Myth and Motivation: On Dopamine

There are contradicting views and explanations of what dopamine is and does and how much we can intentionally affect it. However, the commonly heard notions of scrolling for dopamine hits, detoxing from dopamine, dopamine drains, and craving dopamine, appear to be more like a story we've constructed to understand our actions than a scientific explanation, and I'm not convinced it's the best narrative to help us change our behaviours, particularly around tech-based habits. 

As a hormone, it's released by the adrenal glands (above the kidneys) into the bloodstream for slower, more general communications where it primarily helps to regulate our immune system. As a neurotransmitter, it provides fast, local comms between neurons in the brain where it does a lot of different things including affecting movement, memory, motivation, mood, and mornings (waking up). It makes up 80% of the "catecholamine content" in our brain, the ingredients that prepare us for action. Our levels fluctuate throughout each day, so you don't have to try to cram all your work into the early hours of the morning.

It's largely discussed as the heart of our quest for pleasure, yet for decades studies have concluded that dopamine doesn't affect pleasure, since we get a dopamine release before a rewarding activity, not after we've completed it. Instead, it affects how the brain decides if an action is worth the effort. A 2020 study found that increasing it with meds like Ritalin can motivate people to perform harder physical tasks. People with higher levels of dopamine are more likely to choose a harder task with a higher reward than an easier, low-reward task. Low dopamine doesn't reduce focus, but it's believed it provokes giving more weight to the perceived cost of an activity instead of the potential reward. Lower levels lead us to save energy.

So why do we think we crave it or, paradoxically, need to try to intentionally deplete it?

ACCIDENTAL MYTH-MAKING 

 Dopamine's function wasn't known until the 1950s, when Arvid Carlsson completely blocked the neurotransmitter in rabbits, which paralyzed them, clarifying dopamine's necessity in self-initiated movement. The rabbits fully recovered with a shot of Levodopa (L-Dopa), which was later used (and still is) as a dopamine replacement agent to reduce the physical symptoms of Parkinson's disease. About the same time, Olds & Milner found that animals repeat acts that were followed by electrical stimulation of the brain, which prompted thinking of brain centers that focus on rewards. Roy Wise wrote about it in a 1978 paper.

Then in 1980, Wise wrote a paper that starts by acknowledging that discussing a "pleasure center" of the brain is inaccurate, but can be a useful paradigm for experimenting. At the time he thought the dopamine system was activated from food, sex, drugs, and social interactions. It was a 1997 study that found it's not getting a reward, but the anticipation of a reward that sends neurotransmitters racing, to help us predict and correct for errors in prediction. Dopamine helps us to learn about our environment. "The key element that causes dopamine neurons to fire is surprise, regardless of whether the outcome is rewarding or disappointing." This was the thinking in the 80s, confirmed in the 90s, yet that attachment to the "pleasure center" was hard to shake.

In 2011, Robert Sapolsky's work with monkeys pressing levers demonstrated that dopamine increased with anticipation and decreased at the end of the behaviour. More relevant to internet habits, when treats were only expected after a random number of bar presses (a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement - more on that later), twice as much dopamine was released, and monkeys pushed the bar more. Unpredictable rewards increase motivation. So if only occasional YouTube videos are entertaining to us, we'll maintain clicking behaviours for far longer. 

In 2012, further to the 1997 study, John Salamone and Mercè Correa published a comprehensive paper in Neuron on the myth of dopamine. Salamone spent most of his career arguing that dopamine is related to motivation, not pleasure. Soldiers with PTSD "show activity in dopamine-rich parts of the brain when hearing recorded gunshots," which is hardly pleasurable. Stories that depression is from low dopamine or that addiction is from a hijacked reward system are not supported by closer examination. We gravitate to simple stories, but this one is far more complex with Salamone's explanation going back to Schopenhauer (1837)! Dopamine "probably performs several functions, and any particular behavioral or neuroscience method may be well suited for characterizing some of these functions, but poorly suited for others. In view of this, it can be challenging to assemble a coherent view." For instance, in some cases it impairs eating, and in others it doesn't. Once again, depletion can "cause animals to reallocate their instrumental response selection based upon the response requirement of the task and select lower cost alternatives."

The myth of dopamine being part of a pleasure center started growing legs in 2019 when Dr. Cameron Sepah used the term "dopamine fast," despite that he explained at the time that it just makes for a catchy title, but it's not to be taken literally since it has little to do with either fasting or dopamine. He proposed we stop ourselves from automatically responding to unhealthy stimuli around us, like notifications, and instead let ourselves feel lonely or bored from time to time, similar to G. Alan Marlatt's notion of urge surfing from 1985. Just wait for the urge to pass. Sepah also suggested timeblocking abstinence: put away devices for 1-4 hours each weekday evening, a full day each week; one weekend each month. and a full week each year. Great ideas, but an unfortunately catchy title.

The following year, Peter Grinspoon, MD, tried to bring the "maladaptive fad" to light, stating what we might think is obvious: "You can't 'fast' from a naturally occurring brain chemical. … It doesn't actually decrease when you avoid overstimulating activities." Dopamine isn't like heroin, which we can build a tolerance to. Don't try to avoid dopamine, but do actively avoid stimuli that lead to unwanted behaviours. Grinspoon was especially concerned with extreme versions of dopamine fasting: people who stopped anything pleasurable, none of which affects dopamine levels at all but can cause other problems. What was actually being suggested was just a day of rest for mental rejuvenation and real life connections, like many religions have counselled:

"The modern wellness industry has become so lucrative that people are creating snappy titles for age-old concepts."

WELL-MEASURED PLEASURE INDICATES THE GOOD 

You'd think that might have settled things, BUT THEN Anna Lembke's Dopamine Nation came out in 2021, which furthered the heroin myth that indulging in pleasures desensitizes us from dopamine. She was criticized for being simplistic and judgmental, using anecdotes over hard data, overemphasizing personal blame, downplaying systemic factors, and conflating neurotransmitters with opium: "overusing your 'pleasure center' can result in not being able to find anything pleasurable at all anymore" is all sorts of wrong. The book sold well anyway. A 2023 op ed tried to dismantle the myth of dopamine hits, and another in 2024 called the book "promoting puritanism as an addiction cure." An excellent read by Jesse Meadows asks, "What morals are being communicated to us through this particular science story?", and digs into Lembke's previous work further as well as clarifying that heroin can cause a high without changing dopamine levels and that studies showing increases in dopamine associated with video games are "small and poorly replicated." 

