There’s a molecule that runs empires. Not gold, not oil, not even information, but something far smaller. It can fit inside a single thought. Yet it decides who rules, who kneels and who keeps scrolling. Its name is dopamine.
We built an entire civilisation around it. Every addiction, every scroll, every conversation that quietly asks, “Do you want this?” — all of it is dopamine’s architecture. It’s not pleasure itself that drives us. It’s the promise of it. The anticipation. The maybe.
Somewhere between the hunter sharpening his first spear and the teenager refreshing Instagram for likes, that same chemical spark powered both. It made us explore, invent and build. But somewhere along the way, the direction flipped — we stopped chasing survival and started chasing stimulation.
Today, the modern human being lives in what I’d call a Dopamine Republic. Every citizen is both the addict and the dealer. Companies manufacture hits; creators peddle them. Politicians bait outrage; news channels feed it on loop. Even the self-proclaimed enlightened are chasing the same high — only with more sophisticated toys. Likes, validation, virality, outrage — it’s all the same circuitry, repackaged and sold back to us.
Dopamine made humanity restless enough to evolve. Now, that same restlessness threatens to consume us…
‘YOU COULD FEEL BETTER THAN THIS’
People love to talk about “the system” as if it’s an external machine built by someone else. But the truth is, we built it ourselves — precisely because it rewards the one thing we all crave: that brief hit of yes. That invisible tap on the brain that whispers, you could feel better than this.
And so, we keep scrolling.
I often think about how the greatest revolutions of the last century weren’t political or industrial — they were neurological. We learned to weaponise desire. We built economies on algorithms that study the tremors of our attention spans. Our hunger was once for food; now it’s for feedback. Our thirst was once for water; now it’s for reaction.
It’s fashionable to call this “late-stage capitalism”, but that’s too neat, too convenient. This isn’t capitalism gone rogue — this is biology unregulated. It’s the raw circuitry of the human brain running the show without a governor.
We tell ourselves we’re informed, connected, empowered. In truth, we’re overstimulated primates, staring at flashing lights, waiting for another microsecond of relief. Our nervous systems are constantly screaming for more. More news, more likes, more outrage. More everything.
And if we’re honest, we don’t even want satisfaction — we just want the chase.
Dopamine is what made humanity restless enough to evolve. But restlessness without purpose becomes a trap. Every app, every billboard, every whispering advertisement promises the same thing: you could feel better than this.
That whisper — once the source of human progress — is now the mechanism of control. The irony is that even the powerful aren’t immune. The billionaires chasing rockets, the politicians addicted to outrage, the influencers mining approval — they’re all chasing the same chemical ghost as the rest of us. Different toys, same loop.
There’s something tragically poetic about it. The species that conquered gravity can’t conquer its own craving.
CONQUERING CRAVING
When I think of freedom now, it doesn’t feel like political liberty or economic independence. It feels like the ability to sit still while your nervous system screams for more. That’s the real test of consciousness in our age:
Can you resist checking your phone for one hour without feeling phantom vibrations?
Can you finish reading a paragraph without your brain begging for novelty?
Can you stop mid-scroll and realise that the world will keep spinning whether you react or not?
If you can — even briefly — you’re winning a war most people don’t even know they’re fighting.
We keep blaming “the system” — social media, corporations, algorithms, governments. But the system isn’t external anymore; it’s inside us. Every time we take the bait, we reinforce it. Every time we reward the cheap hit of distraction, we strengthen the loop we claim to hate.
And maybe, this was inevitable — a kind of species-wide stress test. Evolution by overstimulation. The weak links drown in noise; the aware ones adapt by restraint. The next evolution won’t come from technology — it’ll come from self-regulation.
Whoever learns to govern their own dopamine will govern their own destiny.
REAL FREEDOM
That sounds poetic until you try it. Go a week without the constant drip of novelty — no social media, no algorithmic playlists, no endless scrolling. You start to notice how loud your own mind becomes when it’s not sedated by dopamine. The silence isn’t peaceful; it’s brutal. You realise how much of your identity has been outsourced to stimulation.
That’s when you see it clearly — this empire of craving we’ve built, not on land or faith, but on chemical dependence.
And yet, I don’t think the answer is to burn down the machine. That’s romantic nonsense. You can’t unbuild a civilisation and you can’t uninvent dopamine. The revolution isn’t external. It’s internal. The real rebellion is to stop feeding the machine from inside your own skull. Because the moment you can look at pleasure and say, not now, you’ve already done something radical. You’ve separated yourself from the circuitry. You’ve reclaimed the steering wheel.
That’s the moment you’re free.
We’re all fighting the same battle — not against politicians or billionaires, but against the ghost of our own wiring. Against the endless whisper that says, you could feel better than this.
Maybe, humanity’s next leap won’t happen on Mars or in AI, but in a quiet room, where someone resists the urge to pick up their phone. Maybe, the future belongs to those who can stay conscious in a world designed to make them forget.
So, I’ve stopped blaming the world for being addictive. The world was always addictive — it’s just efficient at it now.
The responsibility, then, is personal. To become your own regulator. To know when to say no to the thing your brain is begging for. Because the moment you can do that — not perfectly, not forever, but even once in a while — that’s not weakness. That’s sovereignty.
Because freedom, in the end, isn’t the absence of desire. It’s the ability to choose which desires deserve your life.
The writer is a banker based in Lahore. X: @suhaibayaz
Published in Dawn, EOS, December 7th, 2025
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