I'm starting to think that addiction is our natural state
I read this post by "innerhealing" with great interest. A lot of people have these sorts of stories, but this one in particular was so touching and well-written.
I've thought a lot about tech addiction in the past 10 years. I've had to slowly withdraw from it the way a "real" addict would. Often, I think I've escaped but really I've just (figuratively) swapped cocaine for methadone. I quit facebook back in 2018. Pared down my reddit usage very significantly, and now just use it when I need to research something. I only recent managed to mostly quite youtube; a major failure on my part. There are a few other sites which I have mostly quit as well. I'll tell this story in better detail sometime. I don't really use my phone for much of anything. It's required to exist because my work uses it for OTP.
But, why was this so hard fought? Why did it take so long? Why is nearly everyone prone to some amount of tech addiction. People will answer this by playing up the evil of the tech companies. They'll saying something like "they have the best engineers working around the clock to defeat your impulse control." This is true in a sense, but why can't you just put your phone down? They are evil, but they don't have a gun to our heads. We're begging them for more content, more addiction. They're more like drug dealers than anything else.
This is not very popular, but is very similar and must be brought up all the same. Why is everyone so fat these days? Why does abundance lead us so far astray? The moment we find something we like, we want more of it. And if more is always available, it does us harm. The only check on this process seems to be real-world scarcity. People in the past weren't fat because good food was too expensive and too rare. (in the old days, it was mostly the rich who were fat)
Try giving up Youtube for a whole week, and then at the end of a stressful week, crack open a beer and jump on youtube. Many people will have completely forgotten why they disliked it. They'll love all the content, the options, the never-ending entertainment. But they don't have the hardware to control themselves. They'll watch enough of it that it will degrade their lives.
This is part of why you cannot ask people to simply exercise more self-control. This isn't something that most people have in sufficient number. In the past, we didn't rely on self-control. We relied on scarcity. You wouldn't eat too much to keep yourself thin. You wouldn't eat too much because you might starve later. ie, you needed to space out your eating and not deplete your food stores. More food was not so easily acquired. You didn't binge on content because it would have been impossible to do so. There was no content to binge on. You might have owned a handful of books. Any other entertainment was manual; a hobby, a walk, performing with an instrument. All those take effort and you cannot indulge them to mental exhaustion; you would reach physical exhaustion first.