A Tale of Two Addictions

Addiction is a strange beast. It’s insidious: the most infectious addictions are the ones that seem the most harmless at first. I remember the first time I saw someone texting on a flip phone where you only had 9 keys: the person was a power user of their device. They would get a text, whip out their phone, clickety-clack away, and within seconds send a response. I was amazed, and I wanted to be that in touch with my device. I wanted it to be an extension of myself, giving me the power to keep in contact with anyone across the nation in seconds. I was hooked. Then, the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android started to pick up steam, and I was reluctantly given an iPod Touch. The games and apps on the App Store back then were amazing: Jelly Car, iBeer, and Doodle Jump were among the first to really gain mainstream traction. From then, it was a constant upgrade: faster phones allowed for even quicker access to a dopamine rush. New product design tactics, like the ubiquitous swipe to refresh, infinite scroll, and loot boxes got users immersed in the digital world more and created an App Store gold rush, where it seemed like all you had to do was push out a one-trick, simple game, install pop-ups after every life, and wait for the ad revenue to come flowing in.

Had I grown up in the 1960’s, my life would have had some parallels to today’s world, especially in the realm of smoking and the culture around it. My father and grandfather would have most likely smoked, giving me a 25 percent higher chance of smoking. I would have been exposed to many ads from big tobacco companies that ruled the airwaves, making smoking seem like a status symbol. We’ve all seen the “don’t do drugs, kid” DARE videos, where the fast crowd is seen pressuring innocent children with free cigarettes. This does happen occasionally, but the much more potent force is the subtle, cultural aspect of smoking. In the 60’s, it would have been much easier to simply go with the flow, because abstaining would have made you different. Virginia Slims, released in 1968, were originally marketed towards young professional women, a previously untapped demographic. These cigarettes were supposed to be more “elegant” and reduce the amount of smoke produced, but of course weren’t healthier than any other cigarette. The cigarettes were also marketed around themes of the emerging women’s movement, and featured skinny women alongside the slogan “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby”. Of course, the large companies that seize our minds today prefer much simpler tactics: preying on children and teens to further the bottom line.

It may seem overly anxious or apocalyptic to view distracted behavior as a societal crisis. However, recall that we didn’t fear smoking until relatively recently, around the 50’s. Where smoking traps your body into a feedback cycle, mindless distractions trap your mind. It’s no mistake that the vast majority of the revenue from Facebook, the sixth most valuable company in the world, comes solely from selling receptive brain time. This receptive brain time is valuable to any company that wants to sell a good or service, and it should be valuable to anyone who wants to succeed in today’s information economy. As Cal Newport puts in his book Deep Work, “Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate… If every moment of potential boredom in your life — say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives — is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the ‘mental wrecks’ in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep [meaningful] work”. On a more philosophical level, we risk losing our sense of being if we allow devices to take over our minds. The second episode of the acclaimed show Black Mirror, titled 15 Million Merits, demonstrates this: almost all of the population rides bikes all day to provide power for society, and on their bikes they stare at television screens, endlessly consuming content, making modifications to their virtual avatars, and being entertained by people less fortunate than them. On first glance, this society is terrifying. Having no use for the real world, this society has shut itself off, literally and figuratively. There are no glimpses of the outer world, and we can only assume that it is polluted beyond repair. After the credits roll, however, the viewer takes a step back and realises that this is the path we’re on. If you spend all day looking at a screen, can you really say that you experienced the day?

I think the moment when I realize I’ve become addicted to something is when I find that, despite a conscious effort of taking real steps to stop, I keep falling back to the same pattern. I realized that I was addicted to the distractions and media on my phone and computer when, for what could have been the hundredth time, I uninstalled all my distracting apps, blocked the websites I knew would draw me into hours of web browsing, and made resolutions to do slightly more productive tasks instead of check Reddit every two minutes. Still, in a week or so, I found myself unblocking those same sites, installing mobile games “because it’ll be a long flight”, and looking at the same messages I had read 5 times in the last hour. I’ve tried a lot of different tools: Moment, Delayed Gratification, and Crackbook (a better Delayed Gratification) to name a few. And, some of these tools work pretty well. The News Feed Eradicator has worked perfectly: I’ve never turned it off, I see the notifications pertinent to my life, and I don’t get trapped into an hour-long clickbait session. Firefox Focus prevents me from opening multiple tabs and getting stuck in something interesting from my history, and I don’t even notice the extra 10 seconds it takes to log into certain services, even with two-factor authentication. However, the vast majority of my attempts to live a less distracted, better life have been derailed in a short amount of time.

Similarly, quitting smoking is an extremely hard task to undertake. It’s estimated that it takes smokers an average of 30 attempts to quit smoking. Different organizations have many different programs for anyone to try. One of the most important steps to take in order to quit smoking is to recognize that you are, and always will be, an addict. If you’ve been addicted to smoking, tobacco will always have its grip on you, and if you’ve come to realize that at any moment you can be entertained rather than be bored, today’s distractions will always have their grip on you. However, once you recognize this fact, you can start having a conversation with yourself about whether it’s worth it to feed this addiction, or whether, for a moment at least, you can resist the temptation. In the same vein, recognizing our dependence on social media can help us quit it.

However, there is hope for all smokers, and huge leaps have been taken in the public health sector to decrease the amount of people that start smoking and help people who are smoking to stop. In 1965, 42 percent of adults smoked cigarettes. Now, that number is down to just 17 percent. What has caused this massive decline? The 1964 Surgeon General Report on the harmful effects of smoking started to bring into the public eye just how bad smoking was for you. Change took a long time (after the report, during congressional hearings, many of the doctors condemning smoking used pipes in the meetings). Between then and 2017, campaigns were launched to ban broadcast smoking advertisements, convince teens not to smoke, and highlight the effects of secondhand smoke. The culture around smoking has completely changed, not only through societal condemnation of cigarettes, but also through new e-cigarettes and vaporizers (although these have been shown to encourage new users to try cigarettes).

In today’s society, we are looking at a serious concern for the mental well-being of our population. Our productivity, attention span, and life experience are all affected by the dopamine rushes we get from our screens. Moreover, large companies that make money primarily by selling ad time are incentivized to create habit-forming products and keep their users coming back to their apps day after day. We restrict the use of casinos and slot machines; they offer a quick dopamine rush for the price of the expected cost of a bet. We don’t restrict the use of addictive products; they offer a quick dopamine rush for the price of lost time and attention. Somewhere along our journey through technology, we lost the notion that we should be bored; that we should have to endure a 5-minute waiting room visit without a flashy screen giving us positive feedback. Fortunately, there are multiple avenues for change: leaders in technology and business (often the people who create these products themselves) are speaking out against these predatory tactics that bring in big bucks and destroy the end user. Additionally, cultural change must occur: the network of users of these technologies needs to collectively realize that scrolling through a news feed for hours every day is no way to live a life. It’s time for companies to either recognize what they’re doing and stop or face consequences.