"The dopamine mythos ultimately tells us that all the world's problems are just inside our own heads, and the solutions can only be found in individual self-management."

I wonder if that's the part people resonated with that increased book sales. We feel out of control, and want a quick answer, and there's a kernel of truth that we're choosing pleasures poorly. We get that some pleasures are better than others. We get mad at ourselves for scrolling for hours, when we look up and realized we missed a gorgeous day outside, so there is a desire for some self-management that Lembke taps into. She appears to take an all or nothing approach, though, as if we'll be ruined by enjoying great food and sex. Plato and Aristotle wrote about this, not in a moralizing way, but arguing that surely we want the most and best pleasures in our lives. For Plato, it's all about measuring short term gains against long term losses. Don't get so hammered that you're sick all the next day because that's a negative net sum of pleasure. Being mastered by pleasure is a form of ignorance, not sin. Aristotle agrees the solution is education: "we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought." A few thousand years later, Nietzsche said, significantly more judgmentally, "All lack of intellectuality, all vulgarity, arises out of the inability to resist a stimulus.”

We don't need to shame people for their vices in order to help them recognize how to get more pleasure, greater in number and duration, by being intentional about choosing less fleeting pleasures. We can teach kids the benefits of restraint, tolerating boredom, and using their imagination more to enable it to be used more. Now we understand brain plasticity, so we know that intentionally focusing for longer eventually makes it easier to focus for longer, eventually. We recognize hard work leads to more pleasure, and easy pleasures lose their luster. The big problem is that we know all the things, but we've become accustomed to low-hanging fruit. Even as an adult raised as an outdoorsy kid, the algorithms often own me. This evolutionary mechanism of motivation that provokes long durations of effort worked for millennia to keep us hunting and foraging, particularly when food is scarce, but more and more, changes in production and distribution and then technology have led to a very different system in place that we haven't yet evolved for. We're like squirrels living on a peanut farm unable to stop collecting nuts despite part of us clearly knowing that nobody needs this much continuous information or entertainment. To live with it, the skill of measuring well needs to be taught and re-taught regularly.

Reducing exposure to the object of our compulsions is a great idea. There's nothing wrong with that part of the trend. Despite not being remotely religious, I regularly observe Lent at the end of winter because it feels easier to do knowing about a billion other people are also depriving themselves of something during those 40 days. For me, it's a yearly re-set towards a more simple life, a reminder of what I don't need to live, and a way to notice and surrender any clinging. Reducing exposure does reduce the craving; but it has little to do with controlling dopamine. 

DOES IT MATTER?? PERCEPTION AS METAPHOR 

When I read or watch people talking about dopamine hits and crashes and tolerance, I translate it in my head to a message about avoiding having a conditioned response. They're struggling to stop a compulsion or habit (craving a hit) and trying to avoid stimuli that provokes it (detoxing). That could just mean they want to doomscroll, and, instead, they put their phone in a drawer for the afternoon. So, does it matter if people think of dopamine as both the cause and solution to their problems?

Jungian analyst, Lisa Marchiano, recently said, 

"If we think about myths as stories that are believed to be true by the culture that writes them, I would like to offer that the DSM is a cultural myth. … My favourite quote from [Jung's] Collected Works: 'We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind, but what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases' [CW 13, par 54]. … Heaviness could be ascribed to Saturn. Being in a kind of frenzy could be assigned to Dionysus. And if it matches well enough, people can have that "Aha!" experience. And often, as I've seen in my practice, people can kind of exhale and place it into a certain aesthetic frame that gives them some distance between themselves and the problem that they're suffering. Many different systems do that, by the way, but myth is one way of possibly doing that."

Dopamine has reached god-like status, with some hoping to be granted its effects and others trying to be released from its chains. But this is a god we can see.

Part of the pull towards brain chemistry may be that we can see it with high-tech machinery in a way that feels like we can know the cause and effect. However, psychiatrist and neuroscientist, Iain McGilchrist, explained the current push to categorize and label and really pin things down can completely miss out on more right-brain attention to complexity and nuance. Just because we can see part of the brain light up doesn't mean we understand what's happening. 

"What can be measured doesn't matter and what really matters can't be measured. It's such a simple observation in a way, and it's almost as if the culture has just taken one little simple wrong turn. … The small mistake is simply … the minute you get into a mindset … that if you can't reproduce it in a lab, it's nonsense … that in itself is such a kind of broken worldview."

We think our psyche can be understood from the parts: neurons and chemical messengers, but that's like picking apart a poem or work of art down to its constituting letters or colours to try to understand what it means. We need to see it as a whole, take it in, and feel it to really get it. We are so much more than the narrative of specific chemicals sending messages in our brain to help us survive.

McGilchrist says we're currently living on Pinocchio's Pleasure Island: 

"The people who create the technology are rushing us very very fast into this robotic left hemisphere world which takes us into goodness knows what horror. But they don't see it as horror. They see it as utopia. … We sacrifice our freedom, our dignity, and everything to just being this consuming entity. … For a minute, [Pinocchio]'s sort of seduced by this and has to learn the hard way that actually that is not going to be a route to anywhere that he wants to go, and it's not compatible with being alive. … We completely mistake ourselves when we think that every kind of friction, every kind of opposition, every kind of restriction is something that should be done away with and is negative. Fulfillment is often something which doesn't come unless you've overcome some kind of obstacle in doing it. And in doing so, you increase the capacity of what a human being can do, and certainly what you can do. … Suffering is part of what makes us fulfilled."

