, doing your main work can be surprisingly easy. You might even be excited, looking forward to making progress toward your biggest goals each day.

The author had spent the previous 30% or more insisting upon the overly simplistic definition that the act of looking forward to a reward and being excited for it was the result of dopamine addiction. Being excited for an email from a friend, an achievement in a video game, or a fun video? Evil, bad, sign that the villain of the internet has hijacked your brain. But apparently being excited and looking forward to the reward of progress toward an approved goal is Totally Different and good and not at all governed by the same mental mechanisms.

Maybe the author means well, but the air this presents is similar to that of being gaslighted into a cult. Everything else of a similar nature is bad and must be completely cut out. No. Just no.

Moderation is the key. Balancing work and the life you actually like living (yeah, protip author: a large number of people in this world don’t like their jobs and only have them out of necessity to survive) is important. Finding time for both fun hobbies and productivity is the goal, not erasing every hint of fun and working yourself to death. Distractions are hard to combat, but it’s not because our brains are “hijacked.”

And y’know what? Maybe it’s because I’m not neurotypical, but for me “just don’t access this distraction and instead do this other thing” is the most useless advice ever. Telling me over and over that the things I feel genuine enjoyment from - the things which make life a little less worthless to me - are not “really” satisfying and that I’m some kind of victim? Lowkey triggering and high-key useless.

I just wanted tips on balancing distractions and productivity, man. Not this tripe.

Oh, by the way? There’s apparently a workbook that goes along with this. It’s referenced constantly, but in order to get it you have to use the Big Bad Internet to go to the author’s linked website and provide your name and email address to sign up for a mailing list. I’m not about to hand over my info and do not want to be on the list, so I have no clue what the workbook contains. I do, however, find that rather scummy and worth a little shaming.

A quick, useful read. Worth the time to flip through and gain some perspective on how overstimulating our daily lives can be.

The book is a short read with a lot of helpful tips to improve your life, focus more on the activities that can have a good impact on your life than wasting your time scrolling through social media and any other addiction that distracts you from the important tasks of the day.