"Until you have it all you won't be free"

Moontower Munchies #62

May 01, 2024

Friends,

I just finished Nir Eyal’s book Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products.

📓My highlights from Nir Eyal’s Hooked

This line spoke directly to me since I had a misunderstanding of dopamine (emphasis mine):

Although dopamine is often wrongly categorized as making us feel good, introducing variability does create a focused state, which suppresses the areas of the brain associated with judgment and reason while activating the parts associated with wanting and desire.

This called back a great essay:

Everything You Can’t Have (4 min read)
Morgan Housel

It’s a short post, you should read it. But I’ll still excerpt a few parts including those that underscore the role of dopamine.

The richest people in the world are some of the unhappiest, because they can afford to never struggle.
“Drinking too much. Talking too much. Thinking too little. Retired. No purpose.”

To ordinary people, it sounds amazing. To those who can afford to do anything, it often falls flat.

”You feel that, gee, isn’t it just great to have enough money to afford to live in a very nice house, to be able to play golf, to have nice parties, to wear good clothes, to travel if you want to? And the answer is: If you don’t have those things, then they can mean a great deal to you. When you do have them, they mean nothing to you.”

This is a little exaggerated. But the idea of valuing only what you’ve struggled for is real. In 1905, author William Dawson wrote in his book The Quest for The Simple Life about how the hardest thing to understand about money is the thrill of the chase.
This all makes sense when you understand what your brain wants. It doesn’t want nice cars or big homes. It wants dopamine. That’s it. Your brain just wants dopamine.

I’ll leave it to the excellent book The Molecule of More to describe the process:

Dopamine is the chemical of desire that always asks for more – more stuff, more stimulation, and more surprises. In pursuit of these things, it is undeterred by emotion, fear, or morality. From dopamine’s point of view, it’s not the having that matters; it’s getting something – anything – that’s new. Your brain doesn’t want stuff. It doesn’t even want new stuff. It wants to engage in the process and anticipation of getting new stuff.

This is similar to Will Smith’s description of fame: Becoming famous is amazing. Being famous is a mixed bag. Losing fame is miserable.

Drake said something similar: “People like you more when you are working towards something, not when you have it.” The change, not the amount, is what matters.

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If you have ever been asked to invest in a real estate syndicate or restaurant and found the proposition a bit strange to understand, the below tweet and response might be helpful. Pardon my snark at the end.

Stay Groovy

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