Tech advances make things easy, particularly in how we fill our leisure time, but that leads to less pleasure. Effort isn't the enemy. We want to stop our compulsion to scroll, in order to start a compulsion to go to the gym so we don't have to make an effort to think about what we're doing. But there are no quick fixes. It's just us here, doing the work over and over and over to get back on a preferred path, which requires having a thought process around what we're doing and whether or not we want to be doing it in the moment.

MYTH OF BEING UNAFFECTED BY THE WORLD 

In a takedown of one "reward center" proponent, Stanton Peele said, "if you label things genetic, you are guaranteed some kind of audience, no matter how ludicrous your claims." By "detoxing," we're already doing the things that help de-condition us: avoiding the external stimuli that provokes a response, but people prefer to think of it as a change in chemistry. 

Why do we prefer the dopamine story?

I wonder if believing we're scrolling or gaming for hours is because of dopamine affecting us, removes our sense of responsibility for our actions. That might relieve any shame around it, which can feel great, but it also takes away our agency to actually change things.

Perhaps a different narrative that removes shame but keeps agency intact is to see these habits as conditioned by the toughest reward schedule out there devised by a technology that can beat a chess master. Of course we're affected by it. B.F. Skinner identified this back in the 1950s. A variable ratio reinforcement schedule, getting a reward after a random number of behaviours, is most resistant to extinction. That's why slot-machines create gambling addictions. One-armed bandits are stealing from you; it's right in the name. Social media tricks us into feeling social and maybe saving the world with clicks, which add extra layers to wade through. It's a more sophisticated thief stealing our time, energy, and focus for a company's profit.

But people hate to believe they've been conditioned, as if we're too smart for that nonsense. If we're at the mercy of our chemical composition, that's just unfortunate; by contrast, if we can't stop because we're been conditioned, then we're an automaton, or of lower intelligence, or a simple animal, as if we should be immune to conditioning. Operant conditioning has been criticized for creating a mechanistic model of the self, as if believing in schedules of reinforcement usurps our free will, instead of a recognition that we are animals affected by the presentation of stimuli in our environment in a way that developed over millions of years. It's necessary when we struggled to get food and needed something to drive us to seek it out relentlessly, and now it's being exploited by corporations.

We like to think that it's possible to be unaffected by our environment as if it's a weakness to be affected by the world instead of a reality of our lives. Thinking of extinguishing the response by removing the stimuli and admitting the conditioning makes that more evident. Being affected by the world isn't just seen as weak, it might also be kind of scary. It requires peeking over some defenses that help us feel untouchable.

To feel stronger, some people might try to stop scrolling without changing their environment: with the phone full of fun apps and available all the time. That's like trying to quit drinking with a fridge full of beer. There's no shame in making it easier by getting rid of the triggering stimuli because this is notoriously a really hard reinforcement schedule to beat. Most of us can't fully unplug from systems that have become the infrastructure of our daily lives, so we need help to stop once we start. We have more agency over the situation if we acknowledge what affects us and the work it takes to uncondition ourselves. It also means admitting that we are animals. But, like other animals, when rats lever pull for hours obsessed with their inconsistent rewards, they're not bad rats! Rats don't push levers because of any moral failing, but because they evolved to be wired to behave for survival now in a system in which this wiring is less than optimal. Even brilliant human beings are conditioned to do things, so it's still not your fault, AND it's possible to change.

Changing our environment is easier than hoping to change our chemistry. Granted it's so much easier to extinguish the behaviour if the world changes the reward system for us, like schools that won't allow phones in classrooms. Barring that, being aware of our thoughts helps to notice our perception of the rewards, which helps to minimize the potential reward or create distance from the thoughts instead of automatically fostering the cravings (don't feed the fire!). We can also distract from the trigger, find an alternative that aims for less fleeting joys, set time limits and alarm, urge surf, recognize our phone as a slot machine, get a support group or friends to drag you away, promise to chat at a time you often get sucked into scrolling,... It can help to find something to care about outside yourself: instead of touching grass, plant something. There are lots of helpful apps and specific strategies. But it's on us to do it.

Paying attention to be able to think before acting in order to slay our dragons is work, for sure, but it might help us to master that ancient skill of measurement. Once we firmly decide we don't want to spend our free time lever pulling and scrolling, it's still not easy to change, but it's possible. But it requires removing the stimuli: a device detox. 

Not Just a Health Issue

Professor Lidia Morawska just won a quarter million dollar science prize for her work in proving that Covid is airborne, against the WHO's public announcement to the contrary back in March 2020. Her efforts saved lives.

"A renowned expert in air quality and health, Morawska, of the Queensland University of Technology, began contacting international colleagues. She eventually gathered 239 scientists globally to highlight the risk of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The public pressure eventually prompted the WHO and other authorities to update their public health guidelines. ... 'Science and scientists are nowhere near as listened to as in the past, and decisions are not based on science.' It is a problem she hopes to tackle by bringing scientists together as she did during the early years of the pandemic."

That feels like a lifetime ago, long forgotten by many, yet illnesses and death from Covid haven't retreated. 

A US study tracked 150 million workers and absences "since the end of the so-called public health emergency in 2023" to find that absences continue to be 12.9% higher than before the pandemic. "Absences were highest in occupations with the greatest exposure to the public." And last month a global insurance firm "pegged that number of excess deaths at 2% above the pre-pandemic annual mortality rate. ... That's roughly the equivalent of two fully loaded standard commercial jets crashing and killing everyone aboard every day." They cited long Covid as a significant factor. Andrew Nikiforuk reports in The Tyee, 

There Will Be Time

I've hit a weird anniversary that I'm not sure what to do with: thirty years in the same place. It seems significant because it's double any other place I've ever lived and exactly half my life. I like when numbers line up like that. My house closed on the 1st of November 1995, but I didn't officially moved in until Friday the 3rd. 

I was in my parents' place from age 2 to 17, and it was so boring to have such a stable home life. That sent me moving place to place for the next dozen years or so. At one point, my dad offered me the house when he moved in with his new wife, but I was still restless, so I declined. I sometimes can't believe I turned that down! I didn't want to live in my childhood home even though it was amazing with a beautiful forest out back; it mattered more at the time to carve my own path.

