Why Normal Life Feels So Boring

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Four years ago, we were just making TikToks, but it feels like there are no friendships left in mom talk.

Alok Kanojia (0:12)

You act like you're better than everyone, you're not.

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I can't trust anyone in this group.

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She's just dead to me.

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There's so much the public doesn't know.

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Alok Kanojia (1:00)

I'm supposed to chase money, bitches, cocaine, right? I'm supposed to chase happiness and marriage, and a fulfilling fatherhood, and a rewarding career. We're supposed to experience bits of pleasure, and then we try to duplicate that pleasure. And the Buddha says, this is a mistake. Today, we're gonna talk about the addictive personality. So we know that there are addictions to particular things. Like if I have a history of alcoholism in my family, I have a gene mutation in my GABA receptor that makes me predisposed to being addicted to alcohol.

We also know there are other kinds of addictions, like behavioral addictions, like pornography addiction, which we explore over here. And so there are addictions to particular things. And if you listen to sort of the wisdom out there, there's this idea that a particular addiction has an evidence-based approach. And that's true. So here, for example, is my cognitive behavioral therapy for substance use disorders. This is specifically around cocaine addiction. Here is my treatment protocol for helping people with cocaine, okay? But there's a problem, because some of us aren't addicted to one thing. We have a tendency to get addicted to a lot of things. And this is what's tricky, is that we don't stay addicted to the same thing forever, right? So it's not like we fall in love with art, and then we spend the next 50 years becoming an artist. We pick something up, and this is sort of this special kind of autism of not like being a math genius, but getting super into this hyper expensive hobby, right? We pick something up, we invest a ton of stuff in it, it consumes our life, and then inevitably we kind of like move on, and then we get addicted to the next thing, and then we get addicted to the next thing. So if there are evidence-based approaches to a particular addiction, what do you do if you have an addictive personality? So the first question that we have to ask is doesn't addictive personality exist from a scientific perspective? Is it a real thing? And the answer is sort of. So we know from numerous studies that there are certain personality traits that predispose you to addiction. So here's a great summary. Overall, the reviewed literature supported a putative personality profile of the behavioral addicted individual as an emotionally fragile, unstable subject driven by short-term gratification with poor impulse control and difficulty in managing their feelings and relationships.

That is a damning personality to have, right? Like, so this is what's so tricky about this is like, some people are like this, like, I'm like this, like, we're like this, right? And this is such a damning personality because a personality is who you are. So what are you supposed to do if you have a, you know, a fragile sense of self, if you're emotionally unstable, have difficulty feeling things and being in relationships and are impulsive, right? There's all this stuff about how we're so ADHD and things like that, right? Like, what do you do if you're this person? Is there a protocol for this? Because this isn't an addiction to a particular thing. And the really scary thing is that it's not just personality features, we've actually tunneled down to the level of neuroscience and we've discovered some really fascinating things. Like people who are like this, literally they're wired a little bit differently. Their brain is less sensitive or less responsive to reward. So some people can get immense joy out of drinking a cup of tea. But if you have an addictive personality, there's a good chance that the simple things in life don't actually give you a lot of pleasure. And the reason that you have a quote unquote addictive personality is because you have to go hard into something. Or if you find that one thing at the moment that really triggers your dopaminergic circuitry, it makes everything else in your life pale in comparison, right? Oh my god, I found this thing in like, let's go.