They are problems of success, really, these modern ills. Social media addiction, gaming disorders, the compulsive over-eating of sugar and processed gloop: they are products of a society with more than enough food, leisure time and boredom, and without the life-or-death excitement that kept our ancestors busy.
We could perhaps think of our rising addiction problems as something like a peacock’s tail or companionable parasite – the costly signal that we no longer need to strain every nerve to stay alive. Only a species that is this superfluously good at survival could afford to hack its own anti-survival neural circuitry, targeting the pathways that instead make it more likely to die. Problems of success are harder, not easier, to deal with, of course – you wouldn’t want to reverse the conditions that got us here. Releasing wolves back among us is not the right policy for tackling TikTok-addled teens. But the troubling fact is that a large portion of the economy now runs on addiction.
The path of incentives is easy to trace: an addicted customer is a reliable customer – and why settle for mere consumption of your product when you could get overconsumption instead? The academic David Courtwright calls this “limbic capitalism”: named for the part of the brain responsible for emotional processing. Global industries, he says, are starting to aim right at it.
In this country, we are at last regulating away some of the older vices, such as nicotine and alcohol. It has been tricky enough to do – vast industries and realms of addicts have staunchly opposed it for decades. But many new vices are popping up in their stead. Food companies mine and refine their products for addictive properties: ultra-processed food, thought to encourage compulsive eating, now makes up two-thirds of the calorie intake of adolescent Britons. Gaming addiction is soaring. We hear less about workaholics than we used to, but perhaps only because the condition is so common – instead, we hear about burnout, the end result.
Then of course there are smartphones, teaching us to crave for the next ping of a message, or the bright notification of a retweet. These in turn link us to the thousands of addictive products being pumped out by the largest tech companies on the planet. There are gambling apps, gaming apps and one-click shopping apps – even addiction to fitness-tracker apps is on the rise. Then of course there is social media, to which almost half of British teens now feel addicted.
But above this inevitable nightmare of compulsive working, compulsive eating and compulsive clicking, floats another kind of life. For a few, it is possible to buy your way out, back into old-fashioned reality. As the modern world claws its way further into our limbic systems, a new kind of luxury is emerging: freedom from cravings.
The ultimate example might be the rapid growth of semaglutide drugs (originally developed for treating diabetes). These are primarily used to help with diabetes and weight loss but, as they have surged in popularity, doctors and patients have begun to notice something else: they also seem to reduce cravings for alcohol, nicotine and opioids, and perhaps even compulsive gambling and online shopping.
This makes sense to researchers, although studies on the phenomenon are still scarce: semaglutides such as Wegovy and Ozempic reduce the release of dopamine in the brain’s striatum, the region that motivates you to take another bite of something delicious but also to take another puff of your cigarette. They appear to act not on the digestive system, but on craving itself.
For their users, then, an alternate reality beckons: you can walk through the blinking lights of modern life and your mind will remain your own. It’s hard to imagine – having a smartphone without needing to check it, putting down a tube of Pringles halfway through. For this is the major struggle of modern life: self-control in the face of addictive products. It’s becoming harder and harder to do. But this is also one place that a class divide is forming. Not everyone should take semaglutides, of course – the side-effects are still being uncovered – but most cannot afford to anyway. You can get Wegovy on the NHS, but only if you are morbidly obese, with a BMI of 35 and a serious weight-related condition such as hypertension – although in exceptional cases the merely obese, those with a BMI of at least 30, might qualify. Meanwhile, Ozempic is mostly known as a “Hollywood phenomenon”, available only to the rich.
The income divide is there, too, when it comes to resisting online addictions. As time away from screens becomes a scarce commodity, some companies are monetising it in the form of off-grid digital detox weekends or curiously expensive dumbphones.
As are schools. In September, a private school in Cambridge started marketing itself as Britain’s first “screen-free school”: no mobile phones, no internet, no laptops and no interactive whiteboards. (Several parents work for tech giants with research centres in the city.) This summer, Eton announced it would ban smartphones – giving new pupils Nokia “bricks” instead. Meanwhile, children from lower-income backgrounds spend on average two more hours a day on their phones than their peers.
This runs alongside the fact that money shelters you from many of the conditions that encourage addiction in the first place. Junk food appeals most when you do not have the time, money or the emotional energy to access healthy alternatives: chasing their likely customers, fast food joints spring up in deprived areas. As do betting shops.
With endlessly long NHS waiting lists for therapy or rehabilitation, getting treatment for addiction can be unaffordable too. We sometimes pretend that resisting gambling, social media, sweet treats and retail therapy is mostly a matter of willpower – as if the economy weren’t built on pushing us these things. Instead, it’s becoming a privilege few can afford.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
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