Why your brain is a badly optimised marketplace.
Your brain is an economy.
Not a good oneâmore like a futuristic bazaar where the merchants are drunk, the currency is unstable, and the stock prices change depending on how close your phone is.
Itâs the invisible accountant deciding what your life is âworthâ minute to minute.
And like any dysfunctional economy, yours has:
All inside a three-pound organ that still thinks itâs living in a forest.
Every action you take â or avoid â has a price tag.
Your brain will always choose the asset with the best dopamine ROI â even if itâs stupid.
Thatâs how you end up:
Youâre not irrational.
Youâre trading on a market with broken valuation metrics.
Dopamine peaks during anticipation, not completion.
This is why imagining cleaning your room feels more rewarding than actually cleaning your room.
Itâs why buying a planner feels more productive than writing anything in it.
Itâs why âresearching a habit changeâ feels like self-improvement when 98% of it is self-delusion.
Your brain rewards the idea of the thing, not the thing.
âYou chase the fantasy and then resent the reality.â
Welcome to the dopamine economy
Hyperfixation is the crypto bull market of your nervous system.
Prices skyrocket overnight. đ
Resources flood into one project. đ
You feel invincible, brilliant, unstoppable. đĽ
Thenâ
without warningâ
the bubble bursts.
Interest collapses. Energy evaporates.
You walk away like the CEO of a failed startup saying âIt wasnât the right time.â
Analyst Note
People think you choose this. They donât understand that hyperfixation is market volatility, not personality.
Your dopamine regulation system is basically a tech bro with a whiteboard and no sleep.
Every task you postpone charges interest.
Not because youâre lazyâ
but because low-dopamine tasks require a tax payment:
activation energy.
This tax is invisible but brutal.
Starting a task is expensive. Once youâre inside it, the tax vanishes.
This is why your behavior makes no sense from the outside but perfect sense internally.
Your system isnât broken. Your budget is.
Modern life hijacks your valuation system.
Apps, notifications, micro-entertainmentâthey all function as dopamine slot machines designed to:
Your brain wasnât built to compete with algorithms trained to exploit your biology.
You are a lone trader in a market run by supercomputers.
Of course youâre overwhelmed.
The dopamine economy collapses when valuations go wrong.
Your brain isnât bad at discipline. Itâs bad at pricing.
It cannot tell the difference between:
what feels rewarding now
and
what makes life rewarding later.
You donât.
You intervene.
You create:
You trick the system into valuing the right things. Not by force â by changing the price signals.
You donât âbecome disciplined.â You adjust the market incentives.
Youâre not rebuilding an economy.
Youâre stabilizing one that was never designed for the 21st century.
âYouâre not fighting your brain. Youâre learning its exchange rate.â