Arizona State University Distracted by Communication Discussion.

Week 1 Questions and Discussion1. What is Alone Together’s “origin story”?
2. What is the most important limitation of an “online all-the-time” social life?
3. What are some of the costs of being constantly distracted by
communication technology?
4. In what sense does technology “make us forget what we know about life”
(page xxii)?
5. Describe and discuss the tradeoff between the loss of privacy and the easier
use of technology, e.g., Alexa’s “always listening” feature.
6. In what respects is authenticity “threat and obsession, taboo and
fascination” (page 4)?
7. In what ways does creating a social media profile blur the lines between
intimacy and solitude?
8. What is the ELIZA effect? In what ways and for what reasons has the
“romantic reaction” to the ELIZA effect given way to a “new pragmatism”
about our relations with robots?
9. In what respects have computers and other technologies replaced pets as
our “nearest neighbors”?
10. In what sense are Furbies “alive enough” to need their human masters?
11. What is a Turing test? How is it relevant to the “intelligence” of sociable
robots?
12. Discuss the ethical issues concerning causing pain that are raised by
sociable robots.
13. In what sense is AIBO a “toy that changes mnds”?
14. Discuss some of the psychological risks of the “robotic moment.” What are
some of the issues raised by aggression toward sociable robots?
15. What is alterity? How might it lead to narcissism in our engagements with
sociable robots?
ALSO BY ADAM ALTER
Drunk Tank Pink
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright © 2017 by Adam Alter
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Alter, Adam L., 1980-author.
Title: Irresistible : the rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked / Adam Alter.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016043481 (print) | LCCN 2016059209 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594206641 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780698402638 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735223868 (international export) Subjects: LCSH: Digital
media—Social aspects. | Digital media—Psychological aspects. | Psychology, Applied. | BISAC: SOCIAL
SCIENCE / Media Studies. | PSYCHOLOGY Psychopathology Addiction. | COMPUTERS Web Social
Networking.
Classification: LCC HM851 .A437 2017 (print) | LCC HM851 (ebook) | DDC 302.23/1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043481
Graphs and charts by the author.
Credits for images
Here: www.redditblog.com/2015/04/the-button.html; here: Monica Wadhwa and JeeHye Christine Kim,
Psychological Science (Volume 26, Issue 6). Page DS5. 06/01/2015. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE
Publications, Inc.; here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_or_Not; here and here: Courtesy of Ben Grosser,
bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator/.
Version_2
For Sara and Sam
CONTENTS
Also by Adam Alter
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply
PART 1
WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?
1.
The Rise of Behavioral Addiction
2.
The Addict in All of Us
3.
The Biology of Behavioral Addiction
PART 2
THE INGREDIENTS OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION (OR, HOW TO ENGINEER AN ADDICTIVE
EXPERIENCE)
4. Goals
5. Feedback
6. Progress
7. Escalation
8. Cliffhangers
9. Social
Interaction
PART 3
THE FUTURE OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION (AND SOME SOLUTIONS)
10. Nipping
11. Habits
Addictions at Birth
and Architecture
12. Gamification
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Prologue:
Never Get High on Your Own Supply
A t an Apple event in January 2010, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad:
What this device does is extraordinary . . . It offers the best way to
browse the web; way better than a laptop and way better than a
smartphone . . . It’s an incredible experience . . . It’s phenomenal for
mail; it’s a dream to type on.
For ninety minutes, Jobs explained why the iPad was the best way to look at
photos, listen to music, take classes on iTunes U, browse Facebook, play games,
and navigate thousands of apps. He believed everyone should own an iPad.
But he refused to let his kids use the device.
I
—
n late 2010, Jobs told New York Times journalist Nick Bilton that his children
had never used the iPad. “We limit how much technology our kids use in the
home.” Bilton discovered that other tech giants imposed similar restrictions.
Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired, enforced strict time limits on every
device in his home, “because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand.”
