Or: What happens when we mistake the wanting for the having
Read on or listen here:
I need to tell you something uncomfortable about dopamine. It’s not what you think it is. And the way we’ve been talking about it – in wellness circles, productivity podcasts, self-improvement manifestos – has been leading us down precisely the wrong path when it comes to building the lives we actually want to live.
You’ve heard it before, probably: “I need my dopamine hit.” Someone posts a gym selfie. Someone else talks about their “dopamine detox.” We speak about dopamine as if it’s a pleasure chemical, a reward system, a feel-good neurotransmitter that floods our brains when we eat chocolate, achieve a goal, or receive a notification.
Except that’s not what dopamine does at all.
What Dopamine Actually Is
Here’s what the science actually tells us: dopamine isn’t the molecule of pleasure or reward. It’s the molecule of wanting. Of anticipation. Of pursuit. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky demonstrated this beautifully decades ago with experiments on monkeys. When they pressed a button to receive food, dopamine didn’t spike when they got the treat – it spiked the moment they saw the signal light that meant food was coming. The anticipation, not the consumption.
Even more revealing: when researchers made the reward unpredictable – so the monkeys only received food fifty per cent of the time – dopamine production didn’t decrease. It exploded. The uncertainty amplified the wanting, didn’t dampen it.
This distinction between wanting and liking, between motivation and pleasure, was further refined by neuroscientist Kent Berridge. What we experience as pleasure – that satisfied feeling when we bite into something delicious, that contentment after finishing a challenging hike – that’s driven by a different system entirely, primarily involving opioid and endocannabinoid pathways. Dopamine is about the chase, not the catch.
And here’s where it gets uncomfortable: our brains are far better at wanting than at liking. Evolution made us excellent at desiring and pursuing, but deliberately poor at sustained satisfaction. Because our ancestors who felt perpetual contentment after one successful hunt didn’t bother looking for the next meal. They didn’t leave descendants. We’re the children of restless strivers, and our neurobiology reflects that heritage.
The Self-Improvement Trap
Once you understand what dopamine actually does, a lot of modern self-improvement culture starts looking rather sinister. We’re being sold the idea that if we just optimise our dopamine – morning routines, cold plunges, achievement tracking, notification management – we’ll finally feel satisfied. Complete. Done.
But dopamine doesn’t create satisfaction. It creates more wanting. The more effectively you hack your dopamine system, the better you become at pursuing goals… and the worse you become at resting in contentment when you achieve them.
I watch people gamify their lives – tracking every workout, measuring every metric, chasing every optimisation – and wonder if they’ve noticed that the goalposts keep moving. The achievement that was supposed to bring fulfilment becomes just another box ticked on the way to the next achievement. The dopamine spike from completing something lasts minutes, maybe hours, before the system resets and you’re scanning for the next target.
This isn’t failure. This is dopamine working exactly as designed. You’re not broken because you can’t maintain motivation or satisfaction. You’re experiencing the normal function of a wanting system that was never meant to deliver lasting contentment.
The Comparison Problem
What makes this particularly cruel in our current moment is that we’re surrounded by engineered systems explicitly designed to hijack our dopamine pathways. Social media platforms, dating apps, news feeds, video games – they’ve all figured out what those monkey experiments revealed: unpredictable, intermittent rewards generate more dopamine than predictable ones.
So we scroll, seeking the dopamine hit of that next interesting post, that next notification, that next match. Except we’re not getting hits of pleasure – we’re getting hits of wanting. The system keeps us in a perpetual state of anticipation that never quite resolves into satisfaction. We’re rats pressing levers, convinced that this time, the reward will finally be worth it.
And this pattern doesn’t confine itself to our screens. The person who shows up consistently, who loves reliably, who is genuinely there? That triggers far less dopamine than the person who’s hot and cold, present and absent, attentive and distant. Your brain doesn’t interpret reliability as rewarding – it interprets it as predictable. And predictable doesn’t generate the wanting response.
This is why people leave good relationships for chaotic ones. Why we abandon reliable friendships for dramatic ones. Why the steady job feels boring compared to the precarious venture. Not because there’s something wrong with us, but because our dopamine systems are working exactly as evolution designed them: to keep us pursuing rather than settling.
The partner who texts back immediately doesn’t create the same neurological fireworks as the one who leaves you waiting, wondering, hoping. The friend who’s always available feels less exciting than the one you have to chase. This isn’t about what’s actually good for us – it’s about what our wanting system responds to. And what it responds to is uncertainty, variability, the maybe.
What This Means for Self-Improvement
Understanding dopamine properly should fundamentally change how we approach personal growth. If dopamine is about wanting rather than having, about pursuit rather than attainment, then optimising it won’t bring us closer to contentment – it will just make us better at wanting more.
The productivity gurus selling you dopamine optimisation are essentially teaching you to become more efficiently dissatisfied. You’ll get better at achieving goals, certainly. But you won’t get better at resting in the achievement. You’ll just reset faster and start chasing the next target.
This doesn’t mean abandoning goals or living without ambition. It means understanding that the pursuit itself – that dopamine-driven forward momentum – will never deliver the sense of arrival we’re actually seeking. That has to come from somewhere else entirely.
