The angry me is my ego, and ego is, as we know, addiction’s minion. But as an alcoholic with “a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of spiritual condition” (85), I have no business cultivating anger, which blocks me from “the sunlight of the spirit” (66), tipping the playing field to addiction’s advantage. All I’ve accomplished is adding a bit more rage to the global atmosphere.Ī normie might indulge in this cycle with only a slight harm to their long-term health. I see friends have liked or shared my post: Dopamine! A conservative friend comments disagreement, so I deliver a stinging retort: Dopamine! Have any of my posts done any good for anyone? Of course not. Only recently have I realized my true motivation: dopamine. I’ve been hitting the awkwardness-free vanquishment bar of social media again and again, posting about Trump’s lies, stupidity, moral depravity, damaging policies, etc. Rather, after the initial despair of 2016, I began to take aim at no one in particular to make “them” recognize the despicable character and politics of this Russian plant president. Fortunately, my entire family is anti-Trump, so we’ve experienced no rift. I’ve been priming similar poisonous dopamine surges myself on social media ever since Trump got elected.
Happily, Amazon took down all but one review, and we’ve since healed enough as a family to deal with this as we do all conflict: we pretend it never happened. So they asked if we could we could all sit down and talk out these uncomfortable issues to arrive at some shared understanding - kidding!! They chose to punish my wrongdoing with no compunction, getting lots of satisfying dopamine surges every time they clicked SEND, POST, or PUBLISH.Īt the time, I wept gallons of tears and developed panic attacks from so much as looking at my laptop. They emailed flamers berating me as a liar, narcissist, and sadist they posted lengthy Facebook strings of back-and forth mockery and they published one-star “reviews” on Amazon under pen names, buying copies under multiple accounts to publish more.Ĭlearly, my ideas about the role alcoholism and codependence had played in my upbringing felt wrong and hurtful to them. Some family members responded from behind their screens with a rage they’d never have unleashed on me face-to-face. Plus, every time someone LIKES or reposts our outrage, we get another dopamine boost, because our brains tell us we’re doling out even stronger punishment.Į-distance can destroy compassion even among people who love each other, as I discovered years ago when I first published my addiction memoir. Our brains revel in dopamine scot-free whenever we proclaim righteous, indignant, and often vicious stuff. Neither consequence applies to social media (or any e-communication). He explains that the face-to-face context in which outrage evolved came with a natural set of brakes: you risked getting physically harmed by those you punished, or, if you were out of line, getting punished yourself.
“Outrage,” the host summarizes, “gives us pleasure.” When people decide to punish someone who’s behaved unfairly, we see activation in areas of the brain associated with reward, including the striatum and the medial prefrontal cortex… There’s a visceral satisfaction in doling out punishment.” “Evolution placed a bet on being a good idea for the group. Yale psychologist Molly Crockett pops explains: How should the group react? Ignore, expel, or punish? If they ignore, the wrong-doer may decide to act again. The Hidden Brain host has us imagine an early human tribe in which someone gets caught doing something wrong.
The trouble for us alcoholics is that getting caught up in these cycles can lead us back toward a drink. We may not realize that’s what’s going on when we find one, but we self-administer hits of it like some poor little lab rat hitting the cocaine bar again and again. That’s the the juicy part for all alcoholic/addicts, right? Human brains in general sift the world like Geiger counters seeking out sources of feel-good. I recently listened to an NPR program, Hidden Brain, that looked at moral outrage on social media and what’s going on in our brains when we post (or repost) it. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us.
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If we were to live, we had to be free of anger.
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