Products that don’t exist. Meal deliveries that will never make it to the front door. Smoke breaks lacking the most important ingredient. (View Highlight)
All this and more — or is it less? — is available on so-called dopamine sites, which offer nothing tangible and yet have somehow become wildly popular as people navigate a digital landscape that cultivates consumption. (View Highlight)
Named for the brain chemical associated with reward seeking, the sites simulate experiences like online shopping that can generate good feelings. In doing so, proponents say, they may subvert the habits of people conditioned to buy and consume. And the prices can’t be beat, since they are the same as the product lines: nonexistent. (View Highlight)
Some are largely whimsical, while others aspire to prompt self-reflection. One environmental group, Earth Day Canada, for example, launched Imaginair, an imitation shop highlighting overconsumption. In the United States, a Microsoft developer concerned about shopping built an imitation megastore, Fake Haul, as a personal project. (View Highlight)
Whatever the motivation, psychology exerts say, the sites have gained broad appeal not just by tapping into a basic pleasure pathway of the brain but by speaking to growing anxieties among younger people about their digital world. (View Highlight)
When Seohyun Park, a 21-year-old mechanical engineering student in Seoul, created a fake food-delivery site in March, it was intended as a “playful experiment,” she says. She wanted to test whether the feeling of consuming could be disconnected from the act itself, after realizing she got less pleasure from eating food she ordered than from reviewing menus and requesting a delivery. (View Highlight)
The site, which Ms. Park says best translates as Food Never Arrives, was intended largely as a joke, allowing people to enjoy the act of ordering online and then calculate their monetary and caloric savings. But she was surprised to find it generated real discussions about consumption. (View Highlight)
**“**People began sharing it online and discussing whether it actually helped them resist ordering food,” Ms. Park wrote in an email. (View Highlight)
She had tapped into a shared feeling, it turns out. Experts in behavioral psychology and addiction say dopamine sites have caught on because many people are increasingly uneasy about their relationship to technology and want to engage with it more consciously. (View Highlight)
Ms. Park’s site gets around 10,000 visitors monthly, she says. After it was covered by news media in South Korea and beyond, others followed in her footsteps. (View Highlight)
In India, two professional developers cited Ms. Park’s site as inspiration for their own. (View Highlight)
At first, Purvansh Parmar and Anshul Sharma, who are both 26 and live in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, began experimenting with breaking unconscious consumption cycles of their own, they said. “I was looking into ordering a new phone and ultimately did not — and that was quite satisfying for me,” Mr. Sharma said. (View Highlight)
Then the two men decided to build a “dopamine kitchen” that would offer fake deliveries like Ms. Park’s site, but with a twist: real recipes. It has had more than 2.7 million views since launching in June, they said. (View Highlight)
They followed up with Rewire Heaven, where users can publicly swear off a habit and let strangers hold them accountable, as well as provide support. (View Highlight)
Dopamine sites play with the notion that much of the pleasure of an indulgence comes from the anticipation of it. (View Highlight)
In behavioral economic terms, imaginary purchases offer anticipatory utility — the good feeling generated by expecting something. That can equal or even exceed the delight of a thing actually happening, known as the experience utility. It can also surpass the recollection of it, called retrospective utility. (View Highlight)
“The element of looking forward brings a lot of the pleasure, and we often crash after an event or feel let down,” said Ravi Dhar, director of the Yale Center for Customer Insights. So it makes sense, he said, that, at least initially, anticipation alone may be enough to satisfy some people’s needs. (View Highlight)
The thrill of a simulation, however, may fade when the mind trick becomes old, said Lingguo Xu, a behavioral economist working on postdoctoral research about anticipatory utility at the University of Waterloo in Canada. And one risk of simulating consumption, he said, is that it “may lead to stronger cravings” and to a person “bent on finalizing the eventual consumption to fix the anticipation machinery.” (View Highlight)
“Dopamine sites are essentially equivalent to digital near beer,” said Dr. Anna Lembke, an addiction psychiatrist at Stanford University and the author of “Dopamine Nation,” a 2021 book about living with technologies that hook us on constant stimulation. (View Highlight)
Our devices relentlessly deliver “digital dopamine,” Dr. Lembke has argued, making people feel good at first but often leading to overconsumption of food, news, shopping, porn and more. Anyone might benefit from limiting or abstaining from technology use, at least briefly, as a reset, she has suggested. (View Highlight)
Dopamine sites, she said, are a “creative” response to the perils of the era from young people unhappy with at least some aspects of their digital lives. In the parlance of her profession, the sites serve as a “self-binding mechanism,” a way to limit habitual behavior. They may also help raise self-awareness and allay loneliness by providing community, she said. (View Highlight)
Indeed, some dopamine site creators say they have discovered that people sometimes form real relationships amid the fake consumption. One of them is Seojin Ko, a professional developer in South Korea. (View Highlight)
Ms. Ko, 30, said in an email that though she is a nonsmoker, she had tagged along on occasional smoke breaks and decided last November to make a space recreating these escapes virtually, as a lark. She called it Damta World. (Damta is shorthand for “cigarette time” in Korean.) (View Highlight)
In contrast to many dopamine sites, which can have a lot of offerings, Damta World is simple. It features a large cigarette in the center of the screen and below it a count of “butts” accumulated on a fake office rooftop. (View Highlight)
Tap on the screen and a timed cigarette break begins, with an illustration of smoke wafting and ash accumulating and falling while a crackling tobacco sound plays. Smokers can “whisper” to one another by typing texts that float past briefly. (View Highlight)
On many days, thousands come to hang out, with about 150,000 people visiting each month, according to Ms. Ko. “Damta World has become a place where people can open up to random strangers about the difficulties they’re facing at work, at school or just in everyday life,” she wrote. (View Highlight)
The fake breaks have led to some real friendships, which has been both surprising and gratifying, she said. Some users have told Ms. Ko that they now hang out in person. (View Highlight)
“It makes me really happy to know that the project has helped people form meaningful connections and share positive energy,” she said. (View Highlight)
