What's On Your Dopamenu?

dopamine dispatch #7: on why we scroll

In Building a Dopamine Menu: Things to Do *Instead* Of Doomscrolling, lifestyle influencer Payton Sartain opens with a segment listing her five favorite products of the week — a mineral sunscreen, a bottled lemon water, a podcast for entrepreneurs, a set of teacups for sake, a vintage silk robe.

Three to seven ad breaks later, we finally get to hear what kind of ‘actionable items’ she keeps in a list for on-demand, social-media-free pleasure: driving in her car with a Fleetwood Mac song turned all the way up, taking an ‘everything shower’,¹ going grocery shopping,² swimming at the beach, watching an episode of The Bachelor, having a snack, and calling her grandmother.

A clip from Sartain’s episode about the dopamine menu circulated on TikTok, spawning 23,000 videos of other people sharing and scrapbooking their anti-scroll pleasure lists. The trend has been framed in the press as a solution to ‘free-time anxiety’, called ‘a to-do list that brings you joy’, and the Daily Mail even asked: Have Gen Z found the perfect formula for happiness?

Sartain says that she’s not sure where the idea came from originally — she heard it from a businesswoman friend with a ‘hot smart rich agenda’ — but it’s not really hard to find: a 2020 video from How To ADHD called How to Give Your Brain the Stimulation It Needs, where the social worker, podcaster, and ADHD coach Eric Tivers suggested it as an executive dysfunction tool.

As the pop psych story goes, ADHDers have less dopamine, so we are more prone to seeking it in destructive ways, like scrolling social media. While I don’t deny that dopamine plays some role (because it is involved in almost every cognitive process somehow), I’m also not convinced that ADHD can be chalked up to a simple dopamine deficiency,³ nor do I think dopamine equals pleasure (as you are probably sick of hearing me say).

I also can’t find any studies that show scrolling social media directly increases dopamine levels (please send them my way if they exist), so I think a lot of assumptions are being made here, but let’s go with it for a sec.

In Tivers’ dietary metaphor, the dopamenu is presented as a helpful map for externalizing both memory and decision-making, cognitive processes that many ADHDers struggle to do internally. It’s a way out of those moments of listlessness where you don’t know what to do, that murky longing for something. Tivers suggests:

“..when you're like, "I'm so boredddd," grab the menu! I feel like not doing that is almost like going to the grocery store hungry.”

Implied here is choosing to buy junk food because you have not adequately planned your grocery trip, so you choose ‘whatever’s the fastest, easiest, I want to eat this thing now,’ as he says. The dopamenu is about making ‘good dopamine choices’.

So, what does it mean that an executive dysfunction tool for ADHDers became a popular ‘formula for happiness’? And are we really just doomscrolling for stimulation, or is there something else going on?

It’s Not Just Pleasure And I Will Die On This Hill

My own scrolling problem has resurfaced — it’s been a rough year, personally, physically, politically. So at night, I get into bed, open TikTok, and let the scroll wash my head clean of thoughts. I long to be distracted by something meaningless, like cool-toned lip liner and drugstore make-up dupes.⁴ I watch dermatologist influencers review sunscreens and master chefs discuss stainless steel pans and I learn how to gut a fish.

I also get influenced — the more time I spend doing this, the more things I buy.

Scrolling doesn’t necessarily make me feel good, but it does make me feel something. In his book Filling The Void, Marcus Gilroy-Ware argues that this is social media’s main draw — scrolling is an act of emotional regulation.⁵

Boredom prevention is ‘one of capitalism’s oldest problems,’ he writes, because boredom means worker disengagement, which means lower productivity.⁶ Social media is ‘the product of first-world, late-capitalist culture’, and Gilroy-Ware argues that this lens is crucial if we really want to understand feed’s draw — we live in a culture that pushes us to consume, stresses us out, and offers us no real escape, except through consuming more stuff.

