You should get dopamine from creation.
But today, that’s harder than ever. We live inside a culture of constant interruption - a world shaped by phones, by noise, by an endless stream of micro-stimuli we never truly asked for.
Always loud. Always distracting. Always pulling us out of the pure state of simply being.
For makers, this is deadly. It destroys the conditions under which great creative work is born.
Great creative work happens in silence, stillness, and solitude - in the quiet moments where the mind can descend into depth.
So you have to design your life around those conditions. If you don’t, you’ll never reach the level of immersion required to make work that matters.
It’s the two sacred hours a day you devote to making something - without checking your phone, without talking to anyone, without escape. Just you and the work.
And you must be willing to sit with it.
Sit with the blank page. Sit with the boredom of not knowing what to do. Sit with the uncertainty of not knowing the right direction.
If you can endure these inevitable forces of resistance, you will progress. You will go deeper. You will get better. You will make something real.
This is where slow dopamine emerges - the kind that feels meaningful, earned, and expansive. The opposite of the instant hit you get from social media.
The moment you begin to feel dopamine from the work itself, something in you shifts. You’ve tasted the real reward.
You’ve probably felt this before - fleeting moments that revealed the creative life you crave.
Now your task is simple, but not easy: Say no to everything that pulls you away from those few daily hours of creation.
As you protect this space and build your life around it, the slow dopamine moments multiply.
This is the modern challenge of being a maker: To fight back against the distractions society has engineered - and to win, consistently - for the sake of your craft, your clarity, and your life.