The relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain leads to pain.
We’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance.
One of the biggest risk factors for getting addicted to any drug is easy access to that drug.
It’s pretty exhausting avoiding yourself all the time.
The smartphone is the modern-day, hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine, 24/7 for a wired generation.
The Internet promotes compulsive overconsumption, not only by providing increased access to drugs, old and new, but also by suggesting behaviors that otherwise may never have occurred to us.
Our brains are not evolved for this world of plenty.
The reason we’re all so miserable may be because we’re working so hard to avoid being miserable.
With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases.
We’ve lost the ability to tolerate even minor forms of discomfort. We’re constantly seeking to distract ourselves from the present moment, to be entertained.
I have seen again and again in clinical care, and in my own life, how the simple exercise of abstaining from our drug of choice for at least four weeks gives clarifying insight into our behaviors. Insight that simply is not possible while we continue to use.
Abstinence rests the brain’s reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy in simpler pleasures.
With intermittent exposure to pain, our natural hedonic set point gets weighted to the side of pleasure, such that we become less vulnerable to pain and more able to feel pleasure over time.
There is a cost to medicating away every type of human suffering, and as we shall see, there is an alternative path that might work better: embracing pain.
I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is. Then I dare you to walk toward it. In this way, the world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe-inspiring that does not require escape.