Working With Rather Than Against Our Wiring
Here’s what I’ve learned, both from neuroscience research and from that year I spent living wild in the Scottish Highlands: contentment doesn’t come from optimising the wanting system. It comes from occasionally stepping off the treadmill entirely.
When you’re cold and wet and tired and you finally get shelter, fire, warmth – there’s a deep satisfaction in that which has nothing to do with dopamine’s forward-looking anticipation. You’re not thinking about the next thing. You’re fully present in this thing. That’s the opioid and endocannabinoid systems delivering actual pleasure, actual relief, actual satisfaction.
The irony is that you need the discomfort to access that satisfaction. Without the cold, the warmth is just temperature. Without the effort, the rest is just inactivity. Without the hunger, the food is just fuel. Without the uncertainty, the presence of someone you love is just routine. Dopamine might drive you towards the goal, but it’s the contrast – the difficulty followed by relief, the absence followed by return – that delivers genuine contentment.
This is why I’m suspicious of lives engineered for comfort and convenience. Not because suffering is virtuous, but because when you remove all friction, all challenge, all discomfort, you also remove the conditions necessary for genuine satisfaction. You’re left with just the wanting system, perpetually scanning for the next target, never quite landing.
The Alternative
What if, instead of optimising for dopamine, we optimised for meaning? For presence? For the kind of satisfaction that comes from full engagement with difficulty, followed by earned rest?
Meaning doesn’t spike and crash the way dopamine does. It accumulates slowly, through repeated choices, through showing up, through commitment to things that matter even when they’re hard. The parent caring for a newborn isn’t riding a dopamine high – they’re exhausted, depleted, sometimes questioning everything. But they’re engaged in something meaningful. The artist struggling with a difficult piece isn’t fizzing with motivation – they’re frustrated, uncertain, stuck. But they’re pursuing something that matters to them. The partner who stays through the boring Tuesday evenings, through illness, through the unglamorous middle stretch of a life built together – that’s not dopamine. That’s something more durable.
Dopamine might get you to the studio, but it won’t keep you there through the difficult middle section when nothing’s working. That requires something deeper: purpose, commitment, the quiet satisfaction of showing up for work that matters even when it doesn’t feel rewarding.
This is the wisdom in every spiritual tradition that’s ever existed: the recognition that perpetual wanting is suffering. That peace comes not from optimising desire but from occasionally transcending it. From being able to rest in what is, rather than constantly pursuing what might be.
Practical Implications
So what does this mean for how you actually live?
First, be suspicious of any system or practice that promises to make you more motivated, more driven, more constantly pursuing. That’s just making your wanting system more efficient. It won’t make you happier. It might make you more productive, but it will definitely make you more restless.
Second, build in proper recovery. Not as preparation for the next pursuit, but as a practice valuable in itself. Time when you’re not optimising, not improving, not chasing. Time when the only point is to exist without wanting anything different than what you have in this moment.
Third, pay attention to what generates actual satisfaction versus what generates wanting. The anticipation of the holiday might be more dopamine-rich than the holiday itself. The planning of the project might feel more exciting than the execution. The early stages of a relationship, all uncertainty and possibility, might feel more thrilling than the steady companionship that comes after. That’s normal. But don’t mistake the dopamine-driven excitement for the thing that will actually bring contentment.
Fourth, cultivate regular engagement with discomfort – cold water, physical challenge, appropriate difficulty – not to build discipline or optimise performance, but to create the conditions for genuine satisfaction. You need the contrast. Without it, comfort becomes baseline, and baseline triggers no response at all.
And finally, perhaps most importantly: notice when you’re in a state of perpetual wanting. When everything becomes about the next thing. When you can’t rest in achievement because you’re already scanning for the next target. When the person in front of you feels less interesting than the possibility of someone else. That’s your dopamine system running the show. It’s not making you happy. It’s just making you want more efficiently.
The Deepest Irony
The deepest irony of our dopamine-optimisation culture is this: the more effectively you hack your motivation system, the less capable you become of contentment. You become excellent at pursuing goals and terrible at resting in their achievement. You optimise yourself into perpetual restlessness.
Perhaps the real self-improvement isn’t learning to want more effectively. Perhaps it’s learning, occasionally, to want less. To rest. To be satisfied with what is rather than perpetually pursuing what might be.
Your dopamine system served your ancestors well in a world of genuine scarcity. But you don’t live in that world anymore. And applying a scarcity-adapted wanting system to a life of relative abundance doesn’t create satisfaction. It creates the paradox of having everything and enjoying nothing, of achieving goals that feel hollow the moment they’re reached, of perpetually pursuing a future that never quite arrives.
The wellness industry won’t tell you this, because there’s no money in contentment. But the research is clear: dopamine creates wanting, not having. Motivation, not satisfaction. The pursuit, not the peace.
What you do with that information is up to you. But perhaps it’s worth asking: are you optimising for the right thing?
The question isn’t how to generate more dopamine. The question is whether you want to spend your life in a state of perpetual wanting, or whether you might occasionally step off the treadmill and discover what satisfaction – real, embodied, present satisfaction – actually feels like.
No responses yet