The Addictions of the 21st Century

Smoking was, perhaps, the addiction of the 20th century. Everyone did it. Doctors, housewives, and men of ambition. Everybody smoked. Nowadays, most of us look back at such a phenomenon as curious at best and incredibly stupid at worst.

How would these people not think putting a foreign substance into their lungs multiple times a day would cause long term damage?

Perhaps because tobacco has been with us since the very beginning (around 3000 B.C.E.). It had always been a part of their lives. They grew up with it. There weren't enough scientific studies proving its danger, and plenty of money was to be had extolling the virtues.

Enter the additions of the 21st century:

1. Social Media

2. Porn

3. Marijuana

All three seem relatively harmless, have little scientific research proving their benefits or detractions and all are part of a large cohort of most young Americans daily lives.

Social Media

Social media is a new thing. So new that I never had a MySpace. My first introduction was through Facebook. Now I could go on and on about the so called evils of social media or Facebook as a company (now Meta). But frankly, most of it is conjecture. Here is what we know for sure about social media:

1. Teens spent an average of 3.7 hours on social media before the pandemic. Since the pandemic, that number is estimated to have risen to over 7.7 hours per day. Bear in mind this number does not include other screen time usage such as YouTube, Netflix, or other games and applications.

2. According to an article published by the Wall Street Journal in September of 2021, "Facebook knows Instagram is Toxic for Teen Girls, company documents show". The newspaper shared findings of what Instagram’s internal researchers called a “teen mental health deep dive,” including a study that found Instagram makes body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls. On the 28th of October 2021, Facebook Inc rebranded to "Meta" in the wake of that article, emphasizing its diversified portfolio of services.

3. Social Media companies harvest the data of its users to ensure a better experience for its user. If you look back at my article called Don't Become a Hacked Human, you'll see I go into greater detail there and therefore, won't rehash here.

4. Social Media platforms refuse to take responsibility for the content on their platforms, but expect to receive protection and immunity from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 states that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230).

They claim to be only platforms that host users and are in no way responsible or endorse the views of their users, and therefore can't be held accountable for them. Yet they have terms and conditions that limit your use of such platforms and can ban you from using or hosting content on their platforms.

The former was especially on public display after the events of January 6, 2021 when insurgents stormed the Capitol building and President Donald Trump was banned from several social media platforms. For the record, I think they were correct to do so. But in so doing so, they are regulating the content they are hosting, and are becoming publishers.

This is an essential step that we need to take as a country. We need to hold social media platforms responsible for the content on their sites, the algorithms they choose to employ, and how such content and algorithms affect their audience. Currently, we are doing our youth a tremendous disservice.

Porn

Pornography has been around almost as long as tobacco, but for the purposes of this article, I'm referring to the millions of pornographic videos that are free and easily accessible on sites such as Pornhub.

This is what we know about porn:

• In 2015, worldwide, there were more than 2 billion web searches for porn.

• 20 percent of mobile-device searches are for porn.

• 90 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls are exposed to Internet porn by age 18.

• Porn sites attract more visitors each month than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined.

• 30 percent of Internet content is porn.

• From 2005 to 2013, searches for “teen porn” tripled to 500,000 a day.

To add some of my own conjecture to this argument, I think that most parents do a rather terrible job of explaining sex and sexuality to their children. Sex is strange. It's like nothing else you do in life and has a whole myriad of kinks and innuendo that barely anyone understands well. Sex is so important, or so damaging, that Freud based his entire view of the human mind and behavior on it.

To clarify, I do not wholeheartedly agree with all of Freud's theories and conjecture, but one can at least see where he was coming from. There are a great many things that can be understood about the human mind and body through the lens of evolutionary biology. And what is at the core of that evolutionary biology? Sex.

And therein lies the problem. Porn is not sex. It is a simulation of sex. It is a high quality reproduction of two random people engaging in sex, while you engage in masturbation, which is a much different experience. And like social media, porn doesn't take responsibility for the content on their platform or who is watching it.

And that's not to mention the actors in porn, many of whom start at around age 18 and are subject to a strange facet of an entertainment industry which is already rife with exploitation.

I am in no way advocating for censorship of this type of pornography. But porn hosting sites need to be held accountable for the content they host, how it affects those watching it, and they need to ensure all the participants in every video both consented to the upload of such sensitive material. Currently there is an entire website and many categories devoted to so called "revenge porn."

Marijuana

I will start this section with this disclaimer. I have no issue with marijuana when used sporadically. The issue lies in chronic use. In 2018, 11.8 million young adults reported marijuana use in the past year. Myself among them.

The issue with marijuana use, especially chronic abuse, is its impact on the brain. The prefrontal cortex of the brain is not fully furnished, shall we say, until the age of 26. Chronic marijuana use can cause brain abnormalities, decrease IQ points and create symptoms similar to attention deficit disorder.

More disturbing, and perhaps less widely known, is the impact of marijuana on sleep. As a sedative, marijuana plunges the user into a state of impaired motor functions and blissful euphoria, before gently depositing them to sleep. And while many people enjoy such an effect, the issue comes during sleep itself.

Usage of marijuana before or to induce sleep causes irregular REM sleep patterns. The function of REM sleep, among other things, is to encode memories and skills learned that day, that week and that month. Irregular REM sleep patterns can cause the loss of such memories and skills and chronic use can lead to sleep abnormalities and shortened attention spans.

Conclusion:

At the root of all these addictions is one simple chemical: dopamine. Getting likes on your picture, scrolling to find new content, or laughing at some new joke causes dopamine to be released into our system. Dopamine, sometimes referred to as "the pleasure chemical" had the evolutionary job of rewarding us for certain behaviors. Chief among these behaviors were social status, sex, and novel experiences.

The dangers of social media, porn and marijuana as differentiated from those I've mentioned above, is they have the potential to abuse the dopamine response, creating a negative feedback loop.

Social media has the potential to hijack the social status dopamine receptors. Porn is a boon for novel sexual experiences with hundreds if not thousands of women and men, all tailored to you. And marijuana promises that even your corn flakes will become novel (if not downright hilarious).

The danger lies in the fact that while one of these experiences is fine and altogether not harmful, chronic use will lead to addiction. With each hit of dopamine, the more the body will strengthen such behaviors. And the more social media, porn and marijuana a person consumes, the more they will have to consume to achieve the same effect.

Eventually, a person could end up trying to derive their social status, sexual needs and novel experiences all from their phones in the safety of a single room. And that is a one way ticket to depression.

Because social status requires actual interaction with other human beings. Healthy sexuality involves vulnerability, intimacy and aftercare. And while getting high can be fun on occasion, just like getting drunk, it is not a recipe for a successfully daily routine.

In conclusion, while none of these behaviors are dangerous by themselves, long term exposure to any of them can and will cause a negative feedback loop to form, causing depression, anxiety and a whole host of other issues explored in the body of this article. Which is why they are uniquely suited to be the common addictions of the 21st century.