The Architects of Addiction: Part 2

Understanding how manufactured addiction works may be the most important subject in our current school of life. And life of a school. We think we are free to define ourselves, can be anyone we dream of being, act out of our own free will. But do we? Might there be invisible puppet-masters pulling our strings, so invisibly and skillfully that we are wholly unaware of their impact on how we think, what we think we want, how we act? Here’s my thumbnail history of how I think those forces are working behind the scenes.

 

The original architects of manipulating human wants and needs were the religious authorities trying to sell you heaven and hell. Most used the strategy of convincing you to avoid the pain and torment of hell, with fear at the forefront. Some tried to entice you with angels with harps, with faith at the forefront. According to how you conformed to someone else’s standards, you would be punished or rewarded.

 

Then came the tradespeople at the marketplace trying to entice you to buy their fruit or baskets or tools. The game was survival and any way they could entice you— a tuneful “Strawberries! Succulent and delicious! Best price over here!”, a persistent haggling, an attractive display— all was fair game. 

 

Centuries later, the marketplace kept expanding with snake-oil salesman in the traveling entertainment shows, then the door-to-door salesman selling beauty products, encyclopedias, vacuum cleaners, aluminum siding and such. (See the fabulous films Paper Moon, Tin Men, The Music Man and read Death of a Salesman for a peek into these worlds.) Now the focus was not on avoiding pain, but feeling the promise of looking better, getting smarter, relieving the drudge of work, making your house better than your neighbors. 

 

The industrial revolution gave new energy to buying and selling and a whole industry was created—the Advertising Industry. Now cleverly scripted ads designed to attract your attention were in the newspapers, the magazines, on billboards, on the radio and later the TV. Psychologist were hired to show how to first make people feel inferior— feed on their fear by suggesting bad breath or missing the party if you didn’t drink Pepsi or being left behind if they didn’t get the latest and greatest. And at the same time, accent the pleasure—“double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint, gum”— packaged in a catchy jingle that you’ll remember —like I do— some 60 years later!

 

Schools used the same techniques. First, a lot of fear, with literal caning, the dunce hat, punishment by isolation (I spent most of 3^rd grade out in the hall). But now the new preferred strategy is reward— “Be good and you’ll earn enough points for a pizza party!” In both cases, avoiding pain or pursuing pleasure become the primary motivators of how we are and how we act. 

 

All of this is confirmed by neuroscience. And then applied to the new round of snake-oil promises to make our life better— i-phones. As described in book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt:

 

“When an action is followed by a good outcome (such as gaining food, or relieving pain, or just achieving a goal), certain brain circuits involved with learning release a bit of dopamine—the neurotransmitter most centrally involved in feelings of pleasure and pain. 

 

The release of dopamine feels good and gets us wanting more. When you eat a potato chip, you get a small hit of dopamine, which is why you then want the second one ever more that you wanted the first one.”

 

Remember the Lay’s Potato Chip ad? “Betcha can’t eat one just one!” 

 

It’s the same with slot machines: A win feels great, but it doesn’t cause gambling addicts to take their earnings and go home, satisfied. Rather, the pleasure motivates them to keep going. It’s the same for video games, social media, shopping sites and other apps that routinely cause people to spend far more time or money than they had intended to spend. The neural basis of behavioral addictions…all involve dopamine, craving, compulsion and feeling powerless to act on your own conscious wishes. That happens by design. The creators of these apps use every trick in the psychologists’ tool kit to hook users as deeply as slot machines hook gamblers. Our children’s desires are being hacked and their actions manipulated. 

 

The author then gives the specifics of this nefarious and purposeful manipulation. He imagines a 12-year-old girl trying to study for her test tomorrow in science class. The app designers see her as prey to be lured away from her task and brought into their world. Not for her growth or well-being, but as a pawn in their game to earn big money. How do they do it?

 

Step 1: An external trigger— like the “ping” on her phone that gets her to exit her straight-road focus and take the off-ramp to see what it is. “Did somebody like my last Facebook/ Instagram post?”

 

Step 2: From past experience, she hopes a little dopamine rush awaits her and thus, she is invested in the game and motivated to see what it is.