His five children were never allowed to use screens in their bedrooms. Evan
Williams, a founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, bought hundreds of books
for his two young sons, but refused to give them an iPad. And Lesley Gold, the
founder of an analytics company, imposed a strict no-screen-time-during-theweek rule on her kids. She softened her stance only when they needed computers
for schoolwork. Walter Isaacson, who ate dinner with the Jobs family while
researching his biography of Steve Jobs, told Bilton that, “No one ever pulled
out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.” It
seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule
of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply.
This is unsettling. Why are the world’s greatest public technocrats also its
greatest private technophobes? Can you imagine the outcry if religious leaders
refused to let their children practice religion? Many experts both within and
beyond the world of tech have shared similar perspectives with me. Several
video game designers told me they avoided the notoriously addictive game
World of Warcraft; an exercise addiction psychologist called fitness watches
dangerous—“the dumbest things in the world”—and swore she’d never buy one;
and the founder of an Internet addiction clinic told me she avoids gadgets newer
than three years old. She has never used her phone’s ringer, and deliberately
“misplaces” her phone so she isn’t tempted to check her email. (I spent two
months trying to reach her by email, and succeeded only when she happened to
pick up her office landline.) Her favorite computer game is Myst, released in
1993 when computers were still too clunky to handle video graphics. The only
reason she was willing to play Myst, she told me, was because her computer
froze every half hour and took forever to reboot.
Greg Hochmuth, one of Instagram’s founding engineers, realized he was
building an engine for addiction. “There’s always another hashtag to click on,”
Hochmuth said. “Then it takes on its own life, like an organism, and people can
become obsessive.” Instagram, like so many other social media platforms, is
bottomless. Facebook has an endless feed; Netflix automatically moves on to the
next episode in a series; Tinder encourages users to keep swiping in search of a
better option. Users benefit from these apps and websites, but also struggle to
use them in moderation. According to Tristan Harris, a “design ethicist,” the
problem isn’t that people lack willpower; it’s that “there are a thousand people
on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation
you have.”
T
—
hese tech experts have good reason to be concerned. Working at the far
edge of possibility, they discovered two things. First, that our understanding
of addiction is too narrow. We tend to think of addiction as something inherent
in certain people—those we label as addicts. Heroin addicts in vacant row
houses. Chain-smoking nicotine addicts. Pill-popping prescription-drug addicts.
The label implies that they’re different from the rest of humanity. They may rise
above their addictions one day, but for now they belong to their own category. In
truth, addiction is produced largely by environment and circumstance. Steve
Jobs knew this. He kept the iPad from his kids because, for all the advantages
that made them unlikely substance addicts, he knew they were susceptible to the
iPad’s charms. These entrepreneurs recognize that the tools they promote—
engineered to be irresistible—will ensnare users indiscriminately. There isn’t a
bright line between addicts and the rest of us. We’re all one product or
experience away from developing our own addictions.
Bilton’s tech experts also discovered that the environment and circumstance
of the digital age are far more conducive to addiction than anything humans have
experienced in our history. In the 1960s, we swam through waters with only a
few hooks: cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs that were expensive and generally
inaccessible. In the 2010s, those same waters are littered with hooks. There’s the
Facebook hook. The Instagram hook. The porn hook. The email hook. The
online shopping hook. And so on. The list is long—far longer than it’s ever been
in human history, and we’re only just learning the power of these hooks.
Bilton’s experts were vigilant because they knew they were designing
irresistible technologies. Compared to the clunky tech of the 1990s and early
2000s, modern tech is efficient and addictive. Hundreds of millions of people
share their lives in real time through Instagram posts, and just as quickly those
lives are evaluated in the form of comments and likes. Songs that once took an
hour to download now arrive in seconds, and the lag that dissuaded people from
downloading in the first place has evaporated. Tech offers convenience, speed,
and automation, but it also brings large costs. Human behavior is driven in part
by a succession of reflexive cost-benefit calculations that determine whether an
act will be performed once, twice, a hundred times, or not at all. When the
benefits overwhelm the costs, it’s hard not to perform the act over and over
again, particularly when it strikes just the right neurological notes.
