Dopamine Nation Review

A review of the book Dopamine Nation, by Anna Lembke

T. Dylan Daniel
PageDAO Magazine
Published in
10 min readDec 18, 2022

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I want to start this review by saying that I did this book differently. Instead of reading it line for line, I listened to it while taking Uber Eats orders. In my own life, there was a massive dopamine spike this year — between January and April, I’d 10x’ed my cryptocurrency portfolio. An equally dramatic shift back the other direction then took place, starting with the collapse of Terra/Luna, and continued throughout the year. Watching my funds dry up was not fun, and I was not alone. No matter what happened, I redoubled my resolve and vowed to stick it out with the project at PageDAO; but the story of 2022 for me will always be the story of a bleak, desolate year in which I felt my connection to the rest of the human race wither as I struggled with depression and a tried to stay involved in Web3 even though I struggled with my bills.

It is important for the reader to understand that the perspective from which I approached Dopamine Nation was one that included a lot of personal pain related to dopamine — dopamine was the hormone in my brain most altered by my big win, and then my big loss. There’s nothing like having something really pleasant happen to you, especially after months of learning to eke it out because it is so hard to make good decisions even in the best situation, say a bull market for example, to build up your expectations. Then, when the bear market comes, the world turns gray and you feel older. You’re not as attentive or as aware. You find yourself unable to understand what happened. Your expectations are now higher than the reality in which you live, and that is just a long way of saying that you are feeling some pain.

I felt that the author, Anna Lembke, M.D., did a wonderful job of taking the mechanical reductive explanation of what happens in brains and why, and tying that explanation down to lived events people really experience. The lovely thing about the mechanistic worldview espoused by modern neuroscientists and indeed addiction specialists is that symptoms themselves are able to be accounted for, and, in the good cases, addressed in this way.

Dr. Lembke doesn’t write for specialists. A clear master of her craft, she speaks in easy language and paints pictures with her words. This unique style…

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T. Dylan Daniel
PageDAO Magazine

Philosopher. Founder of WIP Publishing & PAGE DAO. Author of Formal Dialectics and Bring Back Satire. https://dylan.cent.co/