The Dopamine Scroll: Why TikTok Feels Good and Leaves You Empty
by Christopher Sopher
Valley of the Sun Press
December 14, 2025
As a songwriter sharing my music on TikTok, I started noticing something that didn’t make sense at first. People were watching. The numbers were there. But most viewers were scrolling past without reacting, commenting, or even acknowledging what they heard.
At first, it was frustrating. Then it became interesting.
Instead of guessing, I started paying attention to the data. I tested different approaches, different openings, different ways of presenting the same work. Over time, a pattern emerged. The issue wasn’t the music. It wasn’t uniqueness. It wasn’t quality.
It was attention.
This article is not a complaint about TikTok or its users. It’s an observation about how the platform trains our brains to consume, move on, and never fully land. More importantly, it’s about what artists — and anyone creating meaningful work — can do to be seen without chasing the dopamine loop.
What follows is what I discovered through trial, error, and awareness. I hope it helps you recognize what’s happening, and maybe reclaim a little of your attention along the way.
You open TikTok for five minutes.
Twenty minutes disappear.
You do not feel entertained.
You do not feel rested.
You just feel full and unsatisfied at the same time.
That feeling is not accidental.
What dopamine scrolling really is
Dopamine is often misunderstood. It is not the chemical of happiness. It is the chemical of anticipation.
Dopamine fires when your brain thinks something rewarding might happen next. Not when it actually happens.
The infinite scroll is built entirely on this mechanism.
Every swipe promises:
• maybe the next video will be better
• maybe the next one will surprise you
• maybe the next one will hit harder
Your brain never receives closure. It stays in a constant state of waiting.
The scroll does not reward you.
It keeps you suspended.
Why TikTok is so effective
TikTok did not invent dopamine-driven design. It perfected it.
The platform combines:
• extremely short content
• constant novelty
• unpredictable rewards
• zero commitment
You are never asked to stay.
You are never asked to invest.
You are never asked to finish anything.
This trains the brain to expect stimulation without effort and reward without patience.
The moment a video slows down, asks something of you, or requires attention, your brain has already been conditioned to leave.
Not because the content is bad.
Because your nervous system has learned speed.
The hidden trade being made
The trade is subtle.
You exchange depth for momentum.
You exchange presence for stimulation.
You exchange satisfaction for activity.
After scrolling, people often say:
• I do not know why I stayed that long
• I do not remember what I watched
• I feel tired but restless
That is not entertainment.
That is cognitive exhaustion.
Why artists struggle inside this system
Art requires time.
Music needs space.
Stories need attention.
Meaning needs patience.
The current system rewards:
• immediacy
• shock
• speed
• repetition
It does not reward:
• nuance
• buildup
• silence
• long arcs
This is why many artists feel invisible even when their work is good.
The system does not ask whether something is meaningful.
It asks whether something keeps you moving.
The result is not bad art.
It is unseen art.
The emotional cost nobody talks about
Constant dopamine stimulation flattens emotional range.
When everything is intense:
• nothing feels special
• stillness feels uncomfortable
• boredom feels threatening
People are not afraid of silence anymore.
They are afraid of being unstimulated.
This creates a subtle anxiety that follows people off the app:
• difficulty focusing
• difficulty resting
• difficulty staying with one thing
The brain forgets how to land.
This is not about quitting TikTok
This is important.
TikTok is not the enemy.
Technology is not the enemy.
Unconscious consumption is the problem.
Most people do not need to delete apps.
They need to reclaim agency.
Small shifts matter:
• watch fewer videos all the way through
• follow creators who slow you down
• leave the app when boredom hits instead of chasing relief
• reintroduce long-form experiences without multitasking
The opposite of dopamine addiction is not discipline.
It is presence.
What changes when you break the cycle
When you step out of automatic scrolling, something interesting happens.
You notice:
• how quiet your mind actually is
• how much time you thought you did not have
• how little you needed stimulation to feel okay
You start choosing what you consume instead of reacting to it.
That is not restriction.
That is freedom.
The moment that matters most
The most important moment is not when you open the app.
It is the moment you feel bored and choose not to swipe.
That moment feels uncomfortable because it is unfamiliar.
But it is also where your attention comes back to you.
Attention is finite.
It is powerful.
