Business Blog: Slow Dopa

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"Buy now, pay later" is booming. This past holiday season, American consumers were expected to spend a record $20 billion using these services, in many cases snapping up electronics, clothes, and other products they otherwise couldn't afford. But the BNPL mentality extends far beyond retail. Getting a dopa hit today and dealing with the consequences in the future has become the default mindset for millions of Americans. We're raising a generation of addicts, as tech, gambling, finance, and other companies tap into our constant craving for now. We need to help young men in particular understand the value of slow, compounding gains. Not just the ones that produce financial returns but the kind that pay dividends in your family, friendships, and career — the rewards that really matter. In my new book, Notes on Being a Man, I call this Slowpa. Below is an excerpt.

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The Most Powerful Force in the Universe

Growing up, I was drawn to novel, crazy experiences — in other words, attracted to doing a wide variety of insanely stupid shit. So were most of my (male) friends. At age 8 or 9, we would build ramps and jump with our bikes over one another's motionless bodies. I would skateboard down Wilshire Boulevard, not on the elbow or the sidewalk, but on the actual boulevard. The third and fourth grades of our school looked like an ER waiting room — casts, bandages, crutches, eye patches.

Then I got older, my incredible maturity obvious to everyone. In high school, I distinctly remember deciding not to study for the upcoming SATs — too boring and time-consuming. That same year, my mom had to sign a release so I could play on the high school baseball team, but I forgot to give it to her, which meant I wasn't allowed to play the first game and was eventually cut from the squad.

At UCLA, after my freshman year, I applied immediately for financial aid for the next year. I got a shit-ton, too, including Pell Grants. Then, a year later, aware that my junior year was coming up, I decided not to apply for financial aid, and, you know, whatever, take my chances.

Incredibly fucking stupid.

Other highlights from that era include never checking my car's oil level until the dashboard screamed with yellow and red symbols alerting me that either the engine was about to explode or a comet had just collided with Earth. When this car was later towed to a city pound — encumbered under the weight of dozens of unpaid parking tickets — I thought, Fuck it, and never saw it again. Later, during my first real job, at Morgan Stanley, I was given the profoundly complex task of hand-delivering a proposal to a client. All I had to do was board an a.m. flight to San Francisco. I missed the flight.

Among other things, the brain's prefrontal cortex helps us get the easy stuff right. Until 25, I got more than my fair share of easy stuff wrong, didn't take responsibility, most of the time had no ability to plan, and continually messed up.

A tendency for risk-taking, mixed with poor impulse control, renders many young men helpless against a torrent of on-demand dopamine provided by the world's richest tech companies and makes maturity a hard sell for teen and college-age boys — at least, relative to girls and young women. You almost never hear about people named Laura and Elena eating Tide Pods or blowing off their final exams. Why?

Male and female brains are more than 99% identical. There are variations, though. Men have more than double the brain space and processing power devoted to sexual drive. The male amygdala, home to fear, anger, and aggression, contains testosterone receptors that make males lose their cool faster and more easily. But where the male and female brains diverge most sharply is in their development, especially during adolescence. By age 14 to 16, male and female brains have stopped growing, with the exception of the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. Girls attain "peak values of brain volumes" earlier than boys do — Latin for "girls get their shit together way sooner." Basically, the female PFC matures up to two years before the male PFC does.

The PFC is the grown-up in the room, the CEO. The brain is a network; e.g., overlap is a feature, not a bug. No single brain region governs one instinct. But science agrees that a healthy PFC regulates impulse control, decision-making, good judgment, reasonableness, emotional regulation, and planning/prioritizing between the stuff you have to do versus the stuff you'd rather be doing (getting drunk or high, rewatching Family Guy).

At the start of puberty, boys are basically force-marinated in testosterone. T makes them more monosyllabic than usual. Their socializing, never strong to begin with, narrows to sports/physical activity, depending on the kid, and thinking about sex. With their thicker, denser muscles and deeper voices, boys may look impressive and imposing, but behind the forehead, girls have lapped them. By 14 to 15, girls have greater volume and complexity in their PFCs and thus, theoretically, more maturity than boys. They're better decision-makers and problem-solvers. They can overcome their brains' reward circuits with a good counterargument or simply by deploying common sense.

The male PFC catches up around age 25, when many young men get their act together. Until then, they're at a huge maturity disadvantage.

Waging war against a young man's unformed PFC is like trying to wean a kid off salty snacks in favor of carrots and radishes. With my two boys, I do my best to illustrate the differences between the feverish, relentless dopa hits they get from TikTok and Instagram versus the slower, incremental results that are more valuable and satisfying from reading, working out, or spending time outside — slow dopa, or "Slowpa," as I call it. If tech dopa hits are like shoving handfuls of Cheetos or Snickers into your mouth — i.e., they don't fill you up, you hate yourself, and you want more — Slowpa is more like the salad you order that makes you feel healthier for a week. When my boys were little, we spent a fortune on Legos. If Slowpa ever hires a celebrity spokesperson, it should be Lego. Building a model out of 1,300 pieces of lightly hued plastic requires one to two hours daily, plus focus, but then two weeks later you have a really cool Millennium Falcon or Blacktron Renegade to hang in your bedroom. On weekends, Alec, my oldest, likes cooking with his mom. That's an hour spent chopping, measuring, grating, kneading, basting, followed by another hour watching the oven. Dinner, but also Slowpa.

Children today are overprotected in the real world and under-protected online — an observation made by my NYU colleague Jonathan Haidt. At age 13, I flew from LAX alone to visit my dad and stepmom in Ohio. Looking back, the 1970s may seem lax, negligent, and flaky, but parents were onto something. Nowadays, if, say, my 14-year-old son wants to have a party, no, I won't go out and score a case of tequila for him, but I won't hover, snoop, or get in the way of his plans, either.

I recently showed both boys a TikTok by some ex-finance guy. What he said was basic, obvious, and great: Success comes when you put in small, consistent amounts of effort, every day and every week; it doesn't matter whether you're investing, filming two minutes of video content, or lifting dumbbells. Small, deliberate, regular efforts accumulate and in time pay off. In other words, the most powerful force in the universe — Einstein knew this — is compound interest. Aka, Slowpa.

Life is so rich,