Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (2021)

This book was extremely interesting. Lembke draw both on her clinical work as a psychiatrist and on her research (she's the head of a program at Stanford devoted to addiction research), which makes for gripping, highly stimulating reading. The book is of relevance to my course on Media and Minds, to my thinking about the modern condition, and, not least, to my own efforts to live well. It joins David Courtwright's Age of Addiction and Bruce Alexander's Globalization of Addiction as the third book in my addiction trilogy. A central point Lembke makes has to do with the pain-pleasure balance and how, in complex ways, the brain's homeostatic tendencies respond to pleasure. Like Courtwright and Alexander, Lembke recognizes the unprecented nature of the modern age of plenty, in which we are inundated by dopamine-generating substances and behaviors. Her recommendations include various forms of self-binding (a la Odysseus) and even the pursuit of moderate pain, in order to stave off greater pain.