The dopamine culture & the church

Deborah Sloan takes a look at how our pursuit of pleasure and a burst of dopamine is affecting our lives, and assesses the implications of this for the church.

“Iwant to tell you why entertainment is dead. And what’s coming to take its place,” says the American music critic, Ted Gioia in a recent blog post. Lamenting on the state of the culture in 2024, he describes how we’re witnessing the birth of a postentertainment society. It isn’t pretty, he says, as he paints a dystopian picture of the consequences of social media addiction. Art, once culturally revered, holds little attraction for modern audiences. It demands too much effort, and the media companies who filled the cultural gap with film and television are now struggling in ways nobody anticipated a few years ago.

Gioia explains that the fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. “Call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want,” he says. “But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity. The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.”

We are now living in what Gioia calls a ‘dopamine culture’, designed to hook individuals into a pleasure-seeking cycle of fast-paced, snappy, visual content. Its ultimate goal is to get people addicted. When we follow a clickbait headline or look at a meme or browse YouTube, the neurochemical dopamine is released. In her book, Dopamine Nation, Dr Anna Lembke, an expert on addiction, explains how dopamine is the body’s major reward neurotransmitter. We experience a dopamine hike as we anticipate doing something just as much as when we do the thing itself. When we reach for our phones, we are already expecting them to deliver something to us.

…the fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction.

Seeking pleasure has always been hardwired into the human brain so it isn’t our brains that have changed over the last few years, it’s our access to addictive things. Lembke highlights how our brain normally operates a self-regulating process called homeostasis, meaning “for every high, there is a low”. Whilst we might experience a dopamine dip with most pleasure-seeking activities and eventually stop binge-watching the latest Netflix series or eating the whole packet of biscuits, the dopamine delivered by the digital world is on a previously unimaginable scale with no self-regulating processes.

Social media feeds are unrelenting. We don’t have time to make decisions before the next hit loads automatically onto our screen. Whereas Facebook was once a space to connect with family and friends and Instagram was a photosharing site, everything has now been turned into TikTok, a platform named after the sound of a ticking clock, where short bursts of content are continuously refreshed and replaced.

Of course, we could say mobile phone addiction is nothing new. Parents have been struggling for some time now over whether to allow their children access to a device they will find difficult to extract from them. But addiction to social media is not a ‘disease’ of the young. No generation is immune from the effects of dopamine culture. To a degree, we are all addicts. Lembke calls the smartphone the ‘modern-day hypodermic needle’. We turn to it for quick hits, craving attention and validation with every swipe. Suggesting people have technology fasts, utilise airplane mode and lock their phones in drawers is insufficient. These are temporary solutions, managing the symptoms rather than tackling the causes. So, what does dopamine culture and living in an age of distraction mean for the church? Does it mean rethinking services because we now have short attention spans and distracted minds? Does it mean reducing the length of sermons because people struggle to concentrate and are anxiously waiting to retrieve their mobile from their pocket or handbag? Does it mean using more videos or reels or images on Sunday mornings? Yes, it may involve reviewing how corporate worship is structured to build in more interactive engagement but dealing with dopamine culture is not about identifying innovative ways to provide content or coming up with something that rivals TikTok – it’s about understanding why we have a dopamine culture in the first place and then showing Christian alternatives to this. Here are some things the church may want to consider when it comes to dopamine culture:

Call it scrolling or swiping…it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.

It makes money

Dopamine culture is big business. “If you thought the drug cartels were rich, wait till you see how much money the dopamine cartel is making,” Gioia says about the large technology companies who produce addictive content. They don’t openly publicise it but they want a market of junkies so they can act as their dealers. Gioia believes ruthless corporations need to be named and shamed. “Just telling the truth about the dopamine cartel would be a major step forward for the culture in 2024,” he says. He urges politicians to get involved. Perhaps this is something the church should be getting involved in too.

It doesn’t bring happiness

Despite having endless distraction available at our fingertips, research shows that consuming content does not bring long-term satisfaction. In fact, it does the opposite. Because of the negative effect on behaviour and the increase in addiction-related mental ill-health, Gioia says that “the dopamine cartel is now aggravating our worst social problems – in education, in workplaces, and in private life”. “This is what we do for fun,” he says, “doomscrolling, trolling, doxxing, gaslighting”. The message the church has about the true and long-lasting satisfaction found in Jesus provides a real antidote to this.

It evidences a need to belong

For many, dopamine culture is escapism from reality. Instant gratification is a numbing mechanism and a way of avoiding difficult feelings such as loneliness and low self-esteem. The virtual world becomes a search for connection in the absence of finding it anywhere else. Here is where the church can step in and offer an alternative – a welcome, a community, a place of hope for those who are desperately seeking somewhere to belong.

Dealing with it requires discipline

Lembke explains how we’re forever “interrupting ourselves” for a digital fix because we’ve forgotten how to be alone with ourselves. She encourages people to disconnect from devices and engage with their thoughts. This isn’t easy and means tolerating discomfort, she says, but it is the “path to the good life”. We know that distraction draws us further away from God and intentionally tuning in brings us closer to him again. If we can’t tolerate being silent and still with God, we can’t hear what he is saying to us. Lembke’s comment reminds us of the importance of pursuing and practising spiritual disciplines, setting our phones aside so we can contemplate and meditate on God’s Word.

Tackling it involves an intergenerational approach

There is increasing evidence that younger people (millennials and Gen Z) are quitting social media. They are rejecting dopamine culture because they have seen its destructiveness and yearn to find deeper and higher meaning in life. They are the ones leading the way in terms of establishing interest groups, organising social gatherings, reinvigorating traditional media, and enjoying more slow-paced activities. Perhaps this provides an opportunity for churches to bring different generations together to find collective meaning and to explore and envision ways to counteract the impact of dopamine culture on society. Whether he intends to or not, Gioia ends his lament with a call to appreciate what God has given us. “Unplug yourself from time to time,” he says, “and start noticing the trees. They actually look better in real life than in the headset”.

Deborah Sloan is a member of Bloomfield Presbyterian Church.