| There's a lot of supporting material about addiction and young adults. Social media is just one avenue or road on a path of thousands at your fingertips. You don't control it, the phone manufacturer and the app makers do. You may be shown something, it looks like fun, and then wastes hours, days, or months, on a simple dopamine 'loop' that's been designed (Octalysis Framework). You may spend a lot of money on worthless digital assets in the moment. Loot boxes for example. When you are younger than on average 10 or 11, most children can't comprehend lying, deception, or deceit. They naturally separate people into two groups, the kids, and the adults because adults lie and can be deceptive but aside from that its not something the kids perceive clearly, and that's a biological developmental issue as well. Its largely referred to as the age of reason, when you can start thinking critically and being able to recognize and tell lies is an important brain development. Incidentally what you are taught before and during that time is often accepted as true even if its not, and may be accepted as a true belief. Its hard work re-examining things critically that you thought were true but were actually lies (of omission or comission) designed to get you to think and behave in a certain way. Now the ages differ individually, but for the most part there is always a period of time where you are vulnerable and have cognitive biases and blindspots, which is why it is important to have friends in different age groups, so they can point out things you don't notice. Some blind-spots never go away, and its a process of building up an association in those cases of some thing that triggers you to examine it critically. Addiction is similar, you are mostly blind to it perceptually up until the part of the brain develops that helps moderate it, usually in your late teens, early 20s. That's strictly biology and varies to some degree but remains true. Its still something that is very hard to do, but you are capable of doing that once the area in your brain develops. For confirmation, you might look no further than objective observations about your and others behaviors to highly processed sugar treats. If your parents didn't stop you, would you be able to choose and have only 1-2 servings of your favorite sugar snack? or if left alone would you go through a long process of rationalizing just one more and before you know it the entire bag is gone. Even adults do this, but there's a variance in adults; there's very little variance in developmental stages. Barring some excruciating/traumatic past experience, you would not be able to stop yourself. You would make yourself sick, because it tastes so good going down. Also, phones are a leash. I know many parents who are perfectly fine instilling an omniscient presence via a spyware app that lets them track you everywhere you go, and punish you when they think you break a rule. My cousin got the brunt of this growing up, and would have his car taken away from him when the average speed would go above a certain threshold (and poor technical implementations in certain places bounce between several towers, so when you travel in an area your almost guaranteed to set off an alert). He got punished numerous times until he got the idea to take a drive, with them, in the car through that area (going the speed limit) to do something. They only believed him after he did that a large number of times, where the alert was setting off. Anecdotally, fun fact, anyone with an antenna can actually do location finding like that. Its called trilateration, you learn about it when you start working with Ham Radio, and the requirements are almost nothing just need an adjustable dipole antenna ($15) and a SDR/modulator. Some of the data might be encrypted, but IMEI number and a few other things are not and make you pretty uniquely identifiable over time. There are companies that aggregate this information regularly, and some non-companies that may use it for nefarious purposes (i.e. scam phone calling, deep fake etc). Risks are only increasing, if the experts can't keep up with the pace of trends, what hope do you have. |
"You can't eat just one." Fortunately I seem to be able to easily resist the lure of potato chips/crisps and actually feel full after eating a few of them. I think the greasiness or fat content helps. I can enjoy the hyper-palatable salty, savory and spicy versions but a 200kcal bag is really overkill.
But some hyper-palatable foods are so well optimized that they can be really hard to resist; they press all of the buttons of deliciousness while making you hungry for another one.