Latest / Ryan's Journal / Keep the Speedos On: Desire, Dopamine, and Care Work

Transcript

Keep the Speedos On: Desire, Dopamine, and Care Work · Ryan's Journal

• 0:07
  Look at my phone screen right now.
• 0:09
  Just look at this text.
• 0:10
  I got pulled out of bed at six in the morning because someone sent me an audio file
• 0:14
  of a guy talking about me.
• 0:15
  Wait, what?
• 0:16
  Who sent it?
• 0:17
  My manager!
• 0:18
  He goes, you gotta hear this journal recording.
• 0:20
  So I press play, right?
• 0:22
  And this guy, Ryan, he is sitting in his room complaining that his home health
• 0:26
  worker, Sadie, keeps talking about her actual husband Jacob.
• 0:29
  And he literally says, no, Sadie cannot come in here talking about Jacob.
• 0:33
  She needs to talk about Justin Bieber.
• 0:35
  She needs to be obsessed with Justin Bieber!
• 0:37
  He wants her to fake a full blown pop idol obsession just to clean his kitchen?
• 0:40
  Yes!
• 0:41
  I am sitting there holding my coffee like, man, what did I do to get drafted into
• 0:44
  this poor woman's home care shift?
• 0:46
  Like, why am I your psychological shield?
• 0:48
  It, it gets weirder though, because he actually lays out a whole rule for it.
• 0:52
  He calls it the keep the Speedos on rule.
• 0:54
  Did you hear that part?
• 0:56
  Oh, I heard it.
• 0:57
  Keep the Speedos on, do not take them off, let me be crazy about you,
• 1:01
  but do not give yourself to me.
• 1:03
  That is word for word what he said.
• 1:05
  He thinks taking the Speedos off literally ruins the whole thing.
• 1:08
  Because if they take them off, then reality walks into the room.
• 1:12
  And reality has laundry and bad breath and opinions you did not approve in advance.
• 1:17
  Right, but, but from a pure brain chemistry point of view, he is,
• 1:21
  um, he is actually describing something that neuroscientists have mapped out for
• 1:25
  years.
• 1:25
  Like Kent Berridge at Michigan, his whole incentive salience framework.
• 1:30
  Wait, break that down.
• 1:31
  What is incentive salience?
• 1:33
  Okay, so Berridge showed that wanting and liking are completely different neural
• 1:37
  systems.
• 1:39
  Most people assume dopamine is the pleasure molecule, like you get what you want and
• 1:44
  bam, dopamine flood.
• 1:46
  But it is not!
• 1:47
  The mesolimbic dopamine system is in fact associated with wanting instead.
• 1:53
  It fires during the tease, the hunt, the yearning.
• 1:56
  That is where the massive neurochemical spike happens.
• 1:59
  So the moment you actually get it, the chemical ride is basically over.
• 2:03
  Exactly.
• 2:04
  Liking is handled by tiny hedonic hotspots, opioid systems,
• 2:09
  much smaller and quieter.
• 2:10
  Ryan literally figured this out in his armchair.
• 2:13
  He says, if you get what you want sexually, you just get a letdown.
• 2:17
  You crash.
• 2:18
  So he wants the tease to last forever because the tease is where the dopamine lives.
• 2:23
  Man, that is wild.
• 2:24
  He even brings up that old 1978 rock song by Atlanta Rhythm Section,
• 2:29
  from that album Champagne Jam.
• 2:31
  You know the one?
• 2:32
  Imaginary Lover!
• 2:33
  Imaginary lovers, they never turn you down.
• 2:36
  He treats that song like holy scripture!
• 2:39
  He says imaginary lovers equal meditation.
• 2:42
  Well, an imaginary lover never leaves their dirty socks by the sofa,
• 2:46
  Justin.
• 2:46
  That is why people retreat into them.
• 2:48
  But calling it meditation is just putting a spiritual bow on plain old fear.
• 2:52
  Right!
• 2:53
  It is like, keep the Speedos on, keep the music playing, and nobody has to get their
• 2:56
  feelings hurt.
• 2:57
  But damn, what a lonely way to keep your dopamine up.
