Dr. Carl Erik Fisher

There are obviously examples where it makes sense, like the nicotine and tobacco and other drugs that have strong biological effects.

There are some addiction medicine doctors who say, yeah, of course,

heroin is stronger than broccoli.

Otherwise, we would have a lot of broccoli addiction not to make too light of something that's such a devastating problem.

But especially in the case of social media, we see how it's not just all biology.

It's not like there's some demon drug that goes into your head and hijacks you.

And in fact, that probably is not even a good metaphor to use for addictions writ large.

Yeah, I think you're pointing towards something really important.

It's natural that people would use addiction language in situations like that, and in fact, have done for hundreds and hundreds of years.

I don't like to gatekeep around the word addiction, even though I work with people with severe addiction, and I'm in addiction recovery myself.

There's a definition of addiction that actually predates modern medicine, and we still use naturally.

And that's something like a voluntary choice that saps the will, a voluntary devotion that then takes away your capacity to exert the will.

Right.

But you only got there because you've been using your phone and you've been using it in a certain way in certain contexts for a long period of time.

So I think you can apply that definition to a huge range of human behavior.

It's not necessarily medical, although in the farthest extremes of this is clear in the more obvious addictions, gambling addiction.

The more extreme cases of sex addiction, and then of course the substance addictions, people can really feel completely and totally compelled.

But it's really on a diminished spectrum the whole way.

Something that we miss about the phenomenon of addiction, but personally and through my work, I found it more useful to think of addiction as universal.

It's a latent possibility in all human beings, and it gets activated under certain patterns of activity in certain contexts.