Dopamism: Addiction Economics
When it comes to the individual, we rush to diagnose and treat mental illness. We understand that thoughts impact neural networks, neutral networks impact brain structure, and brain structure impacts lived reality. When it comes to the collective, however, we fail to see this same process playing out. Business models impact money flows, money flows impact economic structures, and economic structures impact lived realities. To end economic boom-bust cycles, look at the business models. What you find might surprise you.
Failure by Design
Let’s be honest, we aren’t powerless. We’re careless.
Today’s business models, our collective decision-making frameworks, intentionally optimize for short-term rewards. The fundamental root of our societal angst is that our erratic world seeks what feels good in the short term, not what’s best. This inevitably leads to failure.
Take something basic, like eating. Since the dawn of existence, we’ve intuitively understood how to eat. But superimpose a business model on “eating” and we’ve created a diet industry worth $192 billion, with a 95% failure rate and an obesity epidemic as a side. We proudly sell people fake food that kills them prematurely.
We like the way the product looks - in the moment - even if we hate the long-term effect of what we create. We like the revenues it creates - in the moment - even if it eventually outweighs the cost to governments. We like the semblance of intelligence it creates - in the moment - even if it becomes an artifact of abuse.
The markets reflect both our behavior and values. They are the mirror that reveals how we value short-term incentivized thinking above all else. Structurally, we want immediate rewards, and so the diet industry is successful - just ask intellectual powerhouses McKinsey, Bain, or BCG, who actively commend the industry as an intelligent investment.
We’re living in the world we want.
We’re living in a world that’s failing by design.
Not Intelligence, Illness
The problem with short-term thinking is that it weakens our mental capacity. Neurologically, short-term thinking triggers dopamine-seeking pathways that trap us in a restricted mental map and limit our ability to reason. We set a desired outcome. We achieve our desired outcome. We are rewarded with dopamine.
Optimizing for that chemical hit, we quickly realize that the more desired outcomes we achieve, the more dopamine we experience. We start to determine our actions based on probable outcomes. We whittle down our goals, making them smaller and smaller each time to guarantee our hit. We trade our ambition and our potential for short-term certainties.
Eventually, our neural networks shrink to this basic thought pattern and we lose sight of reality.
As we enforce this neurological groove, it becomes too psychologically unsafe to see the havoc in front of us so we deny the present truth. This limited neural process constantly plays out around us, most obviously in the management of our public markets. Despite being home to our pillars of economic security, incentives and frameworks have become so narrow that they’ve robbed us of a holistic view and, with it, wiped out $3 trillion+ of pension savings in 2022 alone. It is an error that is consistently repeated.
Not Profit, Dopamine
In our distorted view of reality, we become primed for illness. Neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, or histamine, are similar to the nutrients we find in natural food - only beneficial when consumed in holistic balance. Dopamine elicits a pleasure seeker, and when overloaded it becomes an advanced society-wide self-destructive mechanism.
Dopamine overloading is the primary driver behind all addictions. Whether it’s food, alcohol, drugs, caffeine, workaholism, sex, consumerism, or even analytics, it primes society for exploitative relationships and then hides behind the problems it creates. Slowly, communities lose control, unable to pinpoint the true cause of our demise.
It is so serious that after investigating the role of dopamine in destructive behavior, researchers at the University of North Carolina found that the primary dependency of cocaine-addicted rats was actually the desire for dopamine itself. Strikingly, the dopamine desire became so strong that the rats pursued their own deaths.
Once dopamine dependency ensues - without intervention - the only way out is death.
Not Capitalism, Dopamism
Today’s business models optimize for dopamine. We should be concerned.
When business models optimize for dopamine, they stop optimizing for profit. Profit is merely a disguise for the primary dependency. That’s why this isn’t a critique of Capitalism. Capitalism needs stable profit to survive, but a gain that disappears is a loss.
Think about it, adjusting for the time value of money, if I give you $100 but later take $500, it’s a loss. If you make $1 trillion selling smartphones, but you pillage raw materials until you can no longer make the product and go bust, it’s a loss.
Though net present value convinced us to discount future losses in lieu of today’s opportunity costs, we got the math wrong. We drastically underestimated the severity of the losses ahead. Desperately trying to run away from our innate knowledge that we’re masking destruction with growth. We shrink annual reporting to quarterly, rapidly increase CEO turnover, and incessantly swing from hiring to firing.
