Loading Dopamine in a Cart: When Want Disguises Itself as Need

In this long form, I reflect on the constant chase, the unsettling void that comes after, and the desirable vs. undesirable chase.

 

The prospect of something is more desirable than the thing itself. Because there is an underlying chase that hums inaudibly inside of us and makes us sway to its tunes.

Online shopping keeps you motivated till the time retail fatigue doesn’t hit you. And for me, retail therapy becomes retail fatigue in no time. My window shuts off very early. I hit gold on the very first page most of the times. And then comes the act of waiting, which is driven with excitement. It is like all elements of the universe conspiring together to make the product fall into your lap. The domino spirals into action from processing and dispatching to delivery. Like usual, that day too I got what I wanted in the first click. Right when I was adding the sparkling accessory to my shopping cart, I had an epiphany.

“Do I really need this?”

A question that is not part of a shopaholic’s lexicon. A question that can trigger hell and raise a storm in every shopaholic.

I immediately closed the website and thought of returning to it when the feeling wears off. I gave myself a day’s time to process this question. I was sure that in a day, I would be back into action.

To my chagrin, the epiphany still gnawed at me and refused to transmute itself as a passing cloud. I thought of digging deeper and looking longer at my jewellery box. After 2 mins of rummaging through the contents, I came to a conclusion. I never needed this accessory in the first place.

But an inner voice quickly retorted, ‘But you might want it.’

Yes, we all have been taught the difference between needs and wants. I might not have a need for this accessory but the feeling of wanting made me add it to the cart. Then I realised the cart was not holding a product; it was holding a feeling. A feeling that I most certainly ignored. And then I asked myself, “Where does this feeling of want come from? What lurks deeper under the shiny coating of want, making itself unseen and too difficult to fathom?”

Emotional void?

Then I looked at my surroundings and I felt betrayed by the ‘want’ which cloaked itself in the disguise of ‘need’ and featured in my thoughts to make bad purchase decisions. The result was glaring in front of my eyes. But the feeling of wanting is not only to blame because the kingpin behind all its actions, from which the former finds it very hard to wriggle free from its clutches, is our EMOTIONS.  

An emotional void which seeks dopamine to fill its cup is the one which makes us buy things that we don’t need. To keep the wheel of happiness moving, we lay our cards upon an object that promises us happiness. Do we actually get the happiness that we chase? Yes, we do but it is temporary. The novelty in the object soon fades in about 2 to 3 days. The effect tapers off and we are left to our baseline happiness.

When Meemaw (Sheldon’s grandmother) of Young Sheldon fame asks Sheldon, “Should we get an ice cream? When he was bemoaning the fight between his mother and father over the Oklahoma move, his words resonated deeply with me.

He says firmly, 'You cannot fix my emotional crisis with an ice cream.'

Doesn’t it ring a bell?

We are just fixing our emotional void with an ice cream. The objects that we purchase are metaphorically ‘an ice cream’. Just like the taste of sweetened cream mixed with fruits, nuts and milk will linger only for a short while, the objects that come with a badge of happiness will soon lose their charm. The constant chase of dopamine makes us impulsively purchase the objects.

We seek refuge from the emotions that unsettle us, thinking that buying new objects will win us happiness and rescue us from the claws of a vulnerable crisis.

When we fix our emotional crisis with correct coping mechanisms, we will realise there is no need for an ice cream to sweeten our mood. All we need is to listen to our emotions when they are talking to us. When we refuse to listen to them, they will be even more resilient and yell from the rooftop. And still, if we turn deaf ears to their deafening yell, they will find their own ways to come to us.  And the feeling of want is one of the ways. Buying to satisfy the want becomes a band-aid-like sealing off of the wound temporarily. We fool ourselves thinking the band-aid will heal the wound but the band-aid peels off very soon without healing it completely and we soon lay our bets on a new 'want' to be the band-aid to the festering wound.

Also, we chase because we love the fact of chasing. The moment we hit ‘add to cart’, there starts the chase. An illusionary happiness builds inside us and continues to tantalise us till the time the object is received by us.

But is all chase UNDESIRABLE?

Not really.

Chasing is not undesirable but chasing the wrong things to solve our emotional crisis is. We jump from one emotional high to another emotional high because the in-between is boring. The in-between lacks dopamine and we want to operate from one dopamine to the next dopamine. A bitter truth dawned upon me that day. The satisfaction and pleasure of buying an object is short-lived and we fall into the in-between very quickly. We need another high to rise from the in-between to feel better. Hence the maddening chase continues.

When does a chase get desirable?

The in-between isn’t empty. It is a time to reflect on what matters to us. So being in the in-between without seeking instant gratification is the real chase that we should aim for.

So, I asked myself, “If I am going to chase something, what should it be?” Another inner voice that was silent all the time, thinking and reflecting on this whole reward motivation loop, chipped in. Here is what it had to say:

·     Chase knowledge – chasing knowledge prolongs the dopamine surge in us, which arrives not immediately but that is where the beauty is.  It allows us to embrace the in-between and delays the gratification, making the joy in us stay for long. When we actually set out to learn something, it brings us joyful exchange between us and our teachers. We bump into a new piece of information that starts the churn and opens our world view. Even if we learn one new word or one new puzzle, it fills us with unparalleled joy. We slowly catch up to feel-good hormones, without the law of diminishing returns factor coming into play.

 

·     Chase experiences – chasing new experiences opens up new neural connections and fortifies our cognitive thinking abilities.  We don’t have to fly to another country or go on a wilderness trail to begin our adventure. Our everyday spots are enough to offer you a truckload of experience. The chase to look at different experiences through a positive lens is a chase that can only bring fresh perspectives, empathy for others and unbridled joy for ourselves and the place we live in. The quiet in-between begins to overlap with the dopamine so much so that we cannot even tell apart one from the other.

 

All this while I was thinking that the constant chase of dopamine makes the world move. But no. It is in the in-between that the world shifts – and we make better decisions when we learn to sit there. We just need to listen to our impulse and slow it down with our self-inquiry in those mighty minutes (the period between impulse and action).

The real chase is like a true friend who will tell us the truth even when we don’t like it. It doesn’t sugarcoat; it calls a spade a spade. It demands truth from us and asks us to soothe ourselves in reflective ways, instead of making us add things (that we hardly need) to the cart. And that’s when the chase starts feeling more like a nourishment – a catalyst towards our growth – than being a potent poison that numbs us into a void.

 

 

 

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