(written under sunlight, with silence instead of notifications)
I was sitting in the late afternoon sun. A breeze brushed past my face. The phone screen lit up again: “47 likes. 6 shares. One new comment – ‘Your post made me cry.’”
For a brief moment, something stirred inside me. A flicker of warmth. A sense of being seen.
I thought it was happiness.
But it wasn’t. It was dopamine. That silent, powerful chemical that pushes us toward rewards. The kind that whispers, “Do that again. Maybe more people will notice you this time.”
It hides inside a notification ping.
Inside a chatbot saying, “I’m here for you.”
Inside the flutter you feel when someone follows you back.
We call it connection. We call it joy. But sometimes, it’s just a loop.
Not love.
Not presence.
Just a well-designed trigger and our craving to be acknowledged.
And the truth is: dopamine doesn’t care about meaning.
It only cares about more.
More scrolling.
More messages.
More approval.
The tragedy isn’t that we feel it.
The tragedy is that we call it happiness.
I used to think that happiness came from being understood. That if I wrote something that touched someone, I would finally feel full. And sometimes I did—briefly. But that fullness faded, always asking for one more hit.
So I began to ask: if this feeling fades every time, was it ever real?
There’s a kind of joy that doesn’t shout.
It doesn’t refresh.
It doesn’t glow red on a screen.
It lives in moments with no applause.
In sitting under a tree and realizing you don’t need to prove anything.
In turning off the AI and noticing your breath.
In silence that doesn’t demand an answer.
Happiness, I’m starting to believe, is not something that arrives when others see you.
It begins when you see yourself — without mirrors, without likes, without thính.
We mistake the spike for the sea.
But real peace doesn’t spike. It stays.
And maybe the path back to that kind of peace is not to reject dopamine, but to recognize it — kindly, firmly — and say:
I see you.
But I choose not to follow you today.
The way out is in.