As somebody who...might...be more than a little addicted to reading fics, uh. ...
yo this is a place of no judgment and deep compassion bc I'm not being cute or at all joking when I say that I'm addicted. it's a genuine (if relatively benign in the scheme of things) behavioral addiction. in my therapist's words, approximately, it's at least not self-harm or doing coke, lol.
at the same time, it's something I use as a dissociative crutch, and while I've always read a lot, it gained a huge foothold in my life when I worked three jobs, was having significant family drama and health issues, and understandably had no energy or time for enjoyable activities that weren't reading on my phone. and then covid happened. so fanfic was legit something that helped keep me sane and happy, and I'm eternally grateful to all the authors who write and share their work. it's art in the truest sense, in my opinion. this doesn't stop it from simultaneously having become a maladaptive coping strategy that currently hinders me from living life as fully as I want.
there are a lot of other things to that last statement, obviously, and I won't go into it here bc I do have a therapist for that, and also it's personal. but I know without a doubt that I'm not the only person who has trouble with this.
one of the things I've been doing recently is trying to understand why it's so easy to fall into this kind of addiction, specifically how our current techno-cultural landscape plays a role, as well as resilience strategies. I expect I'll be reading and learning for a long time, but on the role of technology and how it relates to our (in)attention culture, I liked:
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (published in 2009 before the socmed boom but still so incredibly topical)
The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr (specifically about automation, and published in 2014 before AI exploded...also still very topical)
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
