Dopaminergic Relativity and the Abundance Paradox: Why Prosperity Predicts Fertility and Motivational Decline

Advanced societies face a paradox: unprecedented abundance coincides with declining motivation, fertility, and social engagement (Easterlin, 1995). Conventional explanations—economic stress, education, gender equality, and value shifts—describe outcomes but not the underlying regulatory mechanism linking individual motivation to civilizational trends. Existing theories remain siloed: neuroscience explains reward processing in individual brains, while demography documents population-level changes, yet no framework connects these scales of analysis (Berridge & Robinson, 2016; Schultz, 2016).We propose Chois’ Theory of Evolutionary Homeostasis (CTEH), which positions dopamine as the necessary starting point for modeling motivational transmission. This is not a reductionist claim, but a recognition that any theory of motivation must begin with the neurochemical that encodes the question, “Is this worth the effort?” (Volkow et al., 2011). CTEH’s eight tenets describe how dopaminergic adaptation to abundance propagates through cultural learning to produce civilizational cycles of motivation, fertility, and renewal.The framework’s key innovation lies in defining the cultural–neurobiological interface of how individual reward sensitivity scales to population patterns through social learning and institutional amplification (Montague et al., 2006). Sustained abundance elevates dopamine baselines, dulling reward sensitivity and shifting behavior from effort-based striving to passive consumption and artificial stimulation (Berridge & Robinson, 2016). As desensitization spreads, motivation wanes, fertility declines, and crisis restores contrast and renewal (Becker et al., 2023).We validate this multi-scale model using fertility as the primary gateway, owing to robust demographic data and its direct neuroendocrine linkage to reward systems (Eisenegger et al., 2011; Elson et al., 2024). However, the same regulatory principles extend to disengagement in work, education, and relationships. Ultimately, this framework reframes societal decline as a predictable process of homeostatic regulation, suggesting that interventions should focus on restoring motivational contrast, not merely increasing material resources.