Welcome to Rat Park

There is a particular kind of antsy neediness I get more often than I would like. I'm sure it's not unique to work-from-home freelancers, but it's definitely exacerbated by the lifestyle: It strikes when I'm waiting for an email, sometimes one that may hold important news, sometimes just one with a reply that I would like now, please, thank you. I don't sit and refresh my inbox; I have alerts that take care of that work. Instead I cycle, more intently than usual, between social media, site to site to app and back again, looking for something. I know the email won't be in my twitter feed, but maybe something else will, a like or a reply or a rat-sized lever that if I press it will sometimes dispense cocaine.

Of course the thing with those rat studies is that you only get sad addict results when the rats are kept, as most lab rats are, in austere little cages. When psychologist Bruce Alexander built his rats a comfy "Rat Park," everything changed. The rats in Rat Park were offered two drinking fountains, one with water and one with water spiked with morphine. But they were also given space to roam, wheels and toys, tasty food, and, most relevant to my interests, lots of company. And so they didn't choose the morphine water—they were already high on life.

Attempts to replicate Alexander's findings have been mixed, my cursory reading of mostly Wikipedia reveals, but there's clearly something there. Scientifically and intuitively, I mean. Because, of course. I'm alone and tackling the amorphous work of "researching my book"—a more hypothetical and less immediately rewarding project I have never known! And lonely! I could talk to my editor or agent, but I don't need to, I just need to keep reading about how our cells got nuclei, and it's actually a piece of science I'm really interested in. But the point is, I'm alone and getting no wholesome rewards, so I go to the morphine-spiked twitter water fountain. (Do I sometimes still do that when I'm in my own Rat Park, out in the interesting world spending time with people I love? Yes, of course, I'm a degenerate.)

So, instead of jiggling the twitter water cooler to get the last few drops of shitty morphine, I decided to write about it. I could pretend it's because I knew I needed some ~creative expression~ but maybe I was just hoping someone would reply to this email, and that that would feel nice. (God, honestly, please don't, that would be too embarrassing at this point.)