Taylor Lorenz

It's just really important to distinguish that from addiction.

Yeah.

Addiction is, I mean, there are, there's a whole sort of like clinical definition of addiction, which just, you cannot become addicted to consuming media, whether it's music, books, you know, internet videos, et cetera.

You can really enjoy it.

You can do it compulsively, but it's, you don't have a lot of sort of symptoms of addiction.

So for instance, like a physiological withdrawal, right?

If you, you know, you're, you're not going to

you don't have to go to like, you're not like detoxing from social media.

I mean, we use the language of addiction so colloquially and I understand people kind of using it as a shorthand, but it also does have a real clinical meaning.

And when we're writing laws around this stuff, we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't rely on that sort of clinical designation to write policies around speech and communication.

The thing with gambling addiction, according to the people that I've spoken to about it, is you are constantly raising the stakes.

There's a lot of compulsive behavior related to money, spending, et cetera.

Really, the reason that gambling is addictive is you are fundamentally losing money, which puts you in this economically precarious state and makes you increasingly desperate.

And people will be like, oh, but...

But what about like you get dopamine, you know, from social media?

OK, you also get dopamine from listening to music.

You know, are you a music addict because you listen to nine hours and you got nonstop dopamine from it?

Like it's just it's different.

I think gambling is mostly considered a vice.

And the reason it's it has a negative outcome is because of our economic system.