“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
-Blaise Pascal
Would you rather work for eight hours a day followed by eight hours of personal time or would you rather switch every five minutes between work and leisure for sixteen hours? Switching every five minutes makes it incredibly difficult to get anything meaningful done. Yet it's closer to how many work and live these days. There's a concept called time confetti that illuminates how we spend time now. The term was originated by Brigid Schulte in her book Overwhelmed, but Wharton professor Adam Grant gives a great succint explanation. Adam states:
Time confetti. Where meaningful moments of our lives get shredded into increasingly tiny, useless pieces
Time confetti is continually shredding our time by reducing blocks of deep thought, work, and enjoyment into pieces that lack coherency and value. It is like reducing meals to a continual stream of morsels. Never fully satisfying but leading you through your day in an unfulfilled way.
It is in this vein that a disturbing article came out about the current state of the world and marketplace.
, a partner at a16z, recently wrote an article about the rise of dopamine culture. He was explaining how the current market is shifting to shorter and shorter consideration spans. The general thesis and observation is that consumers are becoming fast uptake, high churn individuals who crave variety. He writes:
A couple observations on how all of these trends manifest into tech:
Shitty retention is ubiquitous
Novelty effect is real, and affects growth metrics
The dominant culture of product management iterative towards KPIs
Tap into Dopamine Culture, or counterposition - both can work
Andrew claims dopamine culture is better because you filter through many people fast, get more instant feedback on what matters, and can build a better product by focusing on anyone that sticks. People will consider things for short periods of time, focusing only on what gives them an initial hook. This is further enforced by Julian Shapiro, a famed content marketer, who writes about growth marketing. Julian believes that contrary to popular belief, people have long attention spans. Instead, they have short consideration spans - the amount of time to determine if something is worth spending more time on. This feeds into Andrew Chen's current world view. Julian states:
The truth is that people don't actually have short attention spans for content: They finish three hour Joe Rogan episodes and they binge fourteen hour Netflix shows. What they have is short consideration spans: they must be hooked quickly. To do so, ensure your first minute is incredible.
Unfortunately, people spend a lot of time searching and will distract themselves with searching for the next dopamine hit. Bad habit stacks develop. Digging deeper into the inspiration for part of Andrew Chen's article is the writing from
. Ted wrote a famed post about the State of Culture in 2024 that highlighted the following issues with Dopamine Culture.
This is more than just the hot trend of 2024. It can last forever—because it’s based on body chemistry, not fashion or aesthetics.
Our brain rewards these brief bursts of distraction. The neurochemical dopamine is released, and this makes us feel good—so we want to repeat the stimulus.
The cycle looks like this.
[Figure 2. The Dopamine Loop]
This is a familiar model for addiction.
Only now it is getting applied to culture and the creative world—and billions of people. They are unwitting volunteers in the largest social engineering experiment in human history.
It is indeed a social engineering experiment because the entire dopamine loop has been built in large part due to a class of algorithms called reinforcement learning, particularly multi-armed bandits. These algorithms are given a goal, figure out how to explore the search space, and exploit the configuration which provides the highest score. In the context of the dopamine loop, the algorithms search over behaviors and triggers that maximize engagement. Not just duration but the quantity of engagements. That vicious feedback loop leads to a world of distraction which inhibits creative work and project completion.
The creation process is an iterative process, where initial ideas are developed, refined, and improved over time. This iterative nature demands prolonged engagement with the task to experiment, reflect, and iterate effectively. Creative work benefits from momentum, where progress builds on itself. Long periods of deep work help build and sustain this momentum, leading to more substantial and coherent creative outputs. Deep work also facilitates entering a flow state, a mental state where one is fully immersed in a task, leading to higher productivity and creativity. Achieving flow requires extended periods without distractions, allowing for sustained concentration and creativity.
Creative tasks often involve complex problem-solving, innovative thinking, and the synthesis of new ideas. These processes require significant cognitive effort and uninterrupted focus to deeply explore ideas and hold many variables in one's mind simultaneously. That's important because creative tasks cannot be simplified down to near zero. There's a certain amount of bandwidth required to express and grok complex ideas. Even when complex ideas are explained simply, it does not mean the understanding of executing the idea is conferred. Not everything can be in a tweet. Can you to explain how to create a neural network in a single tweet? To not only understand what it does fundamentally but also create one from scratch? There are limits to simplification which implies a required minimum amount of complexity.
This is a fundamental concept in data compression. You can only compress things so much. Data compression works by finding repetitive patterns in data and then creating rules to package those patterns. The more variability that exists in the data, the less patterns there are, the less it can be compressed. Try zipping an image 10 times and see how much the storage size actually decreases. At some point the memory size will stop decreasing.
Figure 3. Why interruptions massively set back engineers
Engineering type work requires effectively holding a large amount of complexity in one's head. Building high quality models well takes deep thought and deep sustained work. For engineering and modeling tasks, it can take around 20 minutes to get back to where you left off after the interruption. That's 20 minutes before you start doing actual work again. That comes from filling your mind with the entire context of what is being worked on. For instance, for a modeling task it might be the relationships between variables, hypotheses on transformations, things that have worked and not worked, expectations of performance, additional paths of exploration, and the current code that needs to be built. All of these are held in the mind at the same time to start working. The great comic above illustrates the point.
The requirement for no distractions naturally leads to engineers, machine learning practitioners, and other creative types requiring large blocks of uninterrupted time to complete their work. It is imperative to not have meetings during this time; Even quick meetings are a distraction that can break concentration and throw off entire blocks of time carved for getting quality work done. (There's a famous image below that illustrates this point). It also requires pausing notifications and not checking slack or emails.
Figure 4. The impact of meetings inside of deep work blocks.
Advancement in life comes from being able to deal with more complex situations and less direction. That progression requires focus and deep thought. Those in turn require removing distractions and task-switching. It appears that dopamine culture is disrupting this entire chain by hacking brain chemistry to reinforce short term content with high task switching and low focus. In effect, dopamine culture escalates the proliferation of time confetti. The brain modification to focus on short content degrades the ability to deal with complexity. This reduces advancement of both individuals and society, a troubling prospect, particularly when many problems that push civilization forward require this ability.
The simplest, though challenging, solution is to eliminate the offending stimuli. Time spent scrolling through short, dopamine-inducing content is time not spent on meaningful work, building deeper connections, or allowing your brain to process important matters. Recognizing and addressing this issue is crucial for personal growth and productivity.
If you aim to cultivate a high-performance engineering or machine learning culture, it is essential to establish professional norms supporting deep work. While this may be well understood by engineers and machine learning practitioners, it can be overlooked or misunderstood by other parts of the business. Ensuring that everyone recognizes the value of uninterrupted work time can significantly enhance productivity and innovation across the organization.
The rising dopamine culture appears to be an impediment to growth and the advancement of society. Combating the pervasive effects of time confetti and dopamine culture requires a conscious effort to create environments that prioritize deep, focused work. By fostering such environments, we can enhance individual capabilities, drive innovation, and ultimately advance society. As Blaise Pascal suggested, perhaps the solution to many of our problems lies in our ability to sit quietly and engage deeply with our thoughts.
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