What is Sedation? Or: How Comfort Became a Conspiracy, and Dopamine Became the Drug of Choice for the Spiritually Homeless
Friday, April 18, 2025
Let’s begin, as many modern tragedies do, with a man alone on a couch.
He’s got high-speed Wi-Fi, Uber Eats on the way, porn in one tab, and TikTok in another.
He’s not in pain exactly—but something’s off. And he doesn’t know why.
In the Red Pill worldview, we have a word for this state. Not “depression.” Not “anhedonia.”
Not “Limbic Capitalist malaise.”
They call it… sedation.
But don’t mistake it for rest.
This isn’t a nap.
Some men say it’s a cultural coma.
Sedation Defined: Dopamine’s Cozy Dungeon
In the manosphere, sedation is the process by which modern men are soothed into submission by a cocktail of comfort, distraction, and unearned pleasure. It’s the spiritual anesthesia administered by civilization to keep you manageable.
You’re not failing because you’re weak, they say.
You’re failing because you’ve been pacified.
Red Pill writers—from Rollo Tomassi to the angry guy in your YouTube sidebar—argue that men were once forged by risk and scarcity.
Now they’re dulled by abundance.
The sedated man doesn’t hunt; he scrolls. He doesn’t woo; he swipes. He doesn’t build; he clicks “add to cart.” It’s what I’ve been calling Limbic Capitalism, but from a more bro-informed stance.
What sedates him?
Porn instead of pursuit.
SSRIs instead of purpose.
DoorDash instead of discipline.
Netflix instead of narrative.
As author Aldous Huxley (1932) once warned, the real threat to freedom is not tyranny, but pleasure. The sedated man is a zoo lion, well-fed, but utterly neutered.
The Meme Mechanics: From “Soulmate Sedation” to “Comfort Castration”
Sedation is more than lifestyle—it’s a meme weaponized by ideology.
And like any meme worth its salt, it mutates.
Some variants include:
Soulmate Sedation: The belief that love will fix everything, keeping men from becoming worthy of love to begin with.
Purpose-Sedation: Men sedated by vague "passion quests" instead of making themselves useful in a concrete way.
Self-Care Sedation: Pseudo-healing routines that never ask you to face hard truths, only to light another candle.
Stoic-Sedation: Stoicism-as-aesthetic—cold showers, deadlifts, and Marcus Aurelius quotes—but no actual accountability.
And for women, the sedative memes tend to lean romantic:
“He’ll change if he loves me enough.”
“It’s not settling, it’s manifesting.”
“If he’s not obsessed with you, he’s not the one.”
These are soft narratives that keep people from maturing, wrapped in dopamine swaddling and tied with a ribbon of emotional self-deception.
The Science Behind Sedation: Dopamine Debt & Digital Breadlines
Let’s be scientific for a moment. The idea that pleasure can become pacification isn’t just rhetoric. The brain runs on dopamine—and it wasn’t designed for the on-demand slot machine of modern life.
We know that:
Frequent porn Use reduces gray matter in areas related to reward and motivation (Kühn & Gallinat, 2014).
Processed Food and Sugar hijack reward circuits, mimicking the addictive loops of opioids (Volkow et al., 2011).
Excessive Screen Time lowers impulse control and alters prefrontal function (Christakis et al., 2018).
Even Social Media Engagement mirrors the neural patterns of drug dependency (Turel et al., 2014).
What this means is simple:
Your phone is better at numbing your existential panic than most pharmaceuticals.
It doesn’t fix you. It just keeps you quiet. Sedated.
Sedation vs. Stillness: Stoicism, Misread
Now for the irony: not all comfort is sedation.
The Stoics also warned against emotional indulgence, but they didn’t equate stillness with sedation.
In fact, true Stoicism is quite uncomfortable.
It demands confrontation—with death, with rejection, with failure.
Modern Stoicism, however, is sometimes just repression in a bathrobe.
Marcus Aurelius didn’t take cold showers so he could post about it. He did it because Rome was falling and he needed to steel himself against despair.
There’s a difference between intentional rest and avoidant sedation.
One prepares you to act. The other prepares you to forget you ever wanted to.
Sedation and the Dating Economy: From Libido to Lethargy
Here’s where it gets considerably more spicy.
In 2025 dating culture, sedation has created a generational, yet heavily monetized stalemate:
Many men are too sedated to pursue meaningfully.
Many women are too sedated by fantasy to choose wisely.
Enter the romantic sedation cycle:
A man, numbed by porn, never learns to build social courage.
A woman, numbed by idealism, rejects “good enough” in search of "soulmate vibes."
Both wonder why dating feels empty.
Both blame the opposite sex.
TikTok therapists go viral.
It’s not just porn and Disney movies. It’s the entire attention economy, monetizing disconnection through micro-dopamine fixes—likes, matches, affirmations. Yikes!
Sedation or Strategy? When Numbness Becomes Adaptive
Let’s be clear: not all sedation is sinister.
Sometimes, you need to dissociate a little to survive late stage capitalism.
Sometimes the big ,fat, spliff is the victory.
But when sedation becomes a way of life—when your entire nervous system is trained to avoid discomfort—you stop growing. Worse, you stop noticing you’ve stopped.
As trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk (2014) writes, “the price of numbness is the inability to fully engage in life.” You trade terror for tedium.
The pain goes away, but so does the joy.
That’s sedation’s Faustian bargain: the absence of pain at the cost of your aliveness and vitality.
VII. Escaping Sedation: You Don’t Need a Cold Shower—You Need a Quest
What’s the cure?
Not screaming about “alpha males.”
Not dopamine detoxes that turn into YouTube content.
The real antidote is agency.
Choose effort over ease.
Choose discomfort over dissociation.
Choose meaning over metrics.
In other words, Make the damn art.
Fix the fu*king fence.
Apologize like you mean it.
Ask her out even if your hands shake. Feel something dangerous and beautiful.
Perhaps you don’t need to be “high value.”
Maybe you just need to embark upon the hero’s journey.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES
Birnbaum, G. E., Reis, H. T., Mikulincer, M., Gillath, O., & Orpaz, A. (2006). When sex is more than just sex: Attachment orientations, sexual experience, and relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(5), 929–943. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.5.929
Christakis, D. A., Ramirez, J. S. B., Ferguson, S. M., Ravinder, S., & Ramirez, J. M. (2018). How early media exposure may affect cognitive function: A review of results from observations in humans and experiments in mice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(40), 9851–9858. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1611611114
Huxley, A. (1932). Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus.
Kühn, S., & Gallinat, J. (2014). Brain structure and functional connectivity associated with pornography consumption: The brain on porn. JAMA Psychiatry, 71(7), 827–834. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2014.93
Moncrieff, J., Cooper, R. E., Stockmann, T., Amendola, S., Hengartner, M. P., & Horowitz, M. A. (2022). The serotonin theory of depression: A systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Molecular Psychiatry, 27(10), 2390–2401. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0
Park, B. Y., Wilson, G., Berger, J., Christman, M., Reina, B., Bishop, F., & Doan, A. P. (2016). Is Internet pornography causing sexual dysfunctions? A review with clinical reports. Behavioral Sciences, 6(3), 17. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs6030017
Turel, O., He, Q., Xue, G., Xiao, L., & Bechara, A. (2014). Examination of neural systems sub-serving Facebook "addiction". Psychological Reports, 115(3), 675–695. https://doi.org/10.2466/18.PR0.115c31z8
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Volkow, N. D., Wang, G. J., Fowler, J. S., & Telang, F. (2011). Overlapping neuronal circuits in addiction and obesity: Evidence of systems pathology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363(1507), 3191–3200. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0107