As someone who has overcome substance abuse, I find this decadeâs framing of addiction incredibly insulting.
Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isnât monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except âa behavior I personally disapprove of.â
Addiction is not âI enjoy stimulation.â It is not âI have habits.â It is not âI seek input before I produce output.â Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.
When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about âdopamineâ is not enlightened. Itâs sloppy. Unserious, even.
Thereâs also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isnât explicitly productive, it must be rot. Weâve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.
What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly youâre âstimulus addicted.â If you canât brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now itâs framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.
This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesnât trend. Alarmism does.
Thereâs also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having âbad dopamine habits.â Itâs easier to diagnose peopleâs scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.
Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. Thatâs not empowering. Itâs infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.
When I hear the word âaddictionâ tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesnât sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.
We deserve better language. We deserve distinctions. We deserve a culture that can tell the difference between compulsion and preference, between harm and habit, between numbing out and nourishing ourselves. Not everything that holds our attention is a disorder. Not everything pleasurable is a vice. And not everything repetitive is an addiction.
I am giving this post a FAQ (of sorts - the "Q" there is very charitable considering these are more like "whatabouts" and "gotchas" than actual questions) because it has been the bane of my online existence ever since it broke containment, and yet I don't want to disable reblogs because I still think the message is important and I want people to continue seeing it.
"But caffeine IS addictive, though!!!"
I never even said the word "caffeine" in this post. I said "coffee." Decaf exists. Don't talk to me about the trace amounts of caffeine in decaf, either, I already know about them. They are not enough for an average adult nervous system to respond to, and that's not the point anyway. The point is, yes, caffeine causes physical dependency, but so do blood pressure regulating meds, corticosteroids, and virtually everything you might get prescribed by a psychiatrist. The point is also "find me somebody who would rather end up homeless or sell their friends/family's valuables than go a couple days without a latte and then we can talk."
"But my friend/SO/family member is addicted to their phone!!! They ignore me to use it!!!"
If you're feeling ignored, that is on you to talk to them about it and set boundaries. You may also want to consider the possibility that you are boring.
"But I'M addicted to my phone. I know this because I end up using it all day and I feel happy when I'm doing it but then I feel bad later. Also, you are probably also addicted to your phone - try not using it for a week and see how you feel."
This is still not addiction. This is having trouble with task transitioning/initiation, avoiding something difficult, "FOMO", struggling to trust that other activities will have as reliable of a return on investment, missing your own emotional cues that tell you when you're getting bored, living in a society where most things require use of a phone, any combination of the above, and/or probably also some other shit I can't think of right now.
I am an app-based independent contractor and if I did that on a whim, I would wreck my finances. But that's so cool how you're apparently so concerned about my well-being!
