They are problems of success, really, these modern ills. Social media addiction, gaming disorders, the compulsive over-eating of sugar and processed gloop: they are products of a society with more than enough food, leisure time and boredom, and without the life-or-death excitement that kept our ancestors busy.
We could perhaps think of our rising addiction problems as something like a peacock’s tail or companionable parasite – the costly signal that we no longer need to strain every nerve to stay alive. Only a species that is this superfluously good at survival could afford to hack its own anti-survival neural circuitry, targeting the pathways that instead make it more likely to die. Problems of success are harder, not easier, to deal with, of course – you wouldn’t want to reverse the conditions that got us here. Releasing wolves back among us is not the right policy for tackling TikTok-addled teens. But the troubling fact is that a large portion of the economy now runs on addiction.
