After waiting my turn in line at Omomo Tea Shoppe in Irvine today, I paid for a couple of milk tea beverages, and the cashier smiled and told me "You're #1". Following a momentary bliss that must've lasted less than a second, my dopamine levels crashed when she handed me this:
What's the purpose of life? If you subscribe to a major religion such as Christianity, the purpose of life is to know, love and serve God, and to prepare for an eternal life as His child. If you subscribe to philosophy, you live according to reason and virtue to achieve inner peace and freedom from suffering. And if you subscribe to science and evolution:
Who said there has to be a purpose to existence? Each of us is born not because of our choice. We simply landed on earth because someone else's egg dropped, and another person's sperm out of 20-200 million swimming upstream managed to penetrate and fertilize the egg. Then as we grew, four happy chemicals pretty much motivated everything we have done and will do. We live and act to pursue happiness or avoid pain. Happiness is a feeling we experience because of four chemicals in the brain, and they are, according to Google Gemini:
Serotonin (The Mood Stabilizer): Helps regulate mood, sleep, and appetite while promoting feelings of well being and emotional stability. Low levels are often linked to depression.
Oxytocin (The Love Hormone): Essential for social bonding, trust, and relationship building. It is released during physical affection, such as hugging or skin-skin contact, and acts of kindness.
Endorphins (The Natural Painkiller): Released in response to stress or physical discomfort to alleviate pain and create a sense of well-being.
The catch is, all these chemicals and their inducements must remain in balance. You cannot short circuit the system and attempt to generate excessive dopamine for extended periods, for example. The brain's natural defense mechanisms will kick in to reduce the number of dopamine receptors as you continue in activities that flood dopamine release, e.g. the use of heroine, cocaine, fentenyl. This is a process called homeostasis. Whatever good thing happens to you that makes you feel like you can touch the sky, your party pooper brain will fight to bring back your stable mental state because too much dopamine and its metabolic byproducts will kill your brain cells. This is why drug addicts develop a tolerance to their drug of choice, and why you constantly need new material things, and can't feel content from whatever material things you already own.
Of these four chemicals, dopamine is by far and away the leading hormone that motivates action. Serotonin is a distant second.
In the The Dopamine-Deficient (DD) Mouse Experiment, researchers, notably Richard Palmiter and his team at the University of Washington, conducted a series of studies (starting in the 1990s) using genetically engineered mice that could not produce dopamine.
Behavioral Observation: These "DD mice" appeared normal at birth but gradually stopped eating and drinking after about two weeks. Despite being surrounded by palatable food, they would literally starve to death because they lacked the motivation (or "wanting") to initiate eating.
The Key Discovery (Wanting vs. Liking): The mice still enjoyed the food if it was placed directly in their mouths—they would lick and swallow it with pleasure, a reaction known as "liking". This proved that dopamine is not required for the pleasure of food, but is essential for the drive to get it.
The Cure: When researchers injected the mice with L-Dopa (a chemical precursor to dopamine), the mice would immediately become active and eat voraciously until the chemical wore off.
There you have it folks. You exist because dopamine motivated a couple of people to produce you, and you continue to exist because of your own dopamine. Pure and simple. There's really nothing more to it.
Some time in early 2025, I finally tracked down this homeless dude near my house who is on a Forrest Gump-like mission. For those who watched the movie, you may recall Forrest begins running across the country for no particular reason for 3 years, 2 months, 14 days and 16 hours. Except, this homeless dude, whom I will refer to as HD hereinafter, shows no signs of slowing down after years of walking up and down Laguna Canyon road every day, all day, even in the rain.
For a while, I'd been looking for the opportunity to ask HD about his shoe size since his shoes were torn and in awful condition from all the mileage. I wanted to buy him a durable and comfortable pair of walking shoes, and maybe keep doing it, given that he'd likely go through any pair of shoes in a hurry from all the walking he does every day. I finally got my chance one day, and I parked my car a little past the Anneliese elementary school by Laguna Canyon Road and El Toro Road. If there was ever an example of no good deed goes unpunished, this fateful day would be the one. Where I stopped my car are multiple mogul-like bumps on the road asphalt that are not particularly visible to the eye. So when I stopped my car on top of one, the bottom of my car hit the bump. This caused damage to the undercarriage panel made of plastic composite called "aeroshield", and it cost me $400 to replace a couple of weeks later when the damaged part came loose and made loud machine gun-like sounds as it dragged on a freeway offramp.
Small price to pay for a good deed, but alas, I failed at obtaining HD's shoe size because he refused to give it to me. Instead, he asked that I give him the $100 cash and he'd purchase the shoes himself. And during this fruitless conversation, he barely made eye contact with me and kept walking on his pathless journey.
This picture of HD is from yesterday, on March 29th, 2025, when he walked past me as I was about to leave my condo. This time he turned his head and looked at me sideways for a good 2-3 seconds. He was wearing black sandals, which are also ill-suited for long walks.
A relevant Forrest Gump quote: "My mama always said you can tell a lot about a person by their shoes, where they going, where they been."
