Dopamine and The Search for Healthy Rewards

I’ve written before about the search for mental well-being, ancient practices, and functional patterns that humans have carried for thousands of years. Crafts. Tai chi. Things that feel old in the body, not just old in theory. Practices that seem to tune us back into something deeper, call it the Tao, call it nature, call it reality before distraction.

Punk rock played a role in that, too. It stripped things down. It cut through pretense and excess. It made me suspicious of systems that sell comfort, speed, and status while quietly hollowing people out.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about dopamine not in the internet pop-psych way, but in a practical, lived sense.

People talk about “good dopamine” and “bad dopamine,” but I don’t think that framing is quite right. What matters more is whether a reward is short-term and extractive or long-term and generative.

Dopamine itself isn’t the enemy. It’s a survival mechanism. Without it, organisms don’t move. They don’t leave the cave. They don’t hunt, build, explore, or learn. Dopamine is the internal signal that says, "This effort matters, do it again." 

The problem isn’t dopamine. The problem is how easily that system can be hijacked.

Some pursuits create a fast spike with no depth. Gambling is a good example. You don’t need much exposure for it to start damaging your life. A weekend can do real harm. Drugs can do even worse—sometimes in months, sometimes faster. The dose makes the poison, and the margin for error is thin.

Other pursuits are different.

Exercise is an interesting counterpoint. To become “addicted” to exercise in a way that truly harms you, the volume required is enormous. Elite endurance athletes might flirt with that edge, but most people will never get anywhere near it. The ceiling is high. The damage threshold is far away.

That matters.

It suggests that some reward loops are structurally safer than others. They demand effort. They build capacity. They return something tangible.

Hunting is another example. Skill. Patience. Movement. Failure. Learning. Food. There’s a feedback loop there that shaped humans for tens of thousands of years. The reward is real, but it’s earned—and it leaves you stronger, not emptier.

Bushcraft fits into this category for me.

You’re building skills. You’re making objects. You’re engaging with materials, tools, weather, and terrain. Even if those objects aren’t strictly necessary for survival anymore, they were for most of human history. The nervous system recognizes that. The body understands it at a level that doesn’t require explanation.

You’re not just consuming a hit of pleasure. You’re participating in a process.

Tai chi does the same thing in a quieter way. The movements are not arbitrary. They are old for a reason. They train balance, structure, breath, and awareness—things that once mattered directly to survival and still matter to health. You’re rehearsing patterns that kept people alive, even if you no longer need them to fight or flee.

That, to me, is the difference.

Healthy reward cycles don’t just feel good in the moment. They build something over time—skill, resilience, presence, capability. They feed the spirit and the body at the same time. They don’t collapse into compulsion because they’re anchored in effort, reality, and limits.

We need a reward to get off the couch. That’s not weakness—it’s biology. The task isn’t to eliminate dopamine, but to choose pursuits that deserve it.

Ancient practices, honest movement, craft, skill, and contact with the real world seem to do exactly that. They don’t numb you. They wake you up.

And once you feel that difference, it’s hard to unsee it.

Following the Grain: How I got into wood carving

 

When I was a kid, there was a movie about a boy who carved a small wooden man in a canoe and set it into a mountain stream. It was called, Paddle to the Sea.

The figure traveled all the way to the city, following rivers, lakes, and hidden waterways. I don’t remember every detail of the film, but I remember the feeling. The idea that something made by hand could move through the world on its own, guided by gravity and terrain, not by control.

That image stayed with me.

Years later, when I went to art school, I tried to move in the opposite direction. I wanted discipline. I wanted lineage. I trained myself as a painter, drawn to post-Impressionists and Renaissance masters, and eventually to Michelangelo’s sculpture. I focused on rendering, anatomy, proportion—learning how to see accurately and reproduce what I saw. I worked hard at the craft of art and reached a high level of technical control.

At the same time, something else was happening. I was hiking in nature for the first time in my life. Spending long hours in the mountains. Doing hallucinogens. Letting the edges soften. And I found myself pulled again and again toward work that was rougher, more immediate—natural forms, instinctive marks, the kind of punk-rock energy that refuses polish. People sometimes call it naïve art, though that word never quite fits.

What I struggled with was honesty. How do you let work be simple without pretending to be untrained? How do you avoid faking naïveté once you’ve spent years learning technique? That tension followed me everywhere. In studios. On trails. In my own head. There is a famous Picasso quote that perfectly sums this up: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

One day, walking toward the mountains near an apple orchard in New Paltz, New York, I noticed a piece of wood lying on the side of the road. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t precious. But it stopped me. I picked it up, and something clicked. I started carving.

Not as a project. Not as a statement. Just responding to the material. Following the grain. Letting the form suggest itself instead of imposing an idea onto it. I carved on and off over the years, slowly, quietly. That thread eventually led me to Taos, to totem carving, to all the small objects that come from listening rather than forcing.

Carving did something that drawing and painting never fully did for me. It removed the illusion of control. Wood pushes back. It splits. It resists. It demands attention. You can’t fake your way through it for long. The knife tells the truth.

The other day, walking along the road, I saw another piece of wood. Just sitting there. And instantly I was back in New Paltz, back at that first moment by the orchard. Same feeling in the body. Same quiet excitement. The sense that the material already knows something, and my job is simply to pay attention.

I don’t start with a plan anymore. I don’t need the object to be anything in particular. I’m interested in what the wood reveals, not what I want it to become.

Maybe that’s what stuck with me from that childhood story. Not the carved figure or the canoe, but the idea of release. Make something carefully. Set it into the current. Let the land finish the work.