The Architects of Addiction

Growing up in the 1950’s/60’s, I, like all of us back then, had a free-range childhood. Made yet more glorious by living a half-a-block from a 200-acre park where my friends and I roamed and played with sticks and stones, bats and balls, climbed trees, caught autumn leaves, played tag and hide-and-seek and generally basked in the glory of children being 100% children, not an adult or a device in sight. 

 

From that foundation, I grew into an adulthood that included hiking and biking and backpacking, still roaming in a park (Golden Gate Park in San Francisco) a half-a-block from my house, often with a ball or frisbee in hand, playing, singing and dancing with children— and sometimes adults— day after day after day, sitting meditation in Zen retreats for 10 hours a day just following my breath— no talking, no reading and certainly no screen-viewing. For many years, I didn’t own a TV and when my wife and I got one, it lived in the hall closet, to be rolled down the hall on Thursday nights and sometimes on Saturday with a VHS video chosen from Le Video. 

 

So for the first 60 years of my life, I was almost entirely free of the addictions that awaited us all. Somewhere around 2010, I finally got a flip phone and quite late amongst my peers, didn't get an i-Phone until 2018. So it is only in the past eight years of my 75 that the epidemic entered my life. You would think that with this solid background of freedom from mindless distractions and feeling thoroughly at home with silence and stillness and mindful attention to the real world around me, that I would not be vulnerable to the kind of device-addiction plaguing us all. 

You would be wrong. 

 

I just read the section in Jonathan Haidt’ s important book The Anxious Generation about addiction (pp. 129-136) and if I’m honest, I have to admit — they got me! Their purposefully manufactured poisonous intentions for their own profit are working. If this is true of someone like me who theoretically would be more aware and less vulnerable with decades of autonomous experience freed from devices, imagine how much more devastating it is for defenseless children who know nothing else but this world of 24/7 phones. And not only are the people creating and selling this venomous snake oil not in jail, but they’re rich as hell and driving up the housing prices in my fair city and unleashing their driverless vehicles into the street. What’s wrong with this picture?

 

To be informed and aware of these forces at play theoretically is the only defense against them. But again, their toxic presence is in the air we breathe and all around us. It takes almost a superhuman effort to resist. But nevertheless, we should persist.

 

Drawing from Haidt’s book, I’ll summarize how this designed addiction works in the next post. But first I have to check my Facebook likes.