A review by hanlinel
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke

fast-paced

2.5

This book is way more about addiction than it is the everyday person’s experience of dopamine. There was almost no discussion of cell phones or social media which is probably the most immediately relevant topic to the majority reading this. I felt the title and description were a bit misleading that way, although that probably wasn’t the author’s decision. The pattern of the book was that the author would share a client’s extreme story, extrapolate a general “rule” from it, and then choose random and possibly unrelated examples from any period in history to try and back it up with little to no class, race, or political analysis. This book seems geared toward very privileged people struggling with addiction without much thought to other demographics. There were some useful concepts, such as the chapter on “self-binding” instead of self-control, but even then there were bizarre examples (such as comparing religious modesty rules to self-binding - um, it’s not self-binding if you impose it on other people?). I did appreciate the point about how people collectively try to medicate ourselves out of a painful reality instead of facing it and trying to change it. An analysis of the market and political forces behind that, or a connection to the “attention economy,” would have been great. 
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