Anna Lembke

I think, well, this is actually Mother Nature ensuring that the tribe gets everything it needs to survive on a population level.

If we were all going for the same berry bush, then we would end up with a lot of berries, but not enough meat, not enough shelter, not enough partners or whatever it is that we need to survive.

But by ensuring that we're all wired just a little bit differently, what Mother Nature has done is made sure that in a world of scarcity, we are collectively getting everything that we need.

And by the way, I do reframe people with severe addiction.

in today's world as people who would have been absolutely crucial for survival of the group in a world of scarcity.

I mean, in a world where we have to work very hard to get even the merest of rewards, you would want people who were very, very tenacious about getting a particular substance.

But this whole concept of drug of choice is also really relevant for what is unique about the time that we live in now.

I mean, I'll just use myself as an example.

I used to think that the addiction gene skipped me in my family because alcohol never really gave me any kind of euphoria.

It wasn't an anxiolytic.

Even caffeine doesn't wake me up.

I thought, well, whatever this addiction thing is, I must not have inherited it.

But the truth was I just hadn't yet met my drug of choice, and it wasn't until midlife when I discovered, you know, this kind of drugified novel, the romance novel, when I got a Kindle so that there could be this immediate access and delivery.

And then I was off and running, completely caught up in it, unawares, which is important because what it says is that

Those of us who previously have been immune to the problem of addiction are now vulnerable because of the ways in which our world has taken even seemingly innocuous behaviors and made them highly reinforcing and highly accessible.

All of this being said, it's still important to acknowledge that we do come into this world with different degrees of vulnerability to addiction.

So there are some of us who are much more vulnerable in general to the problem of addiction than others.

And those individuals will struggle with almost every substance and behavior.

In other words, the kind of tendency to compulsively overconsume despite harmful consequences is something that some individuals really do struggle with no matter what the drug is.

And those are individuals who will go on to develop addiction.