And it is being rented cheaply.
The moment you stop scrolling automatically is the moment you take it back.
Why advertising your own music often doesn’t work
As an independent artist, advertising your own music on major platforms sounds straightforward. In reality, it isn’t.
On platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, creators quickly run into a paradox. You own your music. You wrote it. You recorded it. You hold the copyrights and publishing. Yet the moment you try to promote that music using paid tools, the system treats it as a problem.
External links are restricted or deprioritized.
Posts that send users off-platform are throttled.
And music that isn’t part of the platform’s approved library is often flagged, muted, or blocked.
Ironically, the same platforms that encourage artists to “share their work” often require you to use their royalty-free or licensed music if you want your post to be boosted or advertised. Your own song — the thing you’re trying to promote — becomes a liability instead of an asset.
This creates a closed loop:
• you can post your music organically, but reach is limited
• you can pay to advertise, but only if you don’t use your own work
• you can link out, but the system discourages it
The result is that artists are asked to promote themselves without actually using the thing they created.
This isn’t personal, and it isn’t malicious. It’s structural. Platforms are designed to keep attention inside their ecosystem. Anything that pulls users away — including your music hosted elsewhere — is treated as friction.
Understanding this changes how you approach visibility. It stops being about “spending more” and starts being about how and where attention is invited.
The reality of Spotify advertising
Spotify advertising sounds good on paper. You pay, your music gets exposure, and new listeners find you.
In practice, it doesn’t work the way most artists think it does.
Spotify ads do not promise discovery. They promise impressions. That distinction matters more than people realize. An impression is not a listen. A listen is not engagement. And engagement is not connection.
Most Spotify ads are served passively. They play between songs while people are driving, working, or doing something else entirely. The listener didn’t choose your song. It was inserted into their experience. There is no emotional buy-in, no context, and no reason for them to remember you once the ad ends.
Even when someone hears your name or your hook, the moment passes quickly. There is no guarantee they will:
• search for you later
• follow your artist profile
• remember the song
• or care enough to act
The ad technically ran. The system technically worked. But nothing meaningful changed.
This is where many artists get stuck. They assume the problem is budget. That if they spend more, the results will improve. In reality, the issue isn’t spending. It’s expectation.
Spotify advertising does not create fans.
It creates background noise.
That doesn’t mean it’s useless. It just means it’s often misunderstood. Ads can reinforce awareness after someone already cares. They are far less effective at creating that care from nothing.
When artists feel disappointed by Spotify ads, it’s usually because they were expecting discovery, connection, or growth. What they received instead was confirmation that attention alone does not equal interest.
Once you understand that, the frustration fades. You stop blaming yourself, and you stop chasing tools that were never designed to do what you hoped they would.
What actually started working
After enough trial and error, something became clear. Attention wasn’t being lost because people didn’t care. It was being lost because they didn’t know where they were yet.
Most artists, including myself at first, drop people directly into the middle of the experience. The song starts. The video plays. The meaning is already there. But the listener hasn’t arrived yet.
Once I stopped doing that, everything changed.
The most effective shift was simple: open a doorway before the content begins.
Instead of starting with the song, I started with a question.
Not a promotional question. Not a sales question.
A recognition question.
Something that mirrors a feeling the viewer is already having.
When someone reads a question and thinks, “Yeah… I know that feeling,” they stop scrolling. Not because they’re interested in the artist yet, but because they recognize themselves.
That recognition buys attention.
From there, the music no longer feels random. It feels contextual. The listener understands the emotional space before the first note plays.
This wasn’t about tricking anyone. It was about sequencing.
Why questions work better than statements
Statements assume agreement.
Questions invite participation.
A statement says, “Here’s what this is.”
A question says, “Is this you?”
That subtle difference matters in a system built on speed.
When someone answers a question internally, even for half a second, they are no longer passive. They’re involved. That involvement increases retention far more than volume, shock, or clever editing.
Keywords are not about algorithms. They’re about states.
The same realization applied to keywords and hashtags.
Instead of tagging genres, titles, or artist names, I started tagging states of mind.
Sleep. Fog. Disconnection. Independence. Liminal moments.
These aren’t marketing terms. They’re emotional coordinates.
People don’t search for music because they want music.