A like on Facebook and Instagram strikes one of those notes, as does the
reward of completing a World of Warcraft mission, or seeing one of your tweets
shared by hundreds of Twitter users. The people who create and refine tech,
games, and interactive experiences are very good at what they do. They run
thousands of tests with millions of users to learn which tweaks work and which
ones don’t—which background colors, fonts, and audio tones maximize
engagement and minimize frustration. As an experience evolves, it becomes an
irresistible, weaponized version of the experience it once was. In 2004,
Facebook was fun; in 2016, it’s addictive.
Addictive behaviors have existed for a long time, but in recent decades
they’ve become more common, harder to resist, and more mainstream. These
new addictions don’t involve the ingestion of a substance. They don’t directly
introduce chemicals into your system, but they produce the same effects because
they’re compelling and well designed. Some, like gambling and exercise, are
old; others, like binge-viewing and smartphone use, are relatively new. But
they’ve all become progressively more difficult to resist.
Meanwhile, we’ve made the problem worse by focusing on the benefits of
goal-setting without considering its drawbacks. Goal-setting was a useful
motivational tool in the past, because most of the time humans prefer to spend as
little time and energy as possible. We’re not intuitively hard-working, virtuous,
and healthy. But the tide has turned. We’re now so focused on getting more done
in less time that we’ve forgotten to introduce an emergency brake.
I spoke to several clinical psychologists who described the magnitude of the
problem. “Every single person I work with has at least one behavioral
addiction,” one psychologist told me. “I have patients who fit into every area:
gambling, shopping, social media, email, and so on.” She described several
patients, all with high-powered professional careers, earning six figures, but
deeply hobbled by their addictions. “One woman is very beautiful, very bright,
and very accomplished. She has two master’s degrees and she’s a teacher. But
she’s addicted to online shopping, and she’s managed to accumulate $80,000 in
debt. She’s managed to hide her addiction from almost everyone she knows.”
This compartmentalization was a common theme. “It’s very easy to hide
behavioral addictions—much more so than for substance abuse. This makes
them dangerous, because they go unnoticed for years.” A second patient, just as
accomplished at work, managed to hide her Facebook addiction from her
friends. “She went through a horrible breakup, and then stalked her ex-boyfriend
online for years. With Facebook it’s far more difficult to make a clean break
when relationships end.” A man she saw checked his email hundreds of times a
day. “He’s incapable of relaxing and enjoying himself on vacation. But you’d
never know. He’s deeply anxious, but he presents so well in the world; he has a
successful career in the healthcare industry, and you’d never know how much he
suffers.”
“The impact of social media has been huge,” a second psychologist told me.
“Social media has completely shaped the brains of the younger people I work
with. One thing I am often mindful of in a session is this: I could be five or ten
minutes into a conversation with a young person about the argument they have
had with their friend or girlfriend, when I remember to ask whether this
happened by text, phone, on social media, or face-to-face. More often the answer
is, ‘text or social media.’ Yet in their telling of the story, this isn’t apparent to
me. It sounds like what I would consider a ‘real,’ face-to-face conversation. I
always stop in my tracks and reflect. This person doesn’t differentiate various
modes of communication the way I do . . . the result is a landscape filled with
disconnection and addiction.”
Irresistible traces the rise of addictive behaviors, examining where they
begin, who designs them, the psychological tricks that make them so compelling,
and how to minimize dangerous behavioral addiction as well as harnessing the
same science for beneficial ends. If app designers can coax people to spend more
time and money on a smartphone game, perhaps policy experts can also
encourage people to save more for retirement or donate to more charities.
T
—
echnology is not inherently bad. When my brother and I moved with my
parents to Australia in 1988, we left our grandparents in South Africa. We
spoke to them once a week on expensive landline calls, and sent letters that
arrived a week later. When I moved to the United States in 2004, I emailed my
parents and brother almost every day. We talked on the phone often, and waved
to each other via webcam as often as we could. Technology shrank the distance
between us. Writing for Time in 2016, John Patrick Pullen described how the
emotional punch of virtual reality brought him to tears.
