While the quantity and ease with which we can access distracting content is new, distraction-seeking isn’t unique to our dopamine-conscious era. For centuries, humanity has searched for escape from the ordinariness and angst of our lives. As early as the mid-17th century, French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote that distraction-seeking is completely natural, even for the wealthiest of people: “The king is surrounded by persons who think only how to entertain the king, and to prevent his thinking of self. For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of self.”
And as long as we’ve been seeking distractions, we’ve also been trying to free ourselves from them. For thousands of years, meditation has been embedded in many spiritual belief systems as a means of finding clarity and enlightenment.
Optimization-oriented content creator Richard Yong, known to his 3.57 million YouTube followers as Improvement Pill, told the San Francisco Chronicle that “dopamine fasting is basically just an easy mode version of a Vipassanā retreat,” a specialized, intense kind of meditation practice. Taken to a lesser extreme, intentionally abstaining from things like checking your phone for a couple hours before bed feels like common sense (and good advice!). It only gets weird when you try to draw a direct line between these behavioral changes and a single neurotransmitter.
Dopamine has become a byproduct of all that it tries to explain: impulse, addiction, our drive toward optimization. As technology and society writer L.M. Sacasas wrote, “It is a powerful and catchy meme, although one that is offered in the best spirit. For these reasons, I fear that it may trap us in the very patterns that it seeks to overcome.”
Correction, May 22, 1:15 pm ET: Nandakumar Narayanan’s title was misstated in an earlier version of this article. He is an associate professor of neurology, not an assistant professor.