I think the absolute worst term to come out of this age of pseudo-scientific puritanical bullshit has got to be “dopamine addiction”. “You’re addicted to feeling good and having fun” bitch yeah???? What else are we on this earth to do??
Worse than that, it has led to people fundamentally misunderstanding what dopamine is and the role it plays in the body. Dopamine is not just the reward hormone, it also plays a crucial role in movement. When we were first understanding what dopamine was and what it did, we did human trials with giving some people a dopamine agonist so that they had two little dopamine in their bodies and giving other people extra dopamine so that they had too much dopamine in their bodies. The people who receive the dopamine agonist, who had two little dopamine in their bodies, developed a movement disorder similar to Parkinson's and actually led to furthering the understanding of what Parkinson's is and how it functions (and how it can possibly be treated or cured). The people who got too much dopamine developed symptoms of psychosis (which briefly led to a theory that schizophrenia was caused by too much dopamine before that theory was debunked and discarded). Kids who are "addicted to their phones" or video games or porn or whatever Boogeyman of the week it is aren't developing psychosis as a result, they do not have an actual excess of dopamine. People who go on "dopamine diets" or "dopamine detoxes" don't suddenly develop movement disorders because they aren't actually detoxing dopamine from their body. The role that hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin play in our bodies and our brains are so much more complicated and nuanced than they get boiled down to on social media.
