High on a book

A poet friend and I used to play this little game of imagining the last thing we'd see. He imagined the face of a woman (his wife, incidentally, is a nurse) smiling kindly as if she finally understood him, then waving goodbye. I imagined watching the last :24 seconds of Game 7 of NBA championship--Lakers vs. Celtics--sitting on a comfortable couch with a drink by my side and a bag of Jalapeno Cheetos.

Celtics win at the buzzer! And I die most pleasantly.

(And then what?)

After reading enough of The Hacking of the American Mind (Avery Publishing, 2017) by Dr. Robert Lustig to get the gist--how marketeers have engineered their appeals to that part of our brain that prefers pleasure to happiness to sell their products and services, without us consumers really knowing what's happening--I'm in the process of revising my script; and it certainly won't involve television.

Put pretty simply, dopamine is quick fix, quick fix that pretty quickly needs another quick fix; and pleasure is something that you (usually) pay for.  Seratonin is far quieter, far less demanding of more, and can't be bought.

Dopamine (Pleasure): television.

Seratonin (Happiness): reading.

Another way of looking at the situation: Dopamine is watching the game on tv; Seratonin is actually being at the game.

If I'm understanding it as it's meant to be understood, Lustig's book could have as much cultural impact as Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth had in their time, books that had the moral force of goodness and the charity of truth. The Hacking of the American Mind is a book that shakes you by the collar and holds you in its arms. I'm getting high reading it.