Social media companies capitalize on this situation by providing us with a stream of content that makes us feel something, for a moment, outside of the reality that is distressing us. He draws on Mark Fisher’s concept of depressive hedonia, which, in contrast to anhedonia — the inability to feel pleasure — Fisher wrote was:

an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that “something is missing,” but no appreciation that the mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.⁷

Fisher had observed this in his students, who he saw not as apathetic to the problems of the world, but grappling with a sense of powerlessness that led them to retreat into digital media. Fisher also makes a claim about ADHD in this chapter, arguing that it’s a ‘pathology of late capitalism,’ and ‘a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture.’

This is the flipside to the dopamine deficiency theory, swinging from the all-biological pole to the all-social pole. Fisher was writing in the aughts following Prozac’s meteoric rise and fall, which popularized the metaphor of chemical imbalance as the cause of mental illness, an idea he wanted to challenge. I don’t actually think either of these poles capture the complexity of ADHD (it’s both/and!), but I do agree with Fisher’s overall point that it’s not simply a private, medical issue, but rather, a public, political one.

Fisher also thought that ADHD in his students made visible a mismatch between old, disciplinary forms of education (deep focus on reading and writing, stringent time management, top-down control) and the “New Flesh” — a reference to Cronenberg’s Videodrome, where a man grapples with his body’s fusing to technology.⁸

Constant bombardment with media alters both our sense of time and our style of attention — something those of us with ADHD already know a lot about. It makes a lot of sense, then, that the dopamenu — a coping mechanism for executive dysfunction — originated in the ADHD corner of the internet.

And it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in a personal sense — we all need ways to cope. The problem I see is that quite a lot of the alternatives to consuming the scroll are just consuming other things, like shopping, eating out, or upping your video game budget to $500 per month.

The dopamenu frames the problems of consumption in the logic of consumption — personal choice. If you feel sad, bored, or distressed in any way, it is because you, the consumer, made the wrong choice, not because there is anything wrong with the system of consumption you find yourself in.

In Consuming Life, the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman wrote that a consumer society is driven by the pursuit of happiness through immediate gratification, making boredom into a sort of bogeyman. He argued that our sense of time under consumerism was like a pointillist painting — not a straight line or a spiral, but a smattering of points that each represent different possibilities, disconnected from the past or future.

The TikTok feed is actually a good example of this — every video is a brief window into another point of time, which users can scroll through infinitely. The irony here is that, ultimately, infinite choice is unfulfilling. A recent study found that quickly switching between videos, a la scrolling the TikTok feed, actually increases boredom, which would seem to support Bauman’s ideas — there’s no meaning, no connection, and no depth in pointillist time, so instead of making us happy, unlimited possibility makes us listless and dissatisfied.

This is fine for consumerism, though. According to Bauman, it’s actually really good at absorbing dissent into itself, and then using that dissent as ‘a major resource of its own reproduction, reinvigoration, and expansion.’

The dopamenu shows this process in action — you could see the dissatisfaction that arises from doomscrolling as a kind of bodily dissent to life under consumerism, a sense that something is very wrong here. In response, people try to find a way to regain control by organizing other possibilities for momentary happiness into a menu. It’s an attempt to structure pointillist time, to resist the overwhelm of choice that consumerism creates.

But because, as Gilroy-Ware argues, our options for escape under consumerism are mostly just consuming something else, inevitably the dopamenu involves a lot of market-based options, like buying yourself a little treat. Economists call this ‘the lipstick index’, and it is common during economic downturns — times of widespread bad feelings.

The digital media researcher Trine Syvertsen thinks that abstaining from social media — and posting about it online — can also be a way of signaling what kind of person you are.

“In each historical phase, expressions of media dislike and dissatisfaction are coloured by how people handle dislike and discomfort more generally, and in our era, self-optimisation is a frequent way of dealing with problems that have social or political roots,” she writes.⁹

Because governments have been pushing to digitize everything for the last few decades, and most work in the Global North now requires using phones and computers, it is difficult for individuals to ever truly disconnect. For many of us,

“it becomes a life-long struggle like a constant cycle of dieting and gaining weight, with no final solution.”