In the first five years of my place, I did all the big things I needed to do, and now I've been hitting the end point of all of all that work. Of course the maintenance turnover coincided with retiring. The furnace died in the middle of winter. After fixing one little thing after another to eke out another year, my repair dude told me it had cancer of everything: "That furnace owes you nothing!" The water heater followed soon after. Then this summer I fell through my 25-year-old cedar deck boards outside. I had to fall through a second time before replacing it all. 

New Air Quality Guidelines

Health Canada published new Guidance for Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Professionals that acknowledge that Covid can be spread through airborne transmission. 

"Indoor air quality is considered an important environmental determinant of health. ... Good indoor air can often be achieved using the following three strategies: reducing or eliminating the sources of air contaminants, ventilating by replacing contaminated indoor air with filtered air from outside, filtering the indoor air ... and education of occupants and building staff on best practices for maintaining good indoor air quality. ...

Epidemiological studies on CO2 concentrations and health effects showed that individuals exposed to CO2 concentrations greater than 800 ppm were more likely to report mucous membrane or respiratory symptoms than those exposed to lower CO2 levels. ... Installing demand-based ventilation relying on CO2 sensors may also be an effective strategy. ... Avoid overcrowding indoor environments with more people than the HVAC system can accommodate. Increase natural ventilation by opening windows. ...

The concept of using indoor CO2 levels as an indicator of ventilation has been discussed for decades. With increased public awareness of the importance of ventilation and commercial-availability of CO2 monitors, there is a renewed interest in using CO2 monitoring as a method for quantifying ventilation. ... Continuous measurements can also be used to see how levels change over the course of the day and whether there are certain locations or certain times of day that are more problematic. ...

With some viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, transmission was also found to occur from particles remaining suspended in the air and travelling longer distances, hence the benefit of wearing masks, effective ventilation and building air filtration, and stand-alone air purifiers that utilize high efficiency particulate air filters when and where appropriate to reduce the risk of transmission. ... There are no exposure limits for the range of microbial agents found indoors that can cause disease, as these are dependent on the infectious dose needed to cause an infection. Levels should be kept as low as possible. ... Effective ventilation is important for reducing indoor transmission of respiratory infectious diseases and includes ... increasing indoor/outdoor air exchange with exhaust fans and mechanical ventilation systems, filtering air efficiently, and opening external windows and doors. Ventilation can help reduce viral transmission in indoor spaces by preventing the accumulation of potentially infectious respiratory particles in the air. Good ventilation, combined with other personal protective measures, can further reduce the risk of infection.

Managing So Much Suffering

It feels like I understand the idea that all suffering comes from expectation in a way I didn't used to. Now it seems so obvious, but I'm not really sure what flip was switched. It's not just that if we stop expecting to get things, we'll be happier, but how ridiculous it is to expect anything to stay the same at all, much less get better, ever. And that understanding seems to help reduce some anxiety over the things that can't be easily changed. Suffering is inevitable, but it can be somewhat diminished in order to have more contentment. We can change what counts as suffering, and we can change our perspective around tragedies, so maybe we can also change how we can continue to bear witness to, or experience, absolute atrocities.

One simple way to reduce suffering is to narrow the definition. Comedian Michelle Wolf jokes, "It's hard to have a struggle and a skin care routine," which clarifies that we might be considering some difficulties as suffering in a way that doesn't fly when we widen the scope of our horizons. Pain is pain and can't definitively be compared, yet I believe many of us have an automatic judgment in our heads that lists events in a hierarchy. Typically suffering from having to do a task we don't want to do, like write a boring report or clean out the fridge, or from wanting luxuries we can't afford, like another trip, might be relegated to the bottom as whining. The pain from it is there, though: the agony and stress from uninteresting maintenance that's necessary to further our own existence or the grief over lost opportunities. Furthermore, it can develop an extra layer of shame on top of the suffering if we try and fail to elicit sympathy for having so much food that some is left to rot and needs to be cleaned. When we realize we can't afford that trip after all, this is a suffering we are expected to bear without complaint.

They're Heeeerrrrrreeee!

You might be able to book a Covid shot in Ontario right now with priority given for people who are high-risk, and on October 27th for the general public. That high-risk priority category is significantly looser than it is for who gets a second shot per year, maybe acknowledging how few come out for this shot in the first place. It includes anyone who is at high risk, but also anyone who has significant exposure to birds or mammals, anyone racialized or part of an "equity-denied" community, health-care workers, and more. 

It's still here and still causing damage. In the US, the current wastewater rates are about 2/3rds of last winter's peak. It's baffling that they want to wait for the general public until after our Thanksgiving!! In the past, uptake is so low that it's curious they still stagger the appointment openings for a month later. In the states, people have been getting shots for weeks. We're in the upward trend of very high infection rates coupled with very low immunity in the population since we're almost all a good six months from our last vaccination. That's a deadly combination. 

Not Selves, but Not Nothing

We're living at a time when the glorification of independence and individualism is harming the world and others in it, as well as leading to an epidemic of loneliness. According to Jay Garfield, the root of suffering is in our self-alienation, and one symptom of our alienation is clinging to the notion that we are selves. "We are wired to misunderstand our own mode of existence," he writes in his brief yet substantial 2022 book, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self. 

Garfield traces arguments against the existence of a self primarily through 7th century Indian Buddhist scholar Candrakīrti and 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and explores where many other philosophers hit or miss the mark along the way. The book is a surprisingly accessible read about a complex topic with perhaps the exception of a couple more in-depth chapters that develop arguments to further his conclusion: you don't have a self, and that's a good thing.

Garfield starts with the idea of self from ancient India: the ātman is at the core of being. A distinct self feels necessary to understand our continuity of consciousness over time (diachronic identity) and our sense of identity at a single time (synchronic identity). A self gives us a way to explain our memory and allows for a sense of just retribution when we're wronged. We feel a unity of self to the extent that it's hard to imagine it's not so.

