If you find the topics I write about to be mildly interesting, yet you skim over the articles because they’re “too long” or “you get the gist of it" then you, my friend, have a problem.

Before you cancel me. Hear me out first.

Because I also have the same problem.

Which is that our brains have become so conditioned for instant gratification, that we’ve lost our ability to willingly endure any amount of discomfort.

There used to be a time when people read newspapers as their main source of both news and entertainment. Back then, if you didn’t like what was published, you were stuck with it, so you read it anyway.

Contrast that with today where if you’re not hooked in the first few seconds, you’re moving on to the next.

It’s not lost on me that people spend hours every day scrolling on social media, continuously being drip-fed small shots of dopamine like an addict, all while finding the prospect of reading a 20-minute essay to be a waste of time.

Giving something your focused attention, and slogging through it, even if there are points that are boring or cumbersome has lost it’s perceived value.

I mean.. we might know there’s value in it, but our actions say otherwise.

Society has collectively moved in a direction that’s resulted in a mass erosion of cognitive skills. Memory, attention, focus, deep thinking - these are all very necessary skills for driving your life forward in the direction of peace, abundance, and fulfillment.

As our ability to harness these very important cognitive skills is diminished, so is our ability to control our own lives.

You might think that dopamine makes us happy, but that’s a common misconception.

Dopamine gives us the motivation to pursue things that we THINK will bring us some sort of reward.

This makes it critical for survival because, in the past it gave us the drive to secure food, and build shelter, and produce offspring.

But today is a completely different reality because the anticipation of reward is also the driving force behind capitalism itself. Everything we consume from products, to services, to news, to online content comes with the expectation of some reward, even if we’re not consciously aware of it.

This very fact is the underlying basis of capitalism. To sell anything, someone must convince you that you will receive a reward for buying what they have to offer.

This means that for capitalism to work, it must find a way to infiltrate your dopamine reward system. It’s the only way you will have the motivation to give away your time, energy, money, or attention.

This isn’t inherently bad. But in its persistent quest to do things as efficiently as possible, the system of capitalism wastes no opportunities to feed you the cheapest sources of dopamine on a mass scale because they know that selling instant gratification is the fastest route to profitability.

In practical terms, what does this look like?

I can go on, but if you want a thorough breakdown of how your dopamine reward system is infiltrated, then I suggest you read Robert Lustig’s book, The Hacking of The American Mind.

The end of 2025 marks the completion of the first quarter of the century defined by the rise of the internet-based information economy.

We get our news through the internet. We communicate with other people digitally through emails and instant messages. Our entertainment is mostly online.

The first quarter of this century also coincidentally marks the rise of extreme dopamine overload from the proliferation of the digital economy which pumps roughly 75,000x more information into the human brain than it is capable of processing.

And most of that information are sources of cheap dopamine.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Because not only is it such a problem in my own life and basically everyone else’s, but I’ve also seen how transformational it is once you master the art of dopamine management.

Your bad habits and addictions become less of a problem, or could even go away entirely.

Your ability to channel your time, energy, and money into a really important area of your life, and then locking in with extreme focus dramatically changes your life for the better.

This is how you:

It all starts with making a healthy relationship with dopamine your priority in life, because you know that it will carry over into everything else that’s important to you. Your faith, your family, your health, your work, etc.

Grab a pen and paper, and read very closely, because this is where I stop pontificating, and you take control over your own destiny.

I’ve come up with a very simple 5 step framework that helps me to lock in and get focused without overcomplicating things.

And on that note, if you are interested in using this framework for yourself then I’ve created a free 5-day course. It’s called the Digital Detox and Focus Reset, and each day for 5 days you’ll get new lessons delivered directly to your inbox with an exercise that you can do to embody the framework I’m about to go over.

Now on to the process…

First you really need to know yourself. This should come as no surprise.