whywesuffer

We suffer because we crave, and we crave because we were hacked.

We were hacked with the language of D - dopamine.

We use dopamine to learn where reward and threat lie. We have always been hacked by dopaminergic substances and behaviours, but now this system has been intentionally manipulated to make us crave things that serve other people.

We are shown flashing lights and shiny baubles; timed and targeting advertising. We are exposed to OLED screens and magenta masquerading as blue, with everything cranked up stimulate us to the max.

All of this is to produce phasic bursts of dopamine within your brain that encode things as salient. Desirable. Repugnant. Good or bad; it does not matter. 

All your mind knows is that it wants. It wants more or it wants less or it wants both more and less at the same time.

This is all because of dopamine hacking. Not the intentional type (which you should avoid like poison) but the enforced type. The type that is pushed on us by branded products and social media and the infernal racket when we go to the shop.

Those berries on the tree have been turned into neon lights that play music and squirt high fructose corn syrup straight into our gaping mouths. 

This is why we suffer. We have been programmed to.

We have cranked the volume on life so high that our dvar is spiralling out of control. It’s only getting worse with AI changing advertisement placements in real-time to try to keep you alert, glued to the screen, looking for the tiger in the bushes. And this is only the beginning.

This is going to kill us.

You have to change this, yourself. The world will not do it for you. The hungry ghosts are in charge and they want their food.

You have to change your phone to black and white, limit your social media use, and train your system to ignore phasic bursts.

But you have to remember that you will never be able to shut them out them completely; this is how we evolved to learn.

So you curate your cage. The tiger is a tiger and is not easily controlled. You change its environment.

Listen to music of your choosing to drown out the noise of the arcade. Wear sunglasses inside to take the edge off the lights.

Does this sound autistic to you?

The autistic folks and those with adhd are more sensitive, that is all. And a likely reason that adhd is on the rise is that more people are being pushed over the diagnosable dvar threshold.

There is no black and white for adhd and autism; it is a sliding scale and a spectrum.

When I hit my big upgrade in 2025 I somehow reset my adhd / dvar to the level I had as a pre-schooler. I no longer suffer like I did. I no longer have RSD. I no longer crave more and hyperfocus to drown everything out.

The lesson: this process is reversible.

But the process is happening to us all.

Autism is a spectrum, as people say. It operates in many dimensions.

But dopamine dysregulation is a greyscale. It increases or it decreases based on your global dvar level.

Everyone is being pushed toward dysregulation by the unethical marketing shoved down their throat before they can even crawl. Flashing lights on the baby’s mobile, toddlers playing with tiktok while the airplane taxis out, pre-schoolers flicking through youtube videos faster than they can load.

Each one of these children is being pushed toward a world full of craving and emptiness.

You can take steps to lower your global dvar - your suffering and emptiness - through regular training.

It’s not your fault.

But it’s your responsibility to fix it.

/jb202509051201