The Book

I didn't set out to write about dopamine. I set out to understand why I couldn't stop.

The drinking. The scroll. The restlessness that made every city feel temporary and every accomplishment feel hollow the moment it landed. I thought the problem was me — a lack of discipline, something broken in the wiring.

The neurological profile that makes someone restless and impossible to satisfy is identical to the one that drove the great explorers across unmapped oceans. Tesla. Lovelace. Cortés. Napoleon. Faraday. The same hunger. The same inability to leave well enough alone.

The explorers and the addicts are wired the same way.

This book traces that wiring across ten thousand years — from hunter-gatherers who pushed our species across every continent, through the obsessives who built and broke the modern world, to the attention economy that learned to harvest it all.

Understanding what was happening in my brain was the only thing that actually changed it. Not willpower. Not discipline. Understanding.

"It's for anyone who suspected their hunger might be the most valuable thing about them."