Safe Schools and Hospitals

We're starting the school year with high levels of Covid in Ontario, and kids are still getting sick from a disease that, unlike the flu or a cold, has potential long-term consequences, leaving behind micro-clots that can lead to strokes, as well as increase chances of diabetes, brain damage, and more as it runs through the bloodstream and can affect every organ. 

Vaccinations don't entirely prevent illness and spread, but they CAN keep most people out of the hospital from the acute illness. Unfortunately they wane after several months and most of us are only allowed to get one once/year. If you're going to do it, now is the time. Also unfortunately, they're not ready yet. The government keeps putting them out with the flu shot despite that Covid is not seasonal; it spreads when people congregate. The best time to get the shot might be one in mid-August in time for school, and then early December in time for all the celebrations in late December and winter travel. Then open the windows in the spring and summer! But the powers that be will likely not release this one until next month.

Facing the Backdraft

Climate analyst Barry Saxifrage explains how the CO2 from fires is adding significantly to greenhouse gas accumulation. His charts show the dramatic increase in Canadian wildfires:

"Wildfire is now incinerating four times more forest carbon than during the 1990s. In addition to the surging immediate threats of choking smoke, wanton destruction and disrupted lives, rising wildfire is also pumping billions of tonnes of forest carbon into our atmosphere, intensifying long-term climate breakdown. ... It is piling up in an ever-thickening blanket in our atmosphere that will overheat generations to come. The extra heat being trapped by humanity's CO2 now equals the explosions of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs every day. And rising. ...

Wildfire emissions totalled 30 million tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) [in 1990]. The much taller bar on teh far right shows that this year's wildfires have already burned massive amounts of forest. Emissions are around 500 MtCO2 so far, with many weeks of fire season still ahead. ... It is tempting to think that this current level of wildfire is our 'new normal.' But it's going to keep getting worse until we take our foot off the wildfire accelerator. ... Levels will keep rising until we stop the primary source of them, fossil fuel burning. ... 'It ain't rocket science -- when it's hotter and drier fires burn more easily and more explosively.' ... Burning fossil fuels burns Canada's forests."

Not Strategy but Symptoms

 So, things are a mess. But here's an interesting take on Trump from Andrew Wortman: 

"Trump's 2 a.m. meltdowns and dictator cosplay aren't part of a predetermined strategy--they're collapse. A malignant narcissist, weak and unhealthy, colliding with the one thing he can't escape: DEATH. And his team knows it, which is why they're going full-fascist now. As a psychologist, I can tell you: when malignant narcissists lose control, they don't fade quietly. They escalate exponentially--rage, smear campaigns, humiliation, projection, even violence. Every move is about punishing those who expose their weakness to claw back control. This isn't 'toughness.' It's disintegration. In my field we call it narcissistic mortification: the sheer terror, shame, and dread of being forced to confront one's own fragility. To them, it feels like annihilation--as the false self they've lived behind for decades shatters. 

Mortification hits with both physical and psychological shock--chest pain, burning, panic, humiliation, obsessive thoughts. They feel exposed, worthless desperate. That desperation is what fuels the meltdowns you're watching play out in real time like an SNL skit or horror film. For Trump, the trigger is being faced with his own mortality. He can't sue death. He can't cheat it, bribe it, or con his way out of it. It's inescapable. And for the first time in his life, he's powerless--and the panic shows in every crazed rant and wild attempt to project control. That's why you see him suddenly fixated on things like getting into heaven, legacy, and being remembered. Humiliation is the narcissist's deepest wound--and nothing humiliates more than colliding with the truth that you can't escape the end.

The Epstein files serve to make this terror far worse. Not only do they expose what he's spent 30+ years concealing, but if they surface after he's gone, he can't spin them. The thought of being defined by that humiliation--with no power to control the narrative--is devastating. When narcissists face both mortality AND exposure, collapse deepens. They don't reflect or accept responsibility. They deflect, rage, lie, smear, and escalate authoritarian grabs. Anything to keep the mask intact just a little bit longer--no matter who gets hurt in the process. 

Blending Psychotherapy and Spirituality

In my last post on meditation, I suggested that there's not a lot of harm that comes from meditation and mindfulness training, so maybe it doesn't need the kind of scientific scrutiny that we might expect from a clinical drug trial. However, in Toward a Psychology of Awakening (2000), Buddhist psychotherapist John Welwood documents three traps: spiritual bypass, narcissism, and desensitising, that arise in part because we've leant too far to either psychology or spirituality instead of using both. He also discusses them in brief in a paper, "Principles of inner work: Psychological and spiritual" (1984).

Both psychotherapy and spirituality are about "developing a new kind of loving relationship with one's experience," and both help us break free from our conditioned reactions. But spirituality doesn't address our early mishaps that affect our perceptions, and psychotherapy doesn't address the need to transcend our personal feelings.

When he first trained as a therapist, Welwood was concerned that psychotherapy has a narrow view of human nature, but then realized how much it can help once we no longer demand answers from it. It can help free people from negative childhood conditioning, particularly from dismissive or engulfing parenting, by working with our needs, scripts (now narratives), fears, self-respect, etc. A lot of us don't learn how to exist in the world well. Welwood claims that part of the problem is the "breakdown of extended families and tight-knit communities" so that children just get influenced by parents or just one parent instead of many people providing a variety of ideas that can help a child figure out where they fit in the group. As far as I understand this point, with only one or two major influences, children might accept lessons without question, then have to "spend a good part of their lives freeing themselves" from this singular impact in order to find their own sense of self. It's somewhat unintuitive, but a larger group influence helps a child find their individual self by differentiating from others more clearly at a younger age. But whether we find it at 5 or 50, it's necessary to have this "stable self-structure" before trying to go further.

But without a spiritual element, we have "too literal-minded and serious … too small a vision of what a human being is." Psychotherapy can focus too much on content and not enough on the human being. It's changing more recently, focusing less on content and more on how we are with our experience. Welwood wants to stop trying to overcome emotional content and instead open up to it. If we can't open up to anger, for example, we end up trying to be nicer (people pleasing) or overmonitoring our behaviour to avoid triggers, which can create more stress. Yet there's even more ground to cover than just this.

