--- title: "Bizarre New Websites Are Designed Specifically to Spark Dopamine in Your Brain" description: "A wave of \"dopamine sites\" are designed to spark the pleasure centers in your lizard brain by simulating shopping and ordering food." date: "2026-09-13" modified: "2026-09-13" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore.md" url: "https://futurism.com/future-society/bizarre-websites-dopamine-brain" categories: - "Brain" - "Future Society" - "Health & Medicine" - "Mental Health" --- # Bizarre New Websites Are Designed Specifically to Spark Dopamine in Your Brain ![A close-up of a woman with long red hair and round glasses, looking at a screen with an expression of surprise and delight. Her mouth is open in a smile, and her hand is resting near her chin. The background is softly blurred.]() As far as completely pointless ways to kill time on your phone, this is certainly one of the weirdest on record. Behold the all-new invention of so-called "[dopamine sites]()" — digital domains where you can browse and hunt for deals on nonexistent wares and services. Clothes, food delivery, you name it: you can pretend-shop for it all. You don't actually buy anything, crucially. You're just pretending to have money to buy the things you want. It's window-shopping reimagined for the age of doomscrolling. But it's also a little more than that. These cleverly-built sites simulate the experience down to checking out and "tracking" your shipment or delivery, and their absurdly realistic rituals can help people become more conscious of their spending habits. Supposedly. The trend, [according to the *New York Times*](), originated in South Korea this spring, when Park Seohyun, a 21-year-old mechanical engineering student in Seoul, created a fake food-delivery site called "Food Never Arrives." (It's now an app). Originally intended as a joke, she says, it lets you not only order nonexistent food, but provides you an estimate of the money and calories you saved by skipping on the real thing. In a wintry economic climate, it became an unexpected hit. "People began sharing it online and discussing whether it actually helped them resist ordering food," Park told the *NYT*. A wave of imitators followed. This summer marked the launch of "[FakeHaul]()," a dopamine site built by a Microsoft engineer that convincingly imitates shopping on Temu. Two developers in India inspired by Park's site, Purvansh Parmar and Anshul Sharma, created "Food Never Comes," which simulates food deliveries but provides real recipes for the food you didn't actually order. Parmar and Sharma told the newspaper that their site had more than 2.7 million views since launching in June. Whether these dopamine sites provide anything more than fleeting, empty pleasures is something experts are more skeptical about. Ravi Dhar, director of the Yale Center for Customer Insights, told the *NYT* that the "element of looking forward brings a lot of the pleasure, and we often crash after an event or feel let down." Lingguo Xu, a behavioral economist studying anticipatory utility, warned that the dopamine tricks could quickly get old. And by simulating consumption, you risk developing "stronger cravings." Some take the original idea beyond getting high on simulated shopping. Ko Seojin, another South Korean developer, created a website for taking virtual smoke breaks called Damta World. You click to start smoking an animated cigarette, which starts burning on screen. You can "whisper" disappearing messages to other smokers on break, while a counter keeps track of the number of cigarette butts that have been tossed on the office rooftop each day. Ko told the *NYT* that 150,000 people visit each month, and she says that some users have become real-life friends after meeting on the website. Those friendships, we hope, are something that'll last longer than any fake-shopping dopamine hit. **More on your brain on tech:** [*Psychologist Says AI Is Causing Never-Before-Seen Types of Mental Disorder*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()