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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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What if our craving for dopamine drives our desires and addictions?

By David McElroy · July 12, 2015

Craving for love

When we feel a strong craving for another person, we sometimes say the two of us have strong chemistry. What if that’s more than a metaphor?

It was almost 10 years ago when something hit me which seemed like a major revelation at the time, even though I realize others had already figured it out. I realized that the things people wanted in life — myself included — weren’t the actual material things or the achieved goals. Instead, what we really want is the emotional or psychological states that come with those things.

Once I’ve satisfied my actual physical needs, I don’t actually want money. Instead, I want the feelings that I’ve attached to money and having more of it.

I don’t have to have one partner I’ve committed myself to as my wife. After all, I could make the wrong choice. But I’m driven to find the right wife anyway, because I want the feelings I’ve attached to being loved and understood by a one special woman who is my partner.

In an objective way, I don’t want the extra responsibility and headaches that come with having children and raising them, but I want the emotional state that I attach to reproducing and having a loving family.

Plenty of people have money and spouses and children — and hundreds of other things that we attach to this sort of emotional state — and they’re miserable. So just having the thing itself isn’t necessarily what we need or want.

We want the feelings of fullness and love and deep satisfaction that we associate with having those things and with meeting our goals. That’s why we strive to meet our goals and desires. We believe we will feel those emotional states, even though we’re not conscious of the association most of the time.

I read something recently about why we love music. According to a study done in 2011, music causes something primitive in our brains to release dopamine. This was apparently the first time that it had been proven that something abstract can cause the physical release of this brain chemical. (Here’s a short video summaring what I learned about music and dopamine.)

I’m not going to try to explain the specific brain chemistry that’s involved in dopamine and serotonin, partly because I’m not qualified to do a good job of it and partly because it would overly complicate where I’m going with this. If you’re interested in the science, here’s one place to start.

To oversimplify it, let’s say that more dopamine gives human beings strong feelings of well-being and happiness. Since that’s true, we tend to be drawn to those things which have previously given us those feelings. Even if we’re unaware of what we’re doing, we find ourselves seeking out chocolate — or ice cream or alcohol or cocaine or gambling or sex — if we’ve found that that particular thing has caused us to have that emotional state in the past.

So what if our cravings for all sorts of things — both the healthy things such as love and family, and the unhealthy things such as substances, greed for money, or lousy foods — is nothing but our brains trying to create the emotional states we get when dopamine is at higher levels?

If this is true — and it seems likely to me based on what I’ve been reading in the last week — then much of our behavior is going to be driven by what we’ve been conditioned to associate with different things in our lives.

If we learn that reading literature gives us this pleasurable state of mind, we’re going to read a lot for pleasure, even if most people don’t understand that.

If we learn that getting approval from a certain person gives us this pleasurable state of mine, we’re going to do things to seek that person’s approval, even when we consciously know it’s unhealthy to do so.

If we learn that having money or other material possessions gives us that pleasurable emotional state, we’re going to seek more and more money to the exclusion of other things.

If we learn that sex or drugs or alcohol or cigarettes or gambling or ice cream create that state of mind, we’re doing to turn to those things when our minds crave a “hit” of that state of mind.

If we learn that controlling other people and molding them into what we want them to be — or even rescuing people so we can control them — produces the emotional state we want, we will crave control over those people.

And we won’t understand what we’re doing, because we will create another justification for it.

I suspect we can attach this craving to almost anything, but it depends on what we’ve been “programmed” to need, starting in childhood. We’re going to have different ways of approaching the craving. We’re going to have different ways of justifying what we do. But the need is the same — a need for an emotional state that allows us to feel peaceful, understood, satisfied and what we call happy.

I’ve been thinking about this for the last week or so and filtering my own desires and goals through the lens of this idea. What I realize is that the basic need for this state of mind — and for the chemistry that produces it — isn’t a bad thing. Not only that, but the things we do to achieve the state aren’t necessarily bad simply because they don’t serve purposes in and of themselves other than achieving that state.

Falling in love, having children, making money and getting approval can all be positive things and help the human race to survive. The problems come when we have unhealthy associations that produce that emotional state of mind, as has been the case for me when it comes to food for a long time, especially anything with sugar in it. When those connections are made, we become self-destructive in our pursuit of a chemical state in our brains.

I’m very aware of the things in my life that produce this state of mind. I crave love and understanding from a woman. I crave having an emotionally healthy family. I crave emotional, psychological and financial stability. I crave artistic expression. All of those things bring me that wonderful emotional state that I crave. Those things make me feel satisfied, loved, happy — whatever you want to call it.

But I also know that when I don’t have those things, I turn to dark substitutes. I eat ice cream by the gallon. I stuff my body with all sorts of horrible food. I pursue cheap approval and applause. I even put myself into relationships with a power imbalance that can allow me to be the hero on a pedestal, rescuing someone else who needs me.

I don’t want to do those things. I want to get emotional states I crave from the things on the positive list. But my lack of ability to delay gratification leads me to the dark impulses that give me a shortcut to the brain chemistry I crave — and doing those things short-circuits my ability to achieve the healthy things I want.

I need to be able to delay gratification long enough to win the things I need, but I am programmed to fall into a dark abyss when I go without the feelings I get from that brain chemistry. I panic when it’s missing — and I’ll do anything to get it back in the short term, whatever the cost. Somehow, I have to get past that abyss without falling into my darker cravings, because everything I need is on the other side.

When I reach for the love of a certain person I need, I’m trying to change my brain chemistry. I’m trying to alter the emotional or psychological state I feel. That might not sound romantic, but understanding why the craving is there can actually give us respect for the objective fact that one person can change everything for us. It can help us to understand a complex chemical, emotional and psychological process.

Even so, it’s just easier to say I have strong chemistry with the person I love. That’s more accurate than I’ve ever known.

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Briefly

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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