I am not a medical doctor. I am not a therapist. I am very good at observation.
For the last decade, I've focused my energy on driving change in the AEC industry. In that process, I ended up learning far more about myself — and about humans — than I expected. I've seen deep, loving truth about what people are capable of when conditions are right. Today I want to outline why I think we are unable to communicate with one another, and how I think we can change that.
Today, as the world feels like it's unraveling, I have a message of hope: Change your brain. Change your world.
You are your brain. And your brain is under an electrochemical assault unlike anything in human history. Reality itself has been distorted — by substance abuse, by engineered attention capture, and by systems that hijack meaning faster than we can generate it.
Dopamine, Meaning, and the Inversion of Reality
Dopamine hijacking occurs when your natural attention system gets flipped upside down. The things that once mattered deeply to humans — competence, contribution, effort, survival — are now optional. Nature has been violated. Evolution, the very mechanism that made us better over time, has been bypassed. When dopamine can't find the right thing to attach to, life stops feeling meaningful.
Social Media and the Externalization of Self-Worth
Social media hijacks meaning by externalizing self-worth and fragmenting attention. For our ancestors, social validation was slow, local, and costly. Status came from competence, contribution, protection, and reputation earned over time within a finite tribe. Facebook, LinkedIn, X, and Instagram invert that system. TikTok is especially insidious — it doesn't show you what you like, it learns what captures your attention and feeds it back faster than you can form intent. Dopamine — the attention drug — now takes zero effort.
Chemicals: Shortcutting Meaning
A single drag from a nicotine vape can approximate the dopamine spike our ancestors might have experienced after killing a buffalo following a 12-mile persistence hunt. Cause and effect are completely inverted. If coffee helped build the Renaissance... did nicotine help build the Cold War?
The Summary (rate in US population)
Porn oversimplifies sex into novelty. (8%)
Nicotine oversimplifies effort into stimulation. (8%)
Alcohol oversimplifies meaning into relief. (10%)
THC oversimplifies urgency into drift. (7%)
Social media oversimplifies agency into performance. (>50%)
Anxiety meds oversimplify warning into suppression. (19%)
Depression meds oversimplify contrast into flatness. (13%)
Ultra-processed food oversimplifies nourishment into appetite. (15%)
Sedentary life oversimplifies competence into comfort. (47%)
Closing
Meaning is not found in simplicity. It is found in depth. Depth is messy. It's slow. It's uncomfortable. It takes time to understand.
If you want a meaningful life, control your attention. Take your brain back.