Yup, Still Writing About It

Covid is still here and still killing more people than car crashes. The highest vehicle fatality rate in Canada in the past decade was in 2023, with 1,964 deaths with over 8,000 serious injuries. For Covid, counting less than the last year (about 11 months) and only from participating provinces, we've had 2,248 deaths and over 33,000 serious illnesses that required hospitalization. So, more. 

In some places, it's way more right now!

California is experiencing a surge, and Honduras is experiencing such a spike in illnesses that they're mandating face masks again in hospitals, airports, shopping centres, schools, public transport, and other enclosed or crowded paces. A recent study suggests that LongCovid may be far more common than currently estimated at about one in ten people, with non-human primates studied reaching 90% of the population with bio-markers: 

"Even if you started off lean and healthy, this study shows it won't protect you from some of the worst consequences of Covid."

I compare Covid rates to car crashes because we still, pretty much all of us, take precautions whenever we get in our car, and most of it don't even think about it any more. Some precautions are imposed on us, like I had to ditch my car because apparently the MTO would take it off the road for rust that could enable exhaust to get inside the vehicle. Air bags and driving laws are imposed on us. But we willingly strap ourselves in our cars, for most of us, even when no cops are around. I do it automatically before I start the car. It became second nature.

On that Sexual Assault Case

I listened to a CBC call-in show about the London sexual assault trial of five former Hockey Canada players. All the callers were either on one side or another. I think there's a middle path. 

The gist of the case: Back in June 2018, a woman known as "E.M." was drinking at a bar where the hockey team was celebrating a big win. She consented to go back to a hotel room with one of the team members. A little later, he texted others to come up for a three-some, and up to ten guys were in the room at one point. Allegedly, five of the guys, all between 18 and 20, either had sex with her or had sexually assaulted her. Afterwards she called a friend, crying, saying she was upset at herself for what had happened. All men were acquitted because E.M.'s testimony wasn't seen as credible. A possible reason for this is that she filed a civil suit in 2020, and, if any of her testimony was different between then and now, that brings her credibility into question. Typically a criminal case is filed before a civil case, and she had started a criminal case soon after the event, but that was put on pause, at which time she moved to a civil case. That civil case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. 

First of all, how many of us describe an event exactly the same way after five years? Our brain changes our memories slightly whenever we re-remember an event. It's a very high bar to meet to have explain every detail exactly the same way. 

Mentalizing, Mindfulness, and the Drive for Evidence

 In reading about attachment theory, David Wallin's description of Peter Fonagy's work was intriguing, so I went down that rabbit hole. 

Fonagy developed Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) to improve emotional regulation, as distinct from Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Fonagy sees our mental development as relational, but in order to have empathy for others, we need awareness of our own feelings, which can be helped with mindfulness work. However, in looking at the evidence of efficacy of these separate modalities, I question the attempt, since Freud, to make psychology into a natural science. Each of the various ways to help are useful, but there's an element of the unknowable in the way when we treat them scientifically.

According to Wallin, Fonagy's focus was on developing the understanding of the mental states of others, which he calls mentalizing, to let us understand the depths of ourselves and others. For instance, it can help heal old wounds if we understand that dad's rejection of us might be due to his depression and not our behaviour as a child. Other people's reactions to us aren't just caused by us, but there are always multiple factors at play affecting how people behave. It seems very similar to Theory of Mind. He met Bowby in the 1980s, and studied adults' behaviour relative to their own descriptions of childhood attachment, and found, when comparing severely deprived to well-connected adults, that a weak attachment was correlated with a weak "reflective functioning" (the ability to understand behaviours in terms of their thoughts, feelings, and mental states). From this, he says psychotherapy should be the "effort to restore or kindle patients' capacity to mentalize," to simultaneously feel our feelings and reflect on their meaning. To help people develop mentalizing requires a relationship that mirrors and guides emotional responses.

Vaccinate Against Variant Soup

Some weird new federal SARS-CoV-2 vaccine guidance - in layman's terms.

Variant soup ingredients from April 2025

But first, remember that, when it comes to vaccinations, Covid is like the flu, not like measles or polio. It's not one and done because the virus mutates so easily and quickly. Every few months we permit new variants to add to the mix by letting them spread and mutate, and only sometimes does anyone important mention the variety of variants out there. (By contrast, for rates of illness and death, Covid is a lot like measles and polio in the unvaccinated death and disability rate. It's a serious disease!) 

Like the flu, we need regular access to vaccinations. If people ask how many Covid shots you've had, ask them how many flu shots they've had. It's the same silly question.

If you've never been vaccinated for it, get two shots this year.

If you have been getting shots, the guidelines say you should get one a year if you're pregnant, over 65, in congregated living, a health care worker, part of a listed racialized group, or have an underlying medical condition that's associated with more severe infection, which includes diabetes and cancer and other medical conditions, but also obesity, and disabilities like ADHD, and mental health disorders like depression (but not anxiety).

Luckily, you don't have to prove you have an underlying condition because anyone may (is allowed to) get one shot. They'll come out with a new shot this fall, but who knows when that will be!

The vaccination is protective for less than six months, so you might want two shots a year. But good luck with that! 

According to their collective wisdom, you should get two shots if you're over 80, in congregated living, or moderately to severely immunocompromised due to an underlying condition. I don't think claiming severe ADHD will work, but no harm trying! You may get two shots if you're 65 to 79. 

So despite that most infections come from schools, all those kids spending their days in a school building, from junior kindergarten to university, can get a shot in September, but then are just sitting ducks come February. Make it make sense!

A good N95 is still your best bet to avoid this preventable disease!

ETA: Ontario guidance says, 

"Ontario's Covid-19 vaccine program has transitioned to an annual program in alignment witih expert recommendations from the NACI. ... If you already completed your initial series, it is recommended you receive an updated dose starting in the fall when the vaccine becomes available in Ontario, if it has been 6 months (168 days) since your last dose."

So even thought you can only get one/year, if your last one was in early March, you can still get one now - as soon as they come out. No word on when that will be, though. 