. . . My playmate, Erin, shot me with a shrink ray. Suddenly, not only
were all the toys enormous to me, but Erin’s avatar was looming over me
like a hulking giant. Her voice even changed as it poured through my
headphones, entering my head with a deep, slow tone. And for a moment,
I was a child again, with this giant person lovingly playing with me. It
gave me such a profound perspective on what it must be like to be my
son that I started to cry inside the headset. It was a pure and beautiful
experience that will reshape my relationship with him moving forward. I
was vulnerable to my giant playmate, yet felt completely safe.
Tech isn’t morally good or bad until it’s wielded by the corporations that
fashion it for mass consumption. Apps and platforms can be designed to promote
rich social connections; or, like cigarettes, they can be designed to addict. Today,
unfortunately, many tech developments do promote addiction. Even Pullen, in
rhapsodizing his virtual reality experience, said he was “hooked.” Immersive
tech like virtual reality inspires such rich emotions that it’s ripe for abuse. It’s
still in its infancy, though, so it’s too soon to know whether it will be used
responsibly.
In many respects, substance addictions and behavioral addictions are very
similar. They activate the same brain regions, and they’re fueled by some of the
same basic human needs: social engagement and social support, mental
stimulation, and a sense of effectiveness. Strip people of these needs and they’re
more likely to develop addictions to both substances and behaviors.
Behavioral addiction consists of six ingredients: compelling goals that are
just beyond reach; irresistible and unpredictable positive feedback; a sense of
incremental progress and improvement; tasks that become slowly more difficult
over time; unresolved tensions that demand resolution; and strong social
connections. Despite their diversity, today’s behavioral addictions embody at
least one of those six ingredients. Instagram is addictive, for example, because
some photos attract many likes, while others fall short. Users chase the next big
hit of likes by posting one photo after another, and return to the site regularly to
support their friends. Gamers play certain games for days on end because they’re
driven to complete missions, and because they’ve formed strong social ties that
bind them to other gamers.
So what are the solutions? How do we coexist with addictive experiences that
play such a central role in our lives? Millions of recovering alcoholics manage to
avoid bars altogether, but recovering Internet addicts are forced to use email.
You can’t apply for a travel visa or a job, or begin working, without an email
address. Fewer and fewer modern jobs allow you to avoid using computers and
smartphones. Addictive tech is part of the mainstream in a way that addictive
substances never will be. Abstinence isn’t an option, but there are other
alternatives. You can confine addictive experiences to one corner of your life,
while courting good habits that promote healthy behaviors. Meanwhile, once you
understand how behavioral addictions work, you can mitigate their harm, or
even harness them for good. The same principles that drive children to play
games might drive them to learn at school, and the goals that drive people to
exercise addictively might also drive them to save money for retirement.
T
—
he age of behavioral addiction is still young, but early signs point to a crisis.
Addictions are damaging because they crowd out other essential pursuits,
from work and play to basic hygiene and social interaction. The good news is
that our relationships with behavioral addiction aren’t fixed. There’s much we
can do to restore the balance that existed before the age of smartphones, emails,
wearable tech, social networking, and on-demand viewing. The key is to
understand why behavioral addictions are so rampant, how they capitalize on
human psychology, and how to defeat the addictions that hurt us, and harness the
ones that help us.
PART 1
What Is Behavioral Addiction
and Where Did It Come
From?
1.
The Rise of Behavioral Addiction
of years ago, Kevin Holesh, an app developer, decided that he wasn’t
A couple
spending enough time with his family. The culprit was technology, and his
smartphone was the biggest offender. Holesh wanted to know how much time he
was spending on his phone each day, so he designed an app called Moment.
Moment tracked Holesh’s daily screen time, tallying how long he used his phone
each day. I spent months trying to reach Holesh because he lives by his word.
