It fascinates me how, within a fraction of time, we humans — when left alone — forget the fullness of the forty-eight hours we have just lived. The excitement, the chaos, the wandering conversations, the sense of movement and purpose — all of it seems to dissolve the moment solitude arrives. What remains is a silent, cold evening, where I sit alone, writing these thoughts into a blog.
I find it unsettling how the mind — or perhaps the brain, I’m not sure which — convinces us that those vivid moments never truly mattered. Time spent figuring things out, being present, feeling alive, simply disappears from memory. In isolation, none of it seems real anymore.
Dopamine, that neurological agent so often associated with pleasure and motivation, plays a crucial role here. As a man, I notice that solving problems, helping others, and being there for my friends gives me powerful dopamine surges. When these surges continue uninterrupted for days, something strange happens: a crash. The brain’s pleasure system collapses under its own excess. The baseline rises so high that the simple joys which once sustained me — playing the guitar, reading, spending time with myself — suddenly feel hollow.
These activities, which once brought quiet satisfaction in an otherwise work-focused life, now appear mundane and irrelevant. The systems I build for myself, the goals, the experiments meant to keep me aligned — none of them seem to work in these moments. Motivation disappears. Focus dissolves. Output becomes negligible.
I once read about experiments where dopamine was removed from the brain, and the subjects didn’t merely lose happiness — they lost movement, speech, reaction. They simply existed. (I’ll try to find and add the paper here.) That idea stays with me.
The long conversations, the wandering nights, the extended moments of connection — they seem to steal from my ordinary pleasures. This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this state, but it’s the first time I’ve been aware enough to observe it while it’s happening. So I’m writing it down, trying to give shape to something that usually slips past unnoticed.
This brings up an uncomfortable set of questions. What is joy? Do we even need it? How much is enough? It sometimes feels like the human brain doesn’t truly understand joy at all. The mind experiences feelings, but the brain operates on chemical transactions. No matter how intensely we pursue joy, the moment we’re separated from its sources, the brain throws us into stillness. And in that stillness, the loneliness feels deeper than it did before the joy ever existed.
I don’t have answers to any of this. I don’t even have the dopamine to properly research it. Writing this is already an act of recovery — a small return to stability, a faint clarity emerging after the joy agent has withdrawn. The emptiness, the echo of the keyboard clicks in the room, make me realize how fleeting joy really is. A moment is nothing more than a fraction within an indifferent universe.
If you embrace the moment fully, you pay for it later. But if you don’t embrace it fully, did it ever matter at all?
A question keeps returning to me: Is the moment I’m in worthy enough of the crash that follows? Should I accept the rise and the fall as a single, inseparable experience?
There are no answers here. Only questions.
At least there are questions.