The Necessity of Feeling Seen

Attachment theory is part of the vernacular now. Even the Norwegian show Porni mentions it, and the dramatic eldest daughter blames her mom for her “relational damage”! We’ve largely accepted the questionable idea that mom’s attentiveness in childhood creates our attachment patterns for life — the gist of the theory as it’s largely understood, but what’s usefully generalizable from the actual studies? There are many criticisms of the theory, yet some university psych courses applaud it without reservation. I’m dubious about it, but I also don’t want to entirely throw this baby out with the bathwater.

 This is a huge topic, and I’ll hardly do it justice here. There are a few excellent books on it, but part of the problem with how we understand the studies might be that the most nuanced books seem to be the most academically written, and likely the least read. As it morphed into popular consumption it may have strayed further from the original intention. On top of the reading, I went to a couple workshops on attachment to find the magic solution to all our relationship ills, and my big takeaway is this (for free!): if you’re a bit distant, consider being open to getting closer, and if you’re a bit clingy, try to step back a bit. It’s good advice to notice and change patterns that are a problem, absolutely, but I’m not sure it merits the number of workshops, courses, and self-help books that it’s provoked. At worst, some books actually counsel people to avoid any “avoidant or disordered people” as if there’s no saving them from their dastardly origins. Therapeutic discussions of childhood misconnections definitely have helped people better understand themselves, but I think this theory produces such volumes of celebration and condemnation because, in difficult relationships, it feels like the answer, but to parents, it feels like blame.

Attachment Theory Criticisms 

Heidi Keller’s The Myth of Attachment Theory (2022) is an extremely thorough takedown of the theory. If attachment notions make you feel like a crappy parent, this book is vindicating. She explores the offense of putting it all on moms both because of the narrow focus on a single person as well as on singular causation, but her best work is in exploring the creation of a norm of interaction from upper-middle class, western assumptions around what it means to be sensitive to a baby’s needs, an analysis that was made at the time as well: 

Losing Our Democracy in Ontario

For a little while, Trump's mess made me über proud to be Canadian, and even a little bit okay with Ford. But that was short lived! 

If anything, the US disaster has been a distraction for us as the provincial majority government pushed through several anti-democracy policies. They're using Trump's trade war to try to justify these policies, but we all know that's bullshit. 

Bill 33: Supporting Children and Students Act, which passed second reading yesterday. It will give Ford more control over school boards and universities and colleges. It could mandate police presence in schools and mandate university admission policies. From OPSEU President JP Hornick:

"Stripping away access-focused admissions pathways threatens the socio-economic mobility of entire communities. They want to surveil and criinalize our kids from a young age and then make it even harder to access post-secondary education later on in their academic careers. Ontario's future depends on an inclusive education system, not one that intentionally keeps people out. ... It is clearly intended to defund these services in our colleges."

Covid Causes Clots!!

 A headline in the New York Post: "Why so many people are having strokes in their 20s, 30s, and 40s: We've never had patients so young." 

They report that, "Between 2020 and 2022, there was a 14.6% increase of strokes among people aged 18 to 44." Many of whom were "by all common standards, healthy." Their theories about the increase include birth control pills, stress, long working hours, physical inactivity, caffeine especially from energy drinks, and Adderall (although they add that most studies don't show a strong association between Adderall use and strokes). None of these have been shown to have increased that dramatically since 2020, but something else has. I stupidly read the comments on the article, which are all about "the jab" killing us. IT'S NOT THE VACCINE!!

There is, of course, absolutely no mention about an unmitigated brain-invasive virus doing the very type of damage researchers and doctors warned us about years ago. We knew that Covid stays in the body and forms blood clots since at least 2021, and it became widespread in 2022, which is why some wise doctors ask for a D-dimer test after a patient has problems post-Covid infection to check for clotting issues. Here are just a few: 

Protect Your Neurons from Nimbus!

The latest Covid variant has the same name as a big looming rain cloud. The more we let Covid spread, the more it will continue to mutate, and this one is even more easily transmissible. 

It's provoking people to mask up in parts of Asia, and governments are encouraging updated vaccinations in parts of Europe, and it's definitely in the states, but they're not doing much to stop it. Will we?? My kids and I still can't get another Covid shot until it's been a year since our last, and we can't access Paxlovid if we need it. But thankfully there are no mask bans being proposed here.

In the states, the FBI is treating Covid as a crime to be investigated instead of a public health matter to be mitigated:

Still Blooming!

Another milestone to reflect on life a bit today: my 60th birthday. It sounds so old, but I biked 60k total on Monday and Tuesday (didn't have time for it in one go), and played pickleball today, and I'm regularly writing 3,000 word essays, so I appear to still be reasonably sound in body and mind.  

I was hoping my crabapple would bloom for my birthday, but everything bloomed early this year. A couple years ago I wrote about some people who randomly walk by, loudly insisting my crabapple is dead. It's still not dead yet! These are the very last of the lilac blooms from my garden. Such a weird year.

New Covid Strain Causing Razor Blade Throat

Several news venues have been reporting on Covid in the last few days. An ABC News headline says: "Why are more than 300 people in the US still dying from Covid every week?" 

The article explains,

"Public health experts told ABC News that although the U.S. is in a much better place than it was a few years ago, Covid is still a threat to high-risk groups. 'The fact that we're still seeing deaths just means it's still circulating, and people are still catching it.' ... The experts said there are a few reasons why people might still be dying from the virus, including low vaccination uptake, waning immunity, and not enough people accessing treatments."

That last sentence is infuriating because vaccines wane in effectiveness after a few months, and vaccinations here are restricted to yearly except for people over 65 and anyone moderately to severely immunocompromised, such as organ transplant recipients, anyone HIV+, and anyone taking immunosuppressants. Furthermore Paxlovid, our only treatment option here, is only available to people over 60 or at high risk of complications from Covid. Otherwise, you're on your own.

On Approaching Death

 CW: As the title suggests, there will be discussion of death and dying and some mention of suicide in this post.