On the Moment website, he writes that he may be slow to reply to email because
he’s trying to spend less time online. Eventually, after my third attempt, Holesh
replied with a polite apology and agreed to talk. “The app stops tracking when
you’re just listening to music or making phone calls,” Holesh told me. “It starts
up again when you’re looking at your screen—sending emails or browsing the
web, for example.” Holesh was spending an hour and fifteen minutes a day
glued to his screen, which seemed like a lot. Some of his friends had similar
concerns, but also had no idea how much time they lost to their phones. So
Holesh shared the app. “I asked people to guess what their daily usage was and
they were almost always 50 percent too low.”
I downloaded Moment several months ago. I guessed I was using my phone
for an hour a day at the most, and picking it up perhaps ten times a day. I wasn’t
proud of those numbers, but they sounded about right. After a month, Moment
reported that I was using my phone for an average of three hours a day, and
picking it up an average of forty times. I was stunned. I wasn’t playing games or
surfing the web for hours, but somehow I managed to spend twenty hours a
week staring at my phone.
I asked Holesh whether my numbers were typical. “Absolutely,” he said.
“We have thousands of users, and their average usage time is just under three
hours. They pick up their phones an average of thirty-nine times a day.” Holesh
reminded me that these were the people who were concerned enough about their
screen time to download a tracking app in the first place. There are millions of
smartphone users who are oblivious or just don’t care enough to track their
usage—and there’s a reasonable chance they’re spending even more than three
hours on their phones each day.
Perhaps there was just a small clump of heavy users who spent all day, every
day on their phones, dragging the average usage times higher. But Holesh shared
the usage data of eight thousand Moment users to illustrate that wasn’t the case
at all:
Most people spend between one and four hours on their phones each day—
and many far longer. This isn’t a minority issue. If, as guidelines suggest, we
should spend less than an hour on our phones each day, 88 percent of Holesh’s
users were overusing. They were spending an average of a quarter of their
waking lives on their phones—more time than any other daily activity, except
sleeping. Each month almost one hundred hours was lost to checking email,
texting, playing games, surfing the web, reading articles, checking bank
balances, and so on. Over the average lifetime, that amounts to a staggering
eleven years. On average they were also picking up their phones about three
times an hour. This sort of overuse is so prevalent that researchers have coined
the term “nomophobia” to describe the fear of being without mobile phone
contact (an abbreviation of “no-mobile-phobia”).
Smartphones rob us of time, but even their mere presence is damaging. In
2013, two psychologists invited pairs of strangers into a small room and asked
them to engage in conversation. To smooth the process, the psychologists
suggested a topic: why not discuss an interesting event that happened to you
over the past month? Some of the pairs talked while a smartphone sat idle
nearby, while for others the phone was replaced by a paper notebook. Every pair
bonded to some extent, but those who grew acquainted in the presence of the
smartphone struggled to connect. They described the relationships that formed as
lower in quality, and their partners as less empathetic and trustworthy. Phones
are disruptive by their mere existence, even when they aren’t in active use.
They’re distracting because they remind us of the world beyond the immediate
conversation, and the only solution, the researchers wrote, is to remove them
completely.
Smartphones aren’t the only culprits. Bennett Foddy has played thousands of
video games, but refuses to play World of Warcraft. Foddy is a brilliant thinker
with dozens of interests. He works as a game developer and professor at New
York University’s Game Center. Foddy was born and lived in Australia, where
he was the bassist in an Australian band called Cut Copy—which released
several best-selling singles and won a string of Australian music awards—until
he moved, first to Princeton University and then to Oxford University, to study
philosophy. Foddy has immense respect for WoW, as it’s known, but won’t play
it himself. “I take it as part of my job to play all the culturally significant games.
But I didn’t play that one because I can’t afford the loss of time. I know myself
reasonably well, and I suspect it probably would have been difficult for me to
shake.”
WoW may be one of the most addictive behavioral experiences on the planet.
It’s a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, with millions of players
from around the world who create avatars that roam across landscapes, fight
monsters, complete quests, and interact with other players. Almost half of all
players consider themselves “addicted.” An article in Popular Science described
WoW as “the obvious choice” when searching for the world’s most addictive
game. There are support groups with thousands of members, and more than a
quarter of a million people