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by yhavr 384 days ago
besides porn, things like facebook, tiktok, instagram, reddit... generalising, it's everything that acts as a button "gib me more novelty" that one can press as much and as frequently as they want.

surely, not everybody is hooked by these things, and it's definitely possible to use them without harm, but sometimes it requires training and (self-)awareness.
1 comments
mdp2021 384 days ago
But every source of pleasure could create addiction, so it is not valid to point to a specific one, and the requirement of self control and gratification delay remains generally fundamental.
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yhavr 384 days ago
Not every source of pleasure is equally addictive by its nature.

However, I'm not talking about _addiction_, but messing with the dopaminergic system. It's, I'd say a specific kind of "pleasure" with particular mechanisms to trigger.

The problem here is not that a person "is not having control over doing, taking or using something to the point where it could be harmful to them" (https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/addiction-support/addiction-wha...). The problem is that the reward system gets broken. If a person is actually addicted to instagram scrolling, like people are addicted to smoking, it just adds another layer of complexity. As I observing from myself, "checking stuff on my phone" looks like a bad habit rather than an addiction.

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mdp2021 383 days ago
So, it seems you are saying that there exist products that, giving "pleasure upon command", make people akin to Damasio's rats - they would constantly go to the pleasure trigger.

But people are not rats: they are or can be made aware that crude pleasure is a negligible factor. Duties and other values count much more.

The dopaminergic system is inferior to judgement.

If there are issue in managing the dopaminergic system, the issue is cultural - and has to be treated in that framework.

It's like with the cognitive disaster in many medical doctors, that seem to equate "quality of life" with "pleasure" (in their own twisted ignorant subdevelopment): health itself has an extremely high value, crude veneers like said pleasure have not or can be plain countervalues.

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