a lot of people have heard about dopamine as the pleasure molecule and that's one thing it does dopamine was originally made to make us desire things that will benefit us evolutionarily and reward us when we do it so eat when you're hungry drink when you're thirsty reproduction winning competitions these are natural things your brain develops priorities in large part based on how much dopamine it's gonna get what do you want a hundred dollars or what's behind door number two there's a good chance what behind door number two is like a car or something right so they always pick door number two that's gonna give you more dopamine dopamine doesn't give us pleasure for things we have it can only make us want more once you get it dopamine shuts off social media gets you addicted by always promising you more there's always this sense if i'm not on social media i'm going to miss out on something i need to get more clicks i need to get more likes i need to get more friends have you ever been kind of scrolling through your social media looking at these different stories looking at these different posts and you realize i'm miserable i should be doing something else this is boring this is making me sad but you can't stop because what you're afraid of is that there's something down there that might be important there's something down there that might give you more might make your life better and so you just can't stop and that's dopamine what's the worst thing that could happen with this the danger is that it's no longer a tool to make your life better it becomes a sink where it absorbs all of your time all of your focus all of your energy and everything else around it shrivels so you stop paying attention to the people in your life because all you're worried about is getting more dopamine off of social media that's right what are the consequences of us being addicted to social media instagram twitter texting snap what is the worst long-term consequences we could face with this well how about the end of the human race you think so yes tell me why we've got so much amazing cool stuff we've got all kinds of things we can buy we've got all kinds of things we can experience something's got to give what is it that we're giving up for all of these things the answer is children once an economy reaches a certain point of prosperity the members of that economy lose interest in reproducing all of the developed nations have a negative population growth rate in order to keep the human race going each woman needs to have 2.1 children two children to replace her and the father and one to replace people who die before they have a chance to reproduce in all developed countries the birth rate is less than 2.1 percent even in developing nations uh we're seeing this happen uh it's falling and falling and falling we don't have a solution there are some countries where they're not paying people to have children and even that's not working as we get more and more gadgets that attract our attention they become substitutes for family and ultimately the human race is simply going to collapse unless something changes