They search because they feel something and want to locate it.
When the keywords matched the question, and the question matched the song, the system finally knew who to show it to. Not everyone — just the right few.
This isn’t a hack. It’s alignment.
None of this guarantees virality. That’s not the point.
What it does is stop the content from being invisible.
It aligns:
• the viewer’s state
• the opening question
• the emotional meaning of the song
Once those line up, attention doesn’t have to be forced. It’s offered.
The biggest mistake artists make isn’t lacking uniqueness.
It’s assuming the listener is already where they are.
Once you build the doorway first, the music can finally be heard on its own terms.
Why fewer hashtags work better than more
Hashtags are often treated like volume controls. The assumption is that the more you use, the wider the reach. In practice, the opposite is usually true.
Overloading a post with hashtags doesn’t clarify meaning. It dilutes it.
What started working was limiting hashtags to five or fewer, and making sure each one was intentional. Not promotional. Not generic. Not genre-stuffing. Each tag needed to point to the same emotional place as the opening question and the lyrics themselves.
Hashtags work best when they describe a state, not a product.
Instead of tagging the song title, the artist name, or broad categories, I focused on the feeling the song lives in. Sleep. Fog. Independence. Disconnection. Liminal moments. Quiet confidence.
When the question at the beginning of the video matched the emotional tone of the song, and the hashtags reinforced that same state, the content stopped feeling random to the system. It wasn’t being pushed to everyone. It was being shown to the people already sitting in that feeling.
This wasn’t about gaming an algorithm. It was about coherence.
Too many hashtags send mixed signals. A few well-chosen ones tell a clear story. They help the platform understand what the content is before deciding who might care.
The goal isn’t maximum exposure.
It’s accurate placement.
Once the hashtags reflected the lyric and the emotional core of the song, attention became quieter, smaller, and more meaningful. And for art, that matters more than reach.
Uniqueness in a System That Doesn’t Reward It
There’s a lot of talk online about being unique. You hear it constantly.
“Most artists aren’t unique.”
“Most people have nothing to say.”
“Only a small percentage stand out.”
I don’t agree with that.
Every person is unique. Every artist brings something different to the table, even if the genre overlaps or the tools are the same. The way you hear music, the way you process emotion, the way you translate experience into sound — that combination has never existed before and never will again.
Uniqueness isn’t rare.
Expression is.
Most people don’t fail because they lack originality. They fail because the system doesn’t reward patience, nuance, or depth anymore.
When someone says “be unique,” what they usually mean is “be instantly recognizable inside a system built for speed.” That’s not the same thing.
You can be deeply original and still be invisible in a world optimized for scrolling. You can have something real to say and never be heard if there’s no doorway into it.
That doesn’t invalidate the art.
It explains the silence.
Thinking about uniqueness more deeply led me to a different realization than I expected.
The problem isn’t that artists aren’t unique enough.
The problem is that uniqueness doesn’t survive well inside systems designed to flatten attention into seconds.
Once you understand that, the conversation changes. It stops being about proving yourself and starts being about how meaning is delivered in a world that rarely stops long enough to receive it.
What finally clicked for me wasn’t just that everyone is unique.
It was why uniqueness no longer translates into reward.
The system doesn’t reward uniqueness.
It rewards need satisfaction.
That’s where Maslow comes in.
Most modern platforms are no longer about expression or discovery. They are about keeping people inside a loop that satisfies very specific psychological needs:
• stimulation
• validation
• distraction
• anticipation
Not fulfillment.
Not meaning.
Just enough relief to keep you coming back.
This is the same reason online dating feels addictive but hollow. You’re not chasing connection. You’re chasing the possibility of connection. The swipe is the reward. The match is the dopamine hit. The actual relationship is almost secondary.
The system works like a slot machine:
• pull the lever
• maybe you get something
• most of the time you don’t
• but the anticipation keeps you playing
Advertising inside these systems works the same way.
You spend money, hoping for visibility, hoping for growth, hoping for payoff. Sometimes you get a spike. Most of the time you don’t. And when you do, it rarely turns into anything lasting.
The risk isn’t just financial.
It’s psychological.
Artists aren’t failing because they lack uniqueness.
They’re being trained to gamble on attention inside systems that were never designed to pay out meaningfully.
