[taneq]

Consider music. Music is a form of information, it's pleasurable to listen to, and many people spend significant portions of their day listening to it and would be strongly unwilling to give it up. You could call this 'psychological dependency' or you could just accept that music is a good addition to most peoples' lives and that their spending time and money on experiencing it is an entirely reasonable decision.

[civilitty]

You're demonstrating my point. Portable cassette/CD/MP3 players have existed for what, four decades? The vast majority of humans only experienced music through bards and family/friends up until the last century. This is all a vastly unexplored topic and that's exactly why calling it an addiction is inaccurate. Our understanding of pleasure and neurological dependency is still in its infancy yet our ability to manipulate it at a commercial level through sound, visuals, and base human instinct has grown exponentially - despite the fact that the latter has happened largely through free market trial and error.

The phrase "you could just accept that [music/video games/heroin] is a good addition to most peoples' lives and that their spending time and money on experiencing it is an entirely reasonable decision" is right out of the hardcore addicts' self-defense-from-intervention playbook (been there). Likewise, it's equally ridiculous to use music, a passive art form that has existed for thousands of years, to argue in good faith about the kind of technology that we have today. Especially when that technology has spawned several unique industries ranging from social media to gaming that are dependent on "whales" spending thousands of dollars a month and other behaviors distinguishable from clinical addiction only by the lack of violent withdrawals.