Damn The River

Imagine you didn’t know what money was. All your life you showed up at work, and got paid, and money was being deposited in your bank account, but you didn't even know that was happening: you just kept doing all this work all the time, and secretly a Good Thing was accumulating for you elsewhere, but you didn't know it existed, let alone that you were getting it.

Then one day you found a credit card, and walked into a mall, and discovered that you could wave this piece of plastic and get any amazing thing you see. And you threw a giant rager, and had an incredible time, and all the while you had no idea that you were spending down the product of your many years of hard work, because as far as you're concerned you're just waving a card and getting things.

Of course I'm speculating here, but you might feel an overwhelming urge to tell other people "HEY EVERYONE, LISTEN UP, I DISCOVERED THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS: IT'S THIS LITTLE PIECE OF PLASTIC THAT MAGICALLY GETS YOU UNLIMITED NICE THINGS!!!"

This is roughly how I feel about my neurotransmitters.

A thing I read online once – if you know where, let me know – is that a lot of people's meditation breakthroughs work roughly like a dammed river: you've stored up all these neurotransmitters (or something) over the years, and then one day you have a breakthrough that releases a bunch of them, and you feel amazing and go around telling people "I FIGURED OUT THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS". But that doesn't mean you'll be able to consistently get those good results in future, because now you don't have the huge store of pent-up potential energy any more.

I find this plausible, and/but I've long wondered what the implications are for these kinds of breakthroughs: does it mean that you should actually be quite careful when/whether you have a psychological breakthrough at all, saving it for a time when you'll be able to ride that momentum properly?

Or might it even be a bad idea at times to undam the river at all – might you "use up" reservoirs that you'd be better releasing very slowly over time?

I have similar-but-different thoughts about many other neurotransmitters that I don't really understand. On a smaller (daily) scale, I'm sure many people have had the thought "does drinking coffee make me more energized, or does it just use up my stores of attention/focus neurotransmitters so I'm more-energized now but less-energized later?" That's not necessarily a bad tradeoff, but it's certainly different than a simple gain.