I love this quote, because it brings us right back to the diet culture of it all — the dopamenu is a digital diet for more efficiently managing our time. Things like scrolling, watching TV, and playing video games are framed as ‘empty calories’ in the dopamenu, ‘brain desserts’ that we should only have sometimes, because they are ultimately bad for us.

Managing the threat of ‘junk,’ be it food or media, is the job of the individual, even though these products are being mass-produced and sold to us in a process we have no control over. Scholars call this responsibilization, and it’s a core feature of free market capitalism. Syvertsen explains it like this:

“If you are a responsible citizen you are online, download apps, check your messages and keep the health app notifications on, yet, you make sure that you are a good role model, remain present and productive, handle privacy risks and don’t glance at your phone while spending time with others. The principle of self-regulation means that the problem is on you as a citizen, user, educator, parent and community member.”

Consuming Disabled Knowledge

In this context, the broad appeal of the dopamenu makes perfect sense — it’s that impulse to find a system that fixes everything, the same one that keeps me trying planners and apps and getting out the whiteboard when I feel totally lost, dysfunctional, and out of control.

Decision-making is hard, and it only gets harder the more possibilities exist and the more pressure you’re under. Life under late capitalism is rapidly intensifying. Brain fog and chronic fatigue are spreading, whether from mass Covid infections, or heat exhaustion, or burnout. The future is disabled, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha reminds us, in a vision that goes beyond just acceptance, but to imagine how ‘our cultures, knowledge, and communities shape the world.’

While I disagree with Tivers that doomscrolling is just a neurotransmitter problem that can be fixed through personal choice, I do think the dopamenu is an important example of disabled skill-sharing. It’s a visual aide, a go-to accommodation for neurodivergent people who struggle with planning and memory — if you can’t hold it all in your head, you write it down and post it on the wall.

So, when Sartain says she doesn’t know where the practice came from, she is erasing disabled knowledge. When influencers make aspirational supercuts of cappuchinos and matcha lattes and trips to the gym to show off their dopamenus, they are consuming disabled knowledge and spitting it back out as a status symbol that shows how responsible, self-controlled, and healthy they are.

But if Bauman is right, that consumerism will always eat dissent and turn it back into profit, then even disabled knowledge can be cannibalized by capital. “The life strategy of a fully fledged and seasoned consumer is wrapped around visions of ‘new dawns,’” Bauman wrote.

A consumer is always looking for a reinvention of self, a new position from which to view the sunrise — but what’s missing is ‘a change in the landscape’. Notably, none of the dopamenus I found listed any sort of political engagement — no community meetings, no neighborhood organizing, no volunteering for larger causes. Most dopamenus read as profoundly lonely experiences, with little more than calling a friend or going out to dinner in the way of social options.

Is it possible to make a dopamenu that isn’t focused on personal happiness or goal accomplishment? What kind of a list would that be?

1. which apparently means a hair mask, a full-body exfoliation and wash, a full-body shave, and an immediate application of moisturizer and oil while still wet, so you emerge feeling ‘like a dolphin’

2. actually one of the seven circles of hell for me personally, but okay??

3. For a critique from someone who knows way more about neuroscience than me, see Table 1, page 5 in Ganon 2009

4. Nina Pool is a treasure, though

5. Or, as I said more succinctly in the dopamine politics video I made last year: it’s a cope!!

6. See chapter 4 in William Davies’ The Happiness Industry for more about this.

7. from Capitalist Realism, as quoted by Gilroy-Ware. also: “the pleasure principle” is the idea that we have an instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain. the term is from Freud, but the idea can be traced back to Jeremy Bentham (the panopticon guy) who is credited with founding utilitarianism.

8. also my favorite Cronenberg movie, still so relevant, wow. a body horror must-watch.

9. from Digital Detox: The Politics of Disconnecting, which I found in the excellent recommendations over at Irrational Technology!