PROGRESSother people see them. Often we recognize our friends from a distance
based on how they move, even when we can’t see their faces. The way
we move is part of what defines us.
What do we mean when we say, “She’s not herself today”? The
person might be sick; she might be feeling weighed down by disappoint-
ment; she may be tired because she didn’t sleep last night. Whatever
it is, it rarely means that our friend is choosing to act like a different
person. It generally means that aspects of her behavior that are outside
her conscious control are different. And it’s those aspects that we refer
to when we think of “herself ”—the essence of who she is. We may
believe our souls reside in our dopamine circuits, but our friends don’t
believe that.
What else do we neglect when we identify our core being with our
dopamine circuits? We neglect emotion, empathy, the joy of being with
people we care about. If we ignore our emotions, lose touch with them,
they become less sophisticated over time, and may devolve into anger,
greed, and resentment. If we neglect empathy, we lose the ability to
make others feel happy. And if we neglect affiliative relationships, we
will most likely lose the ability to be happy ourselves—and probably die
early. A Harvard study that’s been going on for seventy-four years has
found that social isolation (even in the absence of feelings of loneliness)
is associated with a 50 to 90 percent higher risk of early death. That’s
about the same as smoking, and higher than obesity or lack of exercise.
Our brain needs affiliative relationships just to stay alive.
We also lose the pleasure of the sensory world around us. Instead
of enjoying the beauty of a flower, we imagine only how it would look
in a vase on our kitchen table. Instead of smelling the morning air and
looking at the sky, we consult the weather app on our smartphone, neck
bent, oblivious to the world around us.
Identifying ourselves with our dopamine circuits traps us in a world
of speculation and possibility. The concrete world of here and now is
disdained, ignored, or even feared, because we can’t control it. We can
only control the future, and giving up control is not something dopa-
minergic creatures like to do. But none of it is real. Even a future one
second away is unreal. It is only the stark facts of the present that are