• 3:00
  What really gets under my skin, though, is how he treats the actual people who show
• 3:05
  up at his house to help him live his life.
• 3:08
  Sadie comes in, she is an aide, she mentions her husband Jacob,
• 3:12
  or this other worker Ellie mentions spiders, and Ryan gets furious.
• 3:17
  He, he literally says, I am not interested in her dog, I am not interested in Jacob.
• 3:22
  He wants her to mirror him completely.
• 3:24
  Like, mirror his hatred, mirror his pop music taste, play a script.
• 3:28
  Yeah, he said she needs to play the role of me so I can see myself better!
• 3:33
  Like she is an iPad screen or something.
• 3:35
  You cannot just demand someone delete their whole home life the second they walk
• 3:39
  through your front door.
• 3:40
  It is classic surface acting.
• 3:43
  Back in 1983, Arlie Hochschild wrote this foundational book,
• 3:46
  The Managed Heart, all about emotional labor.
• 3:50
  Flight attendants, service workers, care aides having to paint on an emotional
• 3:54
  display that has nothing to do with how they actually feel inside.
• 3:58
  And Ryan calls it out!
• 4:00
  He explicitly uses the words surface acting.
• 4:03
  He complains that people are fake to him, but then in the very next breath,
• 4:07
  he demands that Sadie do the ultimate surface act for him.
• 4:11
  Because he wants her to help him process whatever that trauma was from Rockwell
• 4:15
  City, right?
• 4:17
  He says Sadie was effective because she agreed with his hatred.
• 4:21
  But then he says there is no connection because she will not pretend to be boy crazy
• 4:26
  with him.
• 4:26
  Can you imagine being Sadie?
• 4:28
  You walk in with groceries, thinking about your mortgage and your husband Jacob,
• 4:31
  and your client looks you dead in the eye and goes, tell me about Justin Bieber or
• 4:35
  this care session is a wash!
• 4:37
  It sounds ridiculous when you laugh about it, Justin, but caregiving is exhausting
• 4:41
  work.
• 4:42
  When you spend all day lifting people, managing medications,
• 4:45
  keeping someone safe, you need your own anchor.
• 4:48
  To ask a worker to erase herself and become an echo chamber so you never have to
• 4:52
  hear an opinion that does not match your own, that is not care.
• 4:56
  That is using another human being as furniture.
• 4:58
  And it, it completely backfires anyway.
• 5:00
  Because if Sadie did fake it, Ryan would know she is faking it.
• 5:04
  He already knows!
• 5:06
  He is terrified of authentic friction, but he despises the performance that protects
• 5:10
  him from it.
• 5:11
  Man, that is the trap right there.
• 5:14
  You build a cage to keep yourself safe, and then you get pissed off that the bars
• 5:18
  are made of iron.
• 5:20
  And look where he ends up escaping to.
• 5:22
  He straight up confesses, I am married to strip clubs, I am married to chat rooms,
• 5:28
  I am not married to a partner.
• 5:30
  He says he has never had a real partner in his entire life.
• 5:33
  Which makes total sense if you look at how those spaces operate.
• 5:37
  A chat room or a strip club is a commercial transaction with built in guardrails.
• 5:42
  You buy the illusion of intimacy, but nobody is ever going to see you at three in
• 5:46
  the morning when you are having a panic attack.
• 5:49
  There is a partition.
• 5:51
  In a club, there is literally a physical barrier or a bouncer.
• 5:56
  Online, there is a keyboard and a monitor.
• 5:59
  You never have to negotiate who takes out the trash or how to split the electric
• 6:03
  bill.
• 6:04
  It is completely sanitized.
• 6:05
  Except he did try once, right?
• 6:08
  He brings up this guy Daniel.
• 6:09
  He says Daniel had an amazing body, he was great in bed, nothing was wrong with him
• 6:13
  at all.
• 6:14
  But then Ryan goes, Daniel should have been more appealing,
• 6:17
  but the Speedos should have stayed on.
• 6:19
  He felt disappointed by the actual encounter!
