THE SCOOP

Down the rabbit hole

When Rory Campbell from 10 News + reached out to bring me onto this story, two words, "dopamine shopping", sent me straight down the rabbit hole.

Dopamine is arguably one of the first words that comes to mind when people think of ADHD. What seemed like a straight-forward word-association game to play for reporting turned into footnotes upon footnotes of interest finds behind a trend taking to screens around the globe. 

The premise (at first) sounds laughable. You browse. You add things to your cart. You head to the checkout, and you pay nothing. Then nothing arrives.

This is 'dopamine shopping', and when Rory and 10 News+ took it out onto the street to ask people what they thought, the reactions were about what you'd expect: "That is so weird", and - "No. Not for me. A waste of time".

So Rory, still amused by the numbers backing the secret scrollers that clearly weren't outing themselves on the street turned to me to explore whether a site like this actually does anything to your brain. It does (spoiler alert), and a lot - though not all - has to do with tickling the delight the site promises. Dopamine! 

There's the confetti when you check out, the small build of the urge, the click through, and then the spike. These sites hand you every hit point of shopping and skip the part where anything turns up. From the point of view of your dopamine, it ticks every box.

A quick note, because this one trips almost everyone up. Most of us picture dopamine as the reward itself, the little hit of pleasure when the thing lands. Its real work happens earlier. It fires in the anticipation, the buildup, the seeking of a reward you believe is coming. That is why a site built entirely on the chase, with nothing at the end, can still light you up.

So the easy question is whether you'd use it, and most people, at least the ones that Rory interviewed, say no. The more interesting question we were keen to explore is why a growing number of people say yes.

You what started as one quiet idea from a founder vibe-coding a cool app on his weekend (as your do) has become a whole genre. There's a fast-growing family of these "dopamine sites" now, fake food deliveries, fake fashion hauls, fake checkouts of every kind. The trend is widely traced to South Korea, where it first caught fire, and it has spread from there across Asia, the United States and beyond, with copycats and variants pulling in users by the million. The people who built the early versions have said they made them for a very human reason, to get the feeling of ordering without the financial hit.

When one small idea spawns that many imitators that fast, it's usually answering a need that was already there. And for those who turn to online shopping on the regular, the need is rarely about the product. Research demonstrates that for a lot of people, the pull towards the cart may have more to do with soothing anxiety or moving through a hard feeling at the end of a long day. For these people, the shopping is the ritual. The parcel is almost beside the point, despite the sting to the hip pocket.

So which is it? A passing fad. A harmless hit of online entertainment. Or a behavioural substitution, a way to buffer the financial bite of one more late night scroll, click and buy, built for a generation who grew up digital and now face a cost of living that's outpacing their pay cheques? 

My position is this. Whether a site like this helps you or harms you comes down to a major consideration: what the ritual was already doing for you in the first place. Use it to interrupt a spending habit under supervision with a trained mental health or addiction counsellor, and it could form part of a real harm reduction protocol. Use it while rehearsing the very loop that keeps you stuck in the behaviour you were wanting to avoid in the first place, without understand what got you there, and what's maintaining it as enticing, and it's likely to only deepen the groove. Same app, opposite outcomes.

And for those not concerned about online spending habits, but who want to follow why others might just 'play', here's the catch. A fake purchase hands your brain the wanting and the click, then never closes the loop on the thing it likely came for. So the real thing I think will be worth watching is whether a group of people start returning, again and again, for a ritual with no reward at the end.

Of course, for anyone reading this recognising the trend as yet another in seek of our precious, limited attention, you're onto something bigger worth 'clicking on'. When it comes to evaluating what's right for you, knowing your own neurobiology is the real skill here, and it reaches a long way past shopping apps. Your vulnerability stack is simply how your particular brain and body seeks, receives and metabolises different inputs, and which of your systems is most easily caught, and when.

Once you can see that in yourself, it changes how you manage far more than a spending urge.

It's how you handle a digital diet. It's how you design your relationships, online and off. It's how you meet the world around you and decide what you'll let it do to your nervous system. Willpower is the wrong tool against your own chemistry. What works is design: building the conditions and environments that fit the way you're actually wired.

This is the thread under everything I do, from the work I make out loud on Jagged Brilliance and Naked Purpose, where I get into how AI, attention and our own wiring are reshaping the way we live, to the deeper project underneath it all: building sustainable work-life design, and changing the systems around us so they stop burning out the people inside them.

If this is the kind of thinking you want in front of your people, I bring it to the stage. I take the science of how different brains work and turn it into something a room can actually use. Less awareness session, more competitive edge, and a clear way to get full value from the minds you already have. If you're planning a conference, an offsite or a leadership day, I'd love to talk.