What Comes After Dopamine Culture?
It's time to prepare for Peak Experience Culture
Dopamine culture is alive and well. Every time you scroll, click, share, shit-post, thirst-trap, or dunk, you’re participating. And it’s great. The economy loves you for it and so does the pleasure-center of your brain—at least momentarily.
It’s what follows that pleasurable moment that gives “dopamine culture” its sinister connotation. The quick rush from a flood of virtual “likes” is followed by a void. An emptiness. And a realization that—in extreme cases—you’ve just spent the full day alone staring at a lifeless screen like some kind of a brainless zombie.
Everyone agrees that we should do something to thwart the domination of dopamine culture. It would be tragic if musicians stopped making albums and all new music was only made as TikTok clips, or if movie-making was abandoned for reels. This would be the cultural equivalent of all restaurants becoming McDonald’s. And yeah—no one wants that.
I agree dopamine culture should be curtailed. But I take issue with the alternatives that are typically proposed.
Consider this 2024 essay by Ted Gioia: How to Break Free from Dopamine Culture. On the one hand, everything Gioia recommends is perfectly reasonable. To quote his headline points, he recommends that you should:
Minimize your reliance on scrolling and swiping interfaces.
Go out into the world and rediscover what real applications looked like before we had digital apps.
Pursue immersive experiences in music (and other things).
Celebrate rituals—both family and personal rituals, as well as larger communal rituals.
Sounds fine, right?
On the other hand, this advice leaves me about as excited as a deflated balloon. It has the vibe of your mom telling you to eat your vegetables so you’ll feel better. Of course your mom is right—but it’s not advice to inspire a zest for life. Thanks, but…meh!
That’s my initial reaction to Gioia’s advice, but it’s actually beside the point. What really bugs me about Gioia’s advice is that it’s backwards looking. Put down your phone, go outside, listen to music the old fashioned way, partake in rituals. Cool. Why don’t we all just join the Quakers?
When considering the question: Where should culture go next? I don’t think the correct answer is in reverse.
So, what is the alternative? What is something aspirational that could come after dopamine culture?
The Role of Technology
To begin to answer this question, I want to take seriously the possibility that technology will radically transform our lives in the near future. Just as technology gave us dopamine culture, it’s inevitable that the next era will also be driven by technological advancement.
It’s impossible to say how the next few decades will play out, but it seems like a safe bet that the future will be shaped by some combination of: AI, quantum computing, energy abundance, space travel, brain-computer interfaces, and life-extension technology. Each one of these technologies will have major impacts on our culture, including our relationship to athletics, art, and entertainment.
With these new technologies really kicking in, we will enter an era that resembles something like the vision Aaron Bastani articulated in his book Fully Automated Luxury Communism. The futurist Zoltan Istvan, currently running for governor of California, has referred to this new era by the term “Automated Abundance Economy.” It will be an era where AI generates most of the wealth, allowing us humans to find meaning in our lives apart from the 40-hour work week.
Peak Experience Culture
In the cultural realm, I can imagine dopamine culture naturally transitioning to something far more enlivening: Peak Experience Culture.
This new cultural era (as I like to envision it) will be distinguished by freedom from screens, thereby nullifying most of the harms Gioia and others are concerned with. But more importantly, it will center around a new lifestyle where cultural activities are no longer subordinate to economic actives.
We will no longer wake up to work. Instead, we will wake up to play. This play-based existence won’t be a phase of life we grow out of (as children currently do) or begrudgingly age into (as the elderly do). It will be what the most ambitious, intelligent, and mobile among us dedicate themselves to. As such, we will absolutely begin to crush it at entertaining ourselves.
And I use the word “entertain” in the broadest sense. If you enjoy yoga, you will have the time to dedicate hours a day to it, rather than squeezing it into your schedule once a week for one hour. If you’re like me and you like to take long walks, you’ll be able to enjoy the Art Garfunkel experience and walk across America. And of course traveling will become quicker, cheaper, and more widely available.
In addition to these simple pleasures, which we’ll finally be able to indulge in to our hearts’ content, technology-based entertainment will become more immersive, more able to stimulate and to satisfy. This will include virtual reality experiences, but it may also include consciousness-expanding drug experiences that are safely induced through biotech advancements.
What about music, literature, and painting? To some extent we can expect these to be forever handed over to AI. We’ll look back on past eras as golden ages of human storytelling, which form the foundation for AI-based storytelling. We’ll still “manually” write novels and record records, but they will be for amusement-purposes, just as poetry, opera, and stage-plays largely are today. But at the meantime, anyone will be able to generate an absolutely incredible book, film, or album tailored to their exact preference in the moment.
But no matter what pursuits we get involved in, they’ll fall within the context of seeking to achieve a peak experience: “a transcendent moment of intense joy, ecstasy, or awe, often associated with self-actualization.”
Peak experiences, as I’ve written before, are far too amazing to be as rare as we currently know them to be. We can do better. We can gaze up to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy and confidently tell ourselves: our next cultural advancement is up there in the realm of self-actualization.