 

Step 3: She naturally hopes for a reward— “20 likes!” But it turns out the reward is not dependable. It’s variable. There might just be one “like” or a snarky comment. That feeds her persistence, like that gambler at the slot machine. The anticipation of possible more “likes” keeps her distracted and indeed, the anticipation of the reward makes for a heightened dopamine rush when it finally comes. 

 

With her attention split off in all these directions, it is no surprise that she has trouble focusing on studying for the test. To make the whole show even more evil, she then may be diagnosed with ADHD as if it’s her fault that she can’t concentrate while the App designers who consciously strive to lure her away with promises of rewards, novelty and surface emotion, are celebrated as good businesspeople making millions while the poor girl is then given drugs to manage her “learning disability” that they created. 

 

Like drug or alcohol addiction, once the nervous system becomes dependent on device distraction, the “brain enters a state of deficit when the user is not taking the drug. If dopamine release is pleasurable, dopamine deficit is unpleasant. Ordinary life becomes boring and even painful without the drug. Nothing feels good anymore, except the drug. The addicted person is in a state of withdrawal… the universal symptoms of which include anxiety, irritability, insomnia and dysphoria. 

 

My 11-year-old grandson is allowed an hour of videogame play, set by a timer. At the end, I notice some of those symptoms above. By contrast, after an hour of hiking or swimming or playing basketball or playing cards together or reading, none of those symptoms appear! (Well, he gets a little irritable when I beat him in basketball. Ha ha!)

 

That’s the bad news. 

 

And there’s more. In yesterday’s post, I mentioned all the ways I thought I had built up my immune system so none of the above would happen to me. But that’s not the case. When traveling, I have the phone on the bedstand because of the alarm, but I find that if I awake in the middle of the night, turn it on to see the time, I find myself also wondering, “Any messages?” And start to scroll a bit. Bad idea. And be honest, how many people take their phones in the bathroom with them. Don’t want to waste any time while sitting on the toilet! 

Walking in the city, I often listen to my Audible story, but then miss the bird calls high up in the tree or the soothing sounds of the ocean waves. Whereas once I waited for two hours for a bus in India without batting an eye—because back then, the whole culture was immersed in real time just sitting and observing and chatting—now after a minute at the bus stop, I’m checking my phone. 

As someone with that free-range childhood foundation, a meditation and music practice and time spent in nature, as an elder with frontal lobes developed as much as they ever will be, I am capable of setting some limits. While I write Blogposts or books, I silence the phone or ignore all pings. Same with practicing piano. Now I set a time limit to how much I’ll listen to my book while walking in the neighborhood and just shut it off for the rest. A while back, I tried out limiting myself to three different times of the day when I’d check in on the phone. 

 

But for all these efforts to tie myself to the mast of the ship, the Sirens keep calling. In the reversal of the Indian situation where very few people (back in 1978) had phones (back them, landlines) or cars or rat-race schedules where they had to punch in at work, the whole society moved at the same slow pace and no one was punished for moving that slowly. But when the hyper-mania increased to the point that if you’re going to be two minutes late to the restaurant, you’re expected to text your impatient friends, it is hard to resist getting pulling into the rush hour race to nowhere. 

 

But the good news is that somewhere deep inside, free will still exists. We can join with our family, friends, colleagues and community to refuse that which makes us more isolated, more anxious, more manic and just chill out together. There are many hopeful signs that people are deciding to do just that. Parties where people leave their phones at the door, meals where looking at a phone is as rude as lighting up a cigarette (remember that we changed that rule!), Facebook posts that are more poetry and important social justice information than cute cat pictures. 

 

But consider the children. They are vulnerable and minus frontal lobes and prone to sensation and distraction and while we think we are protecting them from predators out in the dangerous world by keeping them at home, we fling the doors open wide to the IT folks preying on them for profit, doing nothing whatsoever to protect them from overuse and addiction (indeed, just the opposite) and never having to be accountable for it all— as in, having to teach a whole class of kids with their phones blazing. If I were to punish them, that would be my first choice. 

 

Reflect on your own addiction, resolve to protect children and let’s learn to use our creations responsibly, not with mindless platitudes, but with law, policies, procedures, limits, the same way we once protected children from pornography (available at a click of a button!), alcohol and drugs. It’s not just possible, but necessary.