Comment by andrewla
5 years ago
This kind of semantic game has to stop.
If you water down the meaning of "addiction" enough then you can say that anything is "addictive" and with that, you can carry over all the connotations of the word.
Then people start saying "I'm addicted to coffee" and "I'm addicted to bread" and before you know it people saying "I'm addicted to heroin" are met with "well, why don't you just stop, like I did with coffee for a week that time".
Since the dawn of time people have tried to make things that people want to use. Making "addiction" a synonym for "success" is just stupid.
Addiction has levels to it, and any one addiction isn't going to be identical to others. Caffeine addiction is a very real thing, as is heroin addiction. Just because the latter can be much stronger and more harmful doesn't mean the former can't exist.
To be honest, I still don't understand how people use the word. Am I addicted to water? I have nasty physiological reactions if I stop using it. What about sleep? Is that a bad habit I should get rid of?
A reasonable definition that I have applied in the past is "an activity that has negative consequences, but which one feels compelled to participate in anyway."
Withdrawal isn't actually required for someone to be addicted to something; they just have to want to keep doing it, even though it's obviously bad for them.
This definition still has flaws; am I "addicted" to eating unhealthy food? Etc.
Not a bad definition, the problem being that most negative consequences from drug abuse are due to the fact that they are illegal, and thus 1) way more expensive than they could be and 2) of bad quality.
People can be neurochemically addicted to coffee. I suspect the same can be said of social media.
Yes, thank you.
I was about to say, "tell that to the hangover-like headache I get if I go all day without caffeine".
Yes it's addiction for many users.
They're hooked on notifications, not disabling them even though it interrupts real-life conversations, sleep, scenery enjoying, etc..
A lot of apps train people's lizard brains to repeatedly hop on and do simple things for tiny bits of stimulation
"ding" -> pull out phone -> paw at it in a repetitive motion -> satisfying bit of stimulation
I think it's habit forming, and it legitimately crosses into the realm of addiction, just like gambling
This is profoundly ignorant, or to quote you, just stupid.
Turns out, most people who use heroin don't get addicted to it. Most people who smoke tobacco, don't get addicted to it.
Easily 90% of people prescribed a course of opiates, don't get addicted to it. I've been handed a scrip for vicodin three times, never finished a bottle in less than a year's time.
Coffee dependence is the most common chemical dependence in the Western world, and stopping will outright ruin your entire week. Is withdrawal from a hefty heroin habit even less fun? It is, but so what? I eat eggs every day, what happens if I stop? Nothing, that is not at all true of coffee.
Oh, and bread? Compulsive overeating has a similar etiology to other addictions, it leads to morbid obesity and the various dire consequences that come with it, it ruins lives. Do you think someone rounding 150 kilos on their way to 200 feels like they're in control of what's happening to them? They would stop if they could.
Addiction to gambling is also both real and tragic. And now we're getting into the home stretch: so is addiction to social media.
Remember how most heroin users don't get addicted? That's real by the way, look it up. Most users of social media don't develop an addiction, just like most players of pay-to-play games don't blow their whole paycheck on them or sneak off to play at work until they get fired, but: some do.
Ever quit smoking? It's not that bad, really. Maybe a headache, some brain fog, only problem is that you're constantly thinking about getting some nicotine for, like, weeks.
Which is why it's just about the hardest drug to quit, heroin addicts have a higher success rate than cigarette smokers (again: look it up). Addiction along the dopamine pathway is insidious. Opiates hook users through a simple mechanism, if they stop, their pain receptors go into overdrive.
Dopaminergic stimulus, which includes chemicals but also endogenous pathways, produce repetitive compulsions: they hijack the part of the brain which wants you to do that thing again.
Social media isn't nicotine. Even cocaine isn't nicotine, it's uniquely pernicious. But it absolutely creeps up into some people's lives, to the point where their social lives and work lives suffer for it, where they feel out of control, break promises to themselves to use it less, and quit with the intention of walking away which they then break.
tl;dr you don't know what you're talking about.