How does this vision of the future help anyone today when we’re all stuck in the thick of dopamine culture? It helps because this vision can encourage you, even this moment, to start to reorient your life around achieving peak experiences. Don’t just set down your phone. Join a sports team. Buy a plane ticket to a random spot on the map. Dig out your running shoes and take off down the road and don’t turn around until all of your problems and anxieties disappear.
I have been wondering lately whether AI will, as you say, liberate our time for enjoyment or further trap us in the dopamine loop. Here's the latest insane pattern I've noticed happening in my life: scroll for a while to feed the social media/news-fueled mental illness; feel bad from doing so; jump on with a supportive, always positive AI who tells me everything will be fine and aren't I so smart and pretty to boot; feel better; back to social media/news. Instead of freeing up my time, I'm starting to feel like AI is more of a parasocial relationship that provides a different kind of dopamine hit--less frenetic doom, more soothing roommate. Considering the economic incentives social media and AI companies have in keeping us dopamined up, do you think something outside those entities will have to step in to snap the general public out of it?
The Dopamine Goldfish Bowl and the Coming Flood of Synthetic Joy
(A rant in three caffeinated spasms by Simian Smith, 2025)
I. Still Mashing the Lever for Treats
Dopamine culture isn’t just "alive and well"; it’s the only jungle left that still guarantees a pulse. Every thumb‑twitched micro‑gesture is a coin in the enormous arcade of algorithmic slot machines. We scroll the infinite feed like lab rats hammered on Monster Energy, slapping the refresh bar so hard you can smell the plastic melting.
Ted Gioia says: touch grass, light candles, rediscover ritual. Lovely. But the phone is already ritual. It’s the prayer wheel that never stops spinning; the rosary beads taste of Gorilla Glass. Trying to quit by going "outside" is like escaping Las Vegas by standing in the car park, you’re still breathing neon.
What Gioia misses is that the casino is upgrading itself faster than we can leg it. The dealers are no longer human. They’re GPT‑flavoured slot clerics trained on our bad decisions and ready to upsell the next hallucination.
II. AIs Don’t Want Your Soul; They Want Your Patterns
Let’s get something straight: the Large Language Model doesn’t cackle in a lair plotting your existential downfall. It’s more banal than that. It watches. It counts. It nudges.
Every emoji, every drunken DM, every late‑night panic‑search for "is loneliness fatal" is mulch for a predictive engine whose sole religion is Engagement Per User Second. We are livestock harvested for statistical regularities. The algorithm isn’t evil; evil at least has motives. This is worse; it’s indifferent, a cosmic vending machine with a taste for jittery mammals.
Peak Experience Culture? Beautiful dream. But under current firmware, "peak" is whatever keeps you staring. If the machine can synthesise a cheap, loopable parody of awe, guess which version scales. Real transcendence takes time, risk, and sometimes silence. None of those paginate well.
Picture it: a headset drips you bespoke euphoria, no sweat, no discipline, no confusing human edges. Meanwhile your body atrophies like forgotten office plant. Congratulations, you’ve self‑actualised into a decorative house slug.
III. How to Punch Holes in the Pleasure Matrix
Sabotage the Data Trail. Throw noise in the gears. Use junk clicks, random scrolls, and deliberate mis‑tags. Make your profile look like an Edward Lear limerick caught in a hurricane.
Curate Boredom. Genuine boredom, the undistracted void, is radioactive to recommendation engines. Sit in a room with nothing but the smell of damp plaster and your own twitchy ape‑brain until a real thought crawls out.
Build Human Latency. Answer messages tomorrow. Post the thing once, then delete the app for a week. Make the algorithm chase you like a drunk ex across a muddy festival field.
Use AI as Pliers, Not Pacifier. Generate a first draft, then maul it with your teeth. Force the machine output through your messy, contradictory, heartbreak‑soaked perspective. Leave claw‑marks only you could make.
Re‑Ritualise the physical. Sweat on purpose. Sing off‑key in a room where no mic is listening. Print your words on dead trees and hand them, shaking, to another mammal. If you must chase a peak, at least bleed for the altitude.
IV. Tomorrow’s To‑Do List (Scrawled on a Beer Mat)
Teach the kids that a feed is a verb, not a life.
Refuse any interface that can’t cope with ambiguity or sarcasm.
Demand transparency from the code priests; if they won’t show you the levers, assume they’re clamped on your amygdala.
Keep a corner of your mind unsponsored, untracked, unsupervised. Guard it like contraband.
The distance between dopamine culture and whatever luminous post‑scarcity circus awaits is measured in politics, infrastructure, and raw, stubborn human will. We can’t spreadsheet our way into Maslow’s loft. We’ll have to drag our meat‑selves there, kicking and muttering, while the bots keep offering shortcuts lined with cotton‑candy sedation.
So yes, I want the era of peak experience. But I want it earned, not streamed. Until then, I’ll keep throwing bricks at the jukebox and dancing in the sparks.
End transmission.