It’s been a chaotic couple of weeks, and I’m getting ready to head out of town, so I don’t have a new practice to share today. But I do want to share what’s been on my mind.
I’ve been reading Daniel Lieberman’s The Molecule of More, which explores how a single chemical—dopamine—drives love, sex, creativity, ambition, and maybe even the fate of our species. The book offers a fascinating framework for understanding why “the next thing” always seems to hold such power over us.
Consider this passage:
The brain manages the external world by dividing it into separate regions, the peripersonal and the extrapersonal—basically, near and far. Peripersonal space includes whatever is in arm’s reach; things you can control right now by using your hands. This is the world of what’s real, right now. Extrapersonal space refers to everything else—whatever you can’t touch unless you move beyond your arm’s reach, whether it’s three feet or three million miles away. This is the realm of possibility.
With those definitions in place, another fact follows, obvious but useful: since moving from one place to another takes time, any interaction in the extrapersonal space must occur in the future. Or, to put it another way, distance is linked to time. For instance, if you’re in the mood for a peach, but the closest one is sitting in a bin at the corner market, you can’t enjoy it now. You can only enjoy it in the future, after you go get it. Acquiring something out of your reach may also take some planning. It could be as simple as standing up to turn on a light, walking to the market for that peach, or figuring out how to launch a rocket to get to the moon. This is the defining characteristic of things in the extrapersonal space: to get them requires effort, time, and in many cases, planning. By contrast, anything in the peripersonal space can be experienced in the here and now. Those experiences are immediate. We touch, taste, hold, and squeeze; we feel happiness, sadness, anger, and joy.
This brings us to a clarifying fact of neurochemistry: the brain works one way in the peripersonal space and another way in the extrapersonal space. If you were designing the human mind, it makes sense that you would create a brain that distinguishes between things in this way, one system for what you have and another for what you don’t. For early humans, the familiar phrase “either you have it or you don’t” could be translated into “either you have it or you’re dead.”
From an evolutionary standpoint, food that you don’t have is critically different from food that you do have. It’s the same for water, shelter, and tools. The division is so fundamental that separate pathways and chemicals evolved in the brain to handle peripersonal and extrapersonal space. When you look down, you look into the peripersonal space, and for that the brain is controlled by a host of chemicals concerned with experience in the here and now. But when the brain is engaged with the extrapersonal space, one chemical exercises more control than all the others, the chemical associated with anticipation and possibility: dopamine. Things in the distance, things we don’t have yet, cannot be used or consumed, only desired. Dopamine has a very specific job: maximizing resources that will be available to us in the future; the pursuit of better things.
Lieberman’s framework lands with a kind of elegant simplicity.
We developed a deeply entrenched belief that the next thing will be better, because we had to believe this to keep going. That’s what dopamine demanded of us.
Translated to modern life, we’ve built trillion-dollar companies around that same premise—the joy, the dopamine, is in the procuring, not the possessing. The ordering. The tracking. The waiting. How many things have you bought with the best of intentions— the planner, the Peloton, the blender. Things you couldn’t wait to use to change your life. Only to immediately become disenchanted.
The joy isn’t in the having. It’s in the seeking.
And I think Americans, in particular, are especially vulnerable to this loop. Our national mythology is built on it. We’re descended from people who believed so fervently that the future could be better that they boarded ships for a new world. They gave up everything to chase that next thing just out of reach.
Even within America, we can still trace the pattern: New England thrift versus California flash. Those whose ancestors landed and said, “this is good enough,” versus those who heard there might be gold in the hills outside San Francisco and risked it all again.
When we think about “wise” cultures, we often think of those rooted in one place for thousands of years—traditions that found harmony in today rather than tomorrow. Taoists, Buddhists, many Indigenous peoples, Sufis, Shinto practitioners, even the Stoics—all centered on presence and acceptance rather than the unquenchable hunger for what could be.
It’s fascinating—and a little humbling—to realize that what we often call ambition or progress might just be the same ancient dopamine circuit, unmoderated, running on 21st-century hardware.
As I keep thinking about parenting, technology, and how to live more intentionally, I’m realizing that maybe the goal isn’t to silence dopamine, but to learn how to harness it to help us reach our goals.
I feel my own dopamine circuitry is especially unhinged. I’m always scanning for the next thing—the one that will finally make life perfect. I’ve owned forty-five cars in twenty-five years of driving. I have a drawer full of e-ink devices that were going to make me more thoughtful. Stacks of notebooks and planners, still in their packaging, after serving their real purpose: the dopamine hunt. I’m trying to get honest about it, mostly with myself. It’s overwhelming, embarrassing, humbling. But it’s me.
So, for now, I’m just feeding this material into my subconscious and letting my default mode network chew on it. Thanks for reading—and for letting your DMN do the same alongside mine.