I thought nothing of following up my last post on Irvin Yalom on the meaning of life with Yalom on the meaning of death, until I started writing here. The very reality of being a bit wary of broaching the subject reveals the strength of societal taboos against admitting that we’re all going to die. Until it’s staring us in the face, we delude ourselves into thinking we will get better and better, mentally and physically, despite that our brain starts to shrink in our 30s, and our joints and organs will start to give out not so long after. We work hard to keep death clean and sanitized so the reality doesn’t seep in too much, and we try to do all the right things to keep death at bay: exercise, various special diets, wearing masks to avoid viruses. We can fix some evidence of erosion with meds and surgeries, sometimes miraculously, but some people even hope to keep their brain going long after their body dies.

Dancing with Viruses

There are several measles cases in Waterloo Region. As of last week there were currently over 60 cases in nearby Wellington/Guelph, and over 1,300 in Ontario since October.

Measles is like Covid in that there's an incubation period in which people have no symptoms but are contagious. Viruses are stealthy! For measles, it's 7-12 days from exposure to symptoms like fever or cough, so it's really important to track cases and isolate if potentially exposed. For Covid, it can be 5-7 days before it's picked up by a rapid test, and you can have it and spread it without any symptoms at all. Both cause serious complications, including brain infection, and leads to death in about 1 or 2 in 1,000 people. 

Both can be prevented with an N95.

The biggest difference between these viruses is that getting vaccinated is extremely good protection for measles, but not for Covid. If you got your measles shots, you're very likely completely protected. Unfortunately, vaccination rates are plummeting. We need to have at least 94% of the population vaccinated to create herd immunity and keep measles at bay, and Ontario has been hovering in the 70s since Covid started and anti-vaxx nonsense got a platform. Vaccination against Covid does a lot to keep people out of the hospital, but it doesn't prevent getting and spreading the disease because, like the flu, Covid mutates all the flippin' time. Measles is just measles, but Covid could be delta, or alpha, or one of many omicron variants, or whatever's going on now. It changes so much I stopped keeping track. The more it spreads, the more it mutates, and we're doing nothing to stop the spread. 

Please Vote!!

Let's see if we can avoid our own Timbit Trump tomorrow!! If you're not sure of the best candidate to beat the cons in your riding, check out Smart Voting!  

Prime Minister Carney said of Poilievre yesterday, 

"It's easy to be negative when you've never fixed anything. It's easy to be negative when you've never built anything. It's easy to be negative when you're a career politician who has never accomplished anything." 

Taylor Noakes, agrees that Poilievre has accomplished nothing during his twenty years in Parliament:

"This isn't as much a political party as it is a ChatGPT-based slogan-generating algorithm speaking through the mouth of everyone's least favourite muppet. . . . The Conservatives have essentially made 'Fuck Trudeau' their ideology, and the average Conservative voter has made it their core identity. ... The Conservative Party have placed strict limits on who is allowed to ask him questions, and have further tried to prevent journalists from talking to party supporters and local candidates. ... According to a report by LaPress, Poilievre seems to have the loosest grasp on facts and the truth, as the publication found that he lied, embellished or misled far more than any of the other candidates during last week's debate. ... He has voted against the environment and climate 400 times ... against the Canadian Dental Care Plan, $10 a day daycare, the National School Food Program, the Canada Child Benefit, and raising the federal minimum wage ... against a proposed first-home savings account and a proposal to build four million new homes."

The Rise of Unreason

The Ontario Health Coalition put out a press release a couple weeks ago about the sharp increase in people infected with measles here. There were 816 cases from October 2024 to April, then 155 new cases from April 3-11. Our immunization rates are lower than most of Europe -- only 70% of kids have typical childhood vaccinations. Vaccination rates were reduced dramatically in 2020. "This is a Public Health failure that must be addressed with the utmost urgency." 

David Fisman recently wrote about it: 

Balancing Individual Rights and Community Health Requires Knowledge of History

Ontario is in the midst of a measles outbreak, and our Chief Medical Officer of Health (CMOH) is taking a “you do you” approach. No mandates. No strong guidance. Just a gentle suggestion that people make informed decisions…if they choose to. It’s a startling response given public health’s long history of collective action, and at times, authoritarianism. 

That authoritarianism wasn’t a bug of early public health. It was a feature. Modern public health emphasizes individual rights, but those rights can come into tension with the community’s right to health, especially during outbreaks of communicable diseases. Institutional public health grew out of fear. 

Yalom on Approaching Meaning

About 45 years ago, psychiatrist Irvin Yalom estimated that a good 30-50% of all cases of depression might actually be a crisis of meaninglessness, an existential sickness, and these cases require a different method of treatment. We experience this lack of purpose as boredom, apathy, or emptiness. We are "not told by instinct what one must do, or any longer by tradition what one should do. Nor does one know what one wants to do," so we feel lost and directionless. Instead of addressing meaninglessness as the problem, though, we've been merely addressing the symptoms of it: addictions, compulsions, obsessions, malaise. In today's context, it might suggest that even social media issues could be problems with a lack of meaning. 

The last sentences of his lengthy tome, Existential Psychotherapy, sum up his solution: "The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One must immerse oneself in the river of life and let the question drift away." How he lands here is an intriguing path through a slew of philosophers and psychiatrists. Even without symptoms of a problem, attention to meaning is necessary as it gives birth to values, which become principles to live by as we place behaviours into our own hierarchy of acceptability. 

"One creates oneself by a series of ongoing decisions. But one cannot make each and every decision de novo throughout one's life; certain superordinate decisions must be made that provide an organizing principle for subsequent decisions." 

Yalom doesn't, however, suggest coming up with a list of values that can become meaningful to us, but that we immerse ourselves in life to become more aware of which values we already have. 

WHAT'S THE POINT? IT'S FOR US TO DECIDE

According to Yalom, we've hit this crisis point in meaninglessness because we have the leisure to think and because our work is no longer clearly purposeful, both of which are relatively recent experiences for such a large proportion of civilization. It's no longer just the philosophers of the day asking, What's it all for? What's the point of it all? He takes the existential position that it's up to us to figure it out.