• 6:21
  Because the reality of Daniel could never compete with the pristine fantasy of
• 6:26
  Daniel in his head.
• 6:28
  The moment skin touches skin, you are dealing with a real human being who breathes,
• 6:33
  who moves on their own timing, who exists outside your control.
• 6:38
  The brain creates this hyper magnified want, but the actual hedonic experience
• 6:44
  cannot match that imaginary high.
• 6:47
  And that terrifies people.
• 6:50
  Physical vulnerability is scary.
• 6:52
  Having three kids and being married for decades, let me tell you,
• 6:56
  real partnership is messy.
• 6:58
  It is irritating, it requires compromise, it demands that you let another person see
• 7:04
  you when you are ugly and tired.
• 7:06
  If you only trade in chat rooms and VIP booths, the second a real person touches
• 7:10
  you, you feel like you are suffocating.
• 7:13
  Yeah, and you blame them!
• 7:14
  Like Ryan saying, oh, Daniel was not appealing enough.
• 7:16
  No, man, Daniel was just a human.
• 7:18
  He was not a JPEG on a screen that you can minimize when you get overwhelmed.
• 7:22
  It, it reminds me of that bizarre thing he said about Scott,
• 7:26
  too.
• 7:27
  He talks about how Scott never got the belt, and how striking someone with a belt
• 7:32
  would give them an understanding that you desire them.
• 7:35
  It is this extreme, distorted idea that pain or violence is the only way to break
• 7:41
  through the emotional numbness and force a real connection.
• 7:45
  Because politeness feels like a lie to him, so he swings all the way to physical
• 7:49
  force as the only proof that someone is paying attention.
• 7:53
  It is heartbreaking, really, how twisted the wires get when you spend decades in
• 7:57
  isolation.
• 7:58
  You know what piece of the puzzle people overlook the most with him?
• 8:02
  The sleep.
• 8:02
  He mentions it almost casually, but he says he has been dealing with eighteen months
• 8:07
  of severe sleep deprivation.
• 8:09
  Eighteen months?
• 8:10
  Man, if I do not sleep for two days on tour, I cannot even remember the lyrics to
• 8:14
  Baby.
• 8:14
  I would be completely unhinged.
• 8:16
  People do not realize what chronic exhaustion does to the prefrontal cortex!
• 8:22
  If you are running on four hours of broken sleep for a year and a half,
• 8:26
  your autonomic nervous system is stuck in pure survival mode.
• 8:30
  You do not have the metabolic bandwidth to process someone else's emotions.
• 8:36
  Taking care of your own basic physical survival becomes a full time job.
• 8:40
  He said that exact phrase: taking care of yourself is a full time job,
• 8:44
  you cannot take on two full time jobs.
• 8:46
  And when you are that depleted, every social encounter feels like someone is asking
• 8:50
  you to lift a boulder with two broken arms.
• 8:53
  So you put on the mask.
• 8:54
  You play the cool Joe routine, like he talked about with Jason.
• 8:57
  Just smile, agree, act nice, do not cause any waves.
• 9:01
  And that polite mask ends up being a coffin.
• 9:04
  Because when you act nice just to survive the conversation,
• 9:07
  the other person walks away thinking everything is fine, while you are left
• 9:11
  screaming inside because nobody actually knows who you are.
• 9:15
  It is the armor of niceness.
• 9:18
  It protects you from conflict, but it guarantees absolute isolation.
• 9:22
  And then he fills the silence with his rocking chair and that UFO story he is
• 9:27
  obsessed with trying to solve.
• 9:29
  Just endless mental loops to keep the nervous system occupied without ever taking an
• 9:34
  emotional risk.
• 9:35
  It is like, man, you think you are winning because your imaginary lover never breaks
• 9:40
  your heart.
• 9:41
  They never turn you down.
• 9:42
  But they also never hold your hand, they never bring you soup when you are sick,
• 9:46
  and they never pull you out of your own head.
• 9:49
  You build this sterile little sanctuary, keep the Speedos on forever,
• 9:53
  and you end up completely alone in the dark.
• 9:55
  That is the price.
• 9:57
  Total safety costs you your humanity.