Creating Amidst The Machine

On dopamine addiction, Lent, and the concrete

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

I recently read this piece from Ted Gioia, “The State of the Culture, 2024”¹ where he created the following graph on ‘dopamine culture’:

There isn’t really much that’s new here; we all have seen “The Social Dilemma” —we know that our attention is the product that makes media companies money. We understand the dopamine reward loop. But what is fascinating here is the speed — the form! — that forms our addiction. It’s not so much the what of addiction but the how.

For instance, years ago we’d save up and purchase an album, listening to it for days, then with the ease and speed of technology we could simply pick and play our favorite tracks from our favorite artists on a streaming service. Now even a song is too long to hold our attention and we settle for tinny songs on TikTok or 15-second reels as our form of — not entertainment, but simply of distraction.

It’s the swipes, the truncated texts, the tiktoks, the 15 seconds of a song, the reel that are now forming us. It’s not so much that screens tap into our dopamine-addled heads but that even a screen is not enough to keep us entertained unless it’s constantly moving. It’s the dopamine hit.

As a mother, this is frightening to think how formative little brains are likely truncated in their full human development by the Pavlovian drool of returning to a constantly moving screen. But I worry for all of us how the machine that we’ve willingly hooked ourselves up to — these machines do allow for good things (like reading Substack, or listening to thoughtful podcasts, or connecting with friends across distance) — but more often than not, our addiction to them is making us altogether less human.

What happens when we never have to be bored?

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While I can turn into what I half-jokingly call “the crazy cruise director” in managing my household and its use of screens, the concern isn’t so much about being anti-screens per se, as it is about questions of formation. What happens when we’re never presented with silence or boredom or even joy — but instead are habituated to receive noise and only a numbness of overindulgence of pixels?

Our formation is stunted.

While our dopamine addiction to screens further atomizes the human person, I supposed this isn’t new. We’ve already stunted our formation when we divide up the human person into blocks of time (thinking of identity in terms of what we produce) or partition ourselves into sections: emotion, will, intellect and so on, and not as a composite whole. While this dopamine loop is worrying in how it forms us, the tendency to think of ourselves in pieces isn’t that new.

Christian scholars like Dallas Willard remind us that this formation is about the whole person being transformed into the likeness of Christ. Christian faith isn’t about checking off doctrinal boxes but is about a whole-person transformation. We stunt our formation when we live only in one part of ourselves.

Willard writes on formation not just happening through our thinking or hearing:

“The one reason why the idea of spiritual transformation through being merely preached at and taught doesn’t work is because it does not involve the body in the process of transformation. One of the ironies of spiritual formation is that every “spiritual” discipline is a bodily behavior. We have to involve the body in spiritual formation because that’s where we live and what we live from. So now spiritual formation is formation of the inner being of the human being, resulting in transformation of the whole person, including the body in its social context. Spiritual formation is never merely inward.”²

When we’ve made our spiritual lives only inward, only part and not whole, only the cherry on top of an upwardly mobile life, we are like unformed vessels, crude and misshapen. When we only engage our thinking but not our emotions or active will, we are stunted in our discipleship.

What does this have to do with screens and making in the age of the machine?

Screens promise an “everywhere” existence while being nowhere in particular.³ They lure the false promise from the Garden that we can be “like God, knowing good and evil” (and choosing which to follow).

But, spiritual formation happens to the extent that we get our bodies involved.

Photo by Alice Dietrich on Unsplash

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When we make transformation about what we think or mentally assent to, we can stay in our tribes, only hang with those who think or vote the same way we do. But if formation involves all of us — from our bodies, to our neighborhood sidewalks, to the civic meeting on Thursday nights, to bringing a meal, or looking an unhoused person in the eye — then it means we cannot simply stay isolated. We can isolate ourselves in the dopamine constant scroll, or we can keep ourselves isolated in ideological ghettos.

Transformation always requires the concrete.

To be formed and as scripture says to be“transformed by the renewing of your mind” we cannot stay isolated (as the addiction game of a screen siren calls to us). We must turn outward. And the first place we turn outward to is to the very stuff of earth.

We turn to toothaches. And sore muscles, and bitten fingernails. We turn to slow-cooked meals, and the hum of a blinking lightbulb.

Here’s an example: In Bret Lott’s Letters & Life (which I’m working my way through) he has an essay in which he’s writing about precision. In a sort of Writers Workshop moment, Lott shares the first sentence of Richard Brautigan’s short story.

Here it is: “My entrance into the thing came about this way: One day I was standing in front of my shack, eating an apple and staring at a black ragged toothache sky.”⁴ Lott writes: “With this word ‘toothache,’ we have been placed on a three-dimensional grid and know now not only exactly what the sky looked like but exactly the ache and trouble and mystery of a young man’s life.”

Good writing, then, always helps us not only feel soil under our fingernails or the spray of a green apple when you bite it, but also has something of “the unseeable realm of description.”

A “toothache sky” works because we’ve had a nagging pain in our tooth. We know that sensation in our bodies and thus, we know the sort of ‘toothache sky’ in the more abstract parts of ourselves.

When we absorb the concrete — whether it’s as an act of paying attention to our surroundings or even using the concrete in our making — our (artistic? human?) formation grows. Stuff actually matters.

Another example. George Saunders, in his Substack, answers a reader’s question who feels like s/he can’t get past sentimentality in his/her prose.
Saunders replies with this line:

“Honestly: all big conceptual questions “reduce to” the deletion or compression or reimagination of specific lines in the work at-hand.”

The problem of sentimental writing isn’t because of one’s background, he notes, but always getting into the weeds with words and sentences. It involves taking the elements of a sentence apart to see what’s working and what is not. What is lazy or cheap, and what is genuinely real.

We’re so apt to think that our problems with making — or with life generally — need big overhauls. But Saunders reminds us that it is the minutiae where real change takes place.

All work flows from the heart of its maker. Ultimately by taking time to work through one’s own work — even at the level of a sentence — to make it more true to human experience, it evidences this truth (Saunders again):

“Great writing stems from the idea that what’s happening to us down here matters and is sacred.  Not just the big things, but every little thing.”

I suppose the whole of this essay is to say: real things, concrete things, really matter. Matter matters. The more concrete we are it not only makes art worth looking at, or listening to, or worth reading, but also obliterates the sort of secular/sacred divide we’ve made between our minds, bodies, and souls.

Stuff matters. It matters for art and it matters for formation.

Maybe the best thing you could do in response would be to stop scrolling and go and take a walk.

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Over to you —> I welcome your comments.

And — I’d love to hear if there’s something you’re giving up for Lent. I’ve given up social media and have found my brain much more clear and I’m filling up on novels instead! How about you?

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This is a part of a new weekly series on creativity and a generative life, based off my reading. An earlier piece, "On Generative Work,” can be read here.

I appreciate you subscribing and sharing.

For more of my work, check out The Willowbrae Institute, my books (Finding Holy in the Suburbs and A Spacious Life) and The Cartographers Podcast.

1. It’s a great article — go and have a read. This post has been making the rounds (and it provided an excellent jumping off point for a conversation on technology we had at The Cartographers Podcast, coming out soon).

2. Dallas Willard, “Spiritual Formation: What it is and How it is Done,” https://dwillard.org/articles/spiritual-formation-what-it-is-and-how-it-is-done

3. I’ve written a lot about this in A Spacious Life in the allures of “freedom” and the chapter, “Jesus isn’t on Instagram.”

4. Bret Lott, Letters & Life, 57. Subsequent quotes are from p. 58.