Quotes About Addiction

how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

Once you're wired for distraction, you crave it.

the second force that encourages behavioral addiction: the drive for social approval. As Adam Alter writes: "We're social beings who can't ever completely ignore what other people think of us."18 This behavior, of course, is adaptive. In Paleolithic times, it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe because your survival depended on it.

The respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer captured this fear well in an essay about why he does not tweet: "Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I'm morally superior to it, but because I don't think I could handle it. I'm afraid I'd end up letting my son go hungry.

Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business

As Harris argues, these companies didn't invest the massive resources necessary to perfect this auto-tagging feature because it was somehow crucial to their social network's usefulness. They instead made this investment so they could significantly increase the amount of addictive nuggets of social approval that their apps could deliver to their users.

Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.

Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle.

An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too.

The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, . . . was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?" And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.

Philip Morris just wanted your lungs," Maher concludes. "The App Store wants your soul.

Twitter is crack for media addicts.

in many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features.

two forces from this longer treatment that not only seemed particularly relevant to our discussion, but as you'll soon learn, repeatedly came up in my own research on how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences.

the people I knew who signed up for thefacebook.com were almost certainly spending significantly more time playing Snood (a Tetris-style puzzle game that was inexplicably popular)

Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable.

Because, let's face it, checking "likes" is the new smoking.

as revealed by whistleblowers and researchers like Tristan Harris, Sean Parker, Leah Pearlman, and Adam Alter, these technologies are in many cases specifically designed to trigger this addictive behavior. Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.

This behavior, of course, is adaptive. In Paleolithic times, it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe because your survival depended on it. In the twenty-first century, however, new technologies have hijacked this deep drive to create profitable behavioral addictions.

Finally, as detailed in the first part of these book, many of these tools are engineered to hijack our social instincts to create an addictive allure. When you spend multiple hours a day compulsively clicking & swiping, there's much less free time left for slower interactions. And because this compulsive use emits a patina of socialness, it can delude you into thinking that you're already serving your relationships well, making further action unnecessary.

Those who fervently love God are intoxicated by His warmth and live out their addiction like moths drawn to a flame.

4/16/85: If I were thin, I'd never say "I am powerless over fudge." a) I can't believe I actually ever said that. b) Which, of course, isn't to say that I do have any power over fudge. Particularly if it has nuts.

Maybe all men are a drug. Sometimes they bring you down and sometimes, like now, they get you so high.