But denial doesn’t work. Like the lemmings pushed to pursue suicide, we compulsively pursue the path to total destruction. After all, at the advice of business models, we’ve pillaged our environment, evaporated biodiversity, raised global temperatures, increased child trafficking, eradicated the rights of women, escalated inequality, collapsed economies, and created an opioid crisis.
This is an economic era of loss, not gain: an era of dopamism, not capitalism.
No, Technology Won’t Save Us
This is only the beginning.
We know something’s wrong. But, instead of honestly assessing the current situation, we desperately clutch onto a new narrative that technology will save us. While technology may hold immense promise, if we’re planning to incorporate it with standard business models then the results will be negative.
Take Uber, Bumble, or Twitter for example. With all these once innocent companies, the inflection point for rapid social demise consistently occurred at commercialization. And things started to get really wild after the IPO. Then there’s Facebook. Once a relatively harmless website, its strategic shareholder-friendly advertising business model turned it into a national security threat in almost every country on the planet.
Let’s pay attention to what’s actually happening: we’re caught in a failure loop.
There’s no need to analyze the future power of technical breakthroughs until we’re honest about the limitations of the markets into which they will be introduced. Because no matter how innovative the tools we create are, we’ll employ consultants to destroy their potential value.
This is an analytic truth. In our manic attempt to usher in a digital revolution, we’ve overlooked a major contradiction: consultants design futures using frameworks that are tied to the past. Think about it. Every major commercial decision making model - from regression to comparison, market sizing to cost-benefit, Porter’s five forces to SWOT - anchors on what’s already over. When we trap the future in the past, revolutionary progress is off the table.
With Web3 and DeFi’s development already funded to create real-time 24/7 market coverage to take us from quarterly reporting to daily, it’s time to wake up because we’re on track for exponential destruction. The most important existential question the tech sector must answer is:
How much technological progress are we willing to sacrifice before we accept that we have a problem?
Breaking the Cycle; There’s Another Way
An antidote to short-term incentivized thinking exists. It’s called awe.
Awe is the counterattack to the crippling fear that’s choking our markets. Because the more we’re pushed into focusing on things up close - from smartphones to finances - the more vital it becomes to look into the distance and rebalance perspective.
Awe isn’t woo-woo, it’s science. By simultaneously raising the sympathetic and parasympathetic neurological systems, awe counteracts the off-balance dopamine dependency short-termism has created, balancing dopamine with oxytocin. Referred to by Berkley and Stanford scientists as the “awe effect,” embracing perceived vastness increases mood, decreases materialism, and - more importantly - increases critical thinking.
Put simply, awe creates measurable shifts in our brains.
That’s why all good advice ultimately boils down to thinking longer term, and almost every influential breakthrough we value derives from a broadened perspective. From penicillin to X-ray machines, from John Lennon to Larry Page, the most iconic game changers haven’t come from modern business models but from explorative, expansive thinking.
Almost everything we cherish stems from awe.
Awe Liberates the Future
When we overanalyze the past, we get stuck there. When we build what’s probable, we deny what’s possible. At any hour we can break the cycle, and choose to create entirely different futures, embracing our full potential. And to unlock this incredible capability, we need only shift from denying the present to embracing it.
Awe shows us how to do this. We imagine awe as an abstract emotion, but it’s actually tangible intelligence. As Harvard neuroanatomist Jill-Bolte Talyor notes, our intelligence's full capacity can only be accessed through awe. There’s no need to stop analyzing or conducting investigations. Instead, awe expands our thinking by encompassing the future, past, and present. We can dream big, identify where we are today, use what we know to estimate the delta, and get cracking, allowing for an outcome even greater than imagined.
As a measurable framework, it looks like this:
For different outcomes, we must do things differently. Awe-inspired analytics fundamentally differs from the status quo, as it accepts that our understanding is incomplete. Instead of denying limitations, it seeks to quantify, measure, and manage our relationship with the unknown, working with life rather than against it.
It might seem simple, but its results are unprecedented. In the blink of an eye, modern insanity is exposed. Irrational investment decisions in companies like Theranos or Uber are made evident by the impossible multi-Nobel Prize-winning, monopoly-dependent leaps required. And goals once considered impossible, such as traveling to Mars or radically reducing cancer rates, become feasible.
A breakthrough that can fundamentally transform the future is already here; it’s a new business model.