Dividends and Dopamine, that other D&D I play

 

I made the right choice to read The Molecule of More by Lieberman and Long last month, and the core idea is that almost all of our motivation comes from the neurotransmitter Dopamine. The book's idea is also useful, as I take some time to understand myself slightly better.

After 5 decades, I've been noticing some of my own personality traits that are very different from those of others and from almost all my friends. I plan so far ahead and create so many contingencies that I don't really have the capability to enjoy the present. Otherwise, I can enjoy anticipating a nice soak at the Onsen at Kallang Wave, but often get impatient once I'm actually there, taking the dip in the hot pools. I can't seem to find an MBTI or Big5 explanation for this until I read this volume. The closest character I can find is a Warhammer 40,000 entity known as Kairos the Fateweaver, a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch (shown above).

According to the book, I have a dopaminergic personality, which makes me more susceptible to a dopamine rush and less affected by other neurotransmitters like serotonin and endorphins that help me enjoy the moment.

Of course, the next thing I had to do was to understand my obsession with building a dividend portfolio that would allow me to live on my dividends, way before more people would even consider retirement planning a bad idea, so here is a powerful table of neurotransmitters that activate when a dividend hits your bank account.

As it turns out, dividends trigger different neurotransmitters, so psychological benefits accrue to people beyond the dopaminergic personality, but it is the anticipatory dopamine that drives the behaviour: self-denial, delayed gratification, and the obsessive frugality that enables FIRE to succeed.

Of course, the rabbit hole goes deeper. Do dividends produce different neurotransmitters than capital gains? ChatGPT has the following answer :

Capital gains may create a different chemical cocktail in the brain, which may explain the stubbornness of dividend investors and why it's not as simple as telling them to sell parts of an ETF to generate synthetic income.

I will leave some disturbing ideas for readers.

Once we know which neurotransmitter needs to be active to generate a financial behaviour, some crazy technocrat can find a way to stimulate a population into consuming recklessly. Technically, the approved technique is via a marketing campaign, but cocaine can throw a person's dopamine into overdrive. 

What if we're becoming unsure as to whether someone is really pulling the strings on our financial behaviour?