Once I saw that, something changed.
I stopped asking:
“Why isn’t this working?”
And started asking:
“What need is this system actually satisfying?”
The answer wasn’t art.
It was dopamine.
Why this matters for artists (and everyone else)
Maslow’s hierarchy isn’t gone. It’s been compressed.
Instead of:
• belonging
• esteem
• self-actualization
We’re offered:
• stimulation
• validation
• distraction
Fast. Cheap. Repeatable.
That doesn’t make people shallow.
It makes them conditioned.
And it explains why spending money on ads often feels like throwing it into a machine that doesn’t care whether you win or lose — as long as you keep playing
The quiet realization underneath all of this
The system isn’t broken.
It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.
What’s broken is the assumption that it’s designed to reward depth, patience, or originality.
Once you understand that:
• you stop blaming yourself
• you stop chasing jackpots
• you stop equating attention with value
And you start designing doorways instead of bets.
Not gambling on attention.
Inviting it.
The quiet advantage of seeing the system
Understanding how all of this works doesn’t give you control over the system. That’s important to say. It doesn’t make you immune to it, and it doesn’t guarantee success, attention, or reward.
What it does give you is agency.
Once you see how dopamine-driven systems operate, it becomes harder to blame yourself for silence. It becomes harder to believe that a lack of reaction means a lack of value. You stop mistaking motion for meaning, and attention for connection.
The system isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. It rewards speed, anticipation, and repetition. It satisfies short-term needs efficiently, while quietly starving long-term ones. That doesn’t make it evil. It just makes it limited.
The mistake most artists make is assuming the system is designed to recognize depth. It isn’t.
Seeing that doesn’t require rebellion or withdrawal. It just changes how you participate. You stop gambling on attention and start inviting it. You stop chasing jackpots and start building doorways. You become more deliberate about when you give your time, your creativity, and your focus.
Awareness doesn’t make you louder.
It makes you steadier.
And that steadiness matters.
In a world that profits from keeping people moving, choosing to slow down — even briefly — becomes a form of clarity. You don’t need to fight the machine. You don’t need to beat it. You just need to stop confusing its rewards with your worth.
Once you do that, something shifts. The silence stops feeling like rejection. The scrolling stops feeling personal. And your work, whether it reaches ten people or ten thousand, finally exists on its own terms.
That may not be the reward the system offers.
But it’s one the system can’t take away.
What actually makes this worth it
Somewhere in the middle of all this thinking about systems, algorithms, and attention, I had to stop and ask myself a quieter question.
What actually makes me happy doing this?
It isn’t numbers.
It isn’t views.
It isn’t followers or ads performing well.
It’s moments.
Like when someone once told me that my song Late Night Scene from Another Broken Heart helped them get through a painful breakup. There was nothing flashy about that message. It wasn’t public. It wasn’t performative. But it mattered. It meant that something I made, alone, late at night, reached someone at the exact moment they needed it.
Or the night I was working on music late, opened my door, and let an album play while I stepped outside to hear how it sounded through the house. It wasn’t loud. Just present. The next day my neighbor told me he and his wife had been listening from their place and ended up dancing to it. He went on about how bands at the casino never play music that actually makes people want to dance anymore, and how hearing mine caught him off guard.
Another time, a woman I’d never met stopped and told me she heard music coming from my house and that it sounded incredible. She didn’t know who I was. She didn’t know where to find it. She just knew it felt good.
Those moments don’t show up in analytics.
They don’t scale.
They can’t be bought.
But they’re real.
And when I think about why I keep writing, why I keep making albums even when the system feels indifferent, it’s because of that. Because the work already did what it was supposed to do. It connected. Quietly. Without permission. Without optimization.
The system can decide what gets amplified.
It doesn’t get to decide what matters.
Once I remembered that, the rest fell into place.
These are the quiet moments I have with real people that my music reaches. They don’t show up in metrics, but they fulfill me in ways numbers never could.
When I step back and really look at it, I know I’m doing something right. Not because I planned to help anyone, but because the work found people when they needed it.
That realization changed something in me.
It reminded me that I don’t need permission, amplification, or validation from a system to know my work matters. I see it in those moments. I feel it in those conversations.
And once I understood that, something finally settled.
I realized I am enough.
