[__MatrixMan__]

It looks like you have good dopamine hygiene. You can probably also trust yourself moderate other dangerous things like World of Warcraft, Twitter, or cocaine--if for some reason you wanted to. Keep it up.

For me the real question is: can people who have unhealthy dopamine habits heavily etched into their neural pathways be taught to change that about themselves, or is replacing unhealthy addictions with healthier ones (i.e. exercise) the best that they can do?

I wish policy would focus less on specific vices and more on helping people along such a path (if it exists). Such a license would be a good way to explore that possibility.

Ideally it would be part of something broader though. You can get a commercial endorsement on your regular driver's license, why not a "drinks-responsibly" endorsement too? While we're at it we can have "can use the 3d printers at the library without supervision" endorsement and a "licensed realtor" endorsement. You can imagine all kinds of badges people might want to collect.

[willcipriano]

I think the trick is to savor the experience and to seek novelty. When I drink coffee, it has an almost uncomfortable effect, but it really wakes me up and the feeling is sort of fun. However if I drink it the next day, the effect will be greatly reduced. If I drink it for a week, I'll start to become dependent and feel less awake than when I started without it.

Coffee isn't really the enemy here, it's your own biology.

That said, I feel like you need enough dopamine to make it though the week and sometimes people get trapped by life circumstances. I'm luckily enough to have a beautiful wife, if I had to sleep alone in a cold bed and go out into the world, I might be the kind of guy who needs to cup of coffee in the morning to remain sane.

So in short I think you need to start with a life that is fulfilling enough that you can endure the slings and arrows of the world on a day to day basis. If you don't have that, it's going to be very difficult to not fall into the embrace of temptations that you'd rather avoid.

[__MatrixMan__]

I'm reminded of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park experiments, which (to me) imply that addictive behavior is an indicator of problems elsewhere, rather than a problem to be solved directly. And by all means, we should work at addressing root causes. But I think there's also room for improvement re: how we respond to bad situations.

> you need enough dopamine to make it though the week

I think this is part of the story, but not all dopamine is created equal. Or rather, it's all created equal, but it ends up motivating different things. I don't have any studies to back this up, but I like to think in terms of fast-vs-slow dopamine. Fast dopamine motivates you to do something arbitrary in search of more dopamine, slow dopamine motivates you to do something that you also have other reasons for wanting to do.

I'm in the middle of fixing a fence that blew down in a recent storm. There will be some slow dopamine involved at gazing upon the finished product. I think it can count towards my enough-to-make-it-through-the-week allotment. But that's easy for me to say--I don't generally have problems with addictive behavior. I'm just interested because I'd like to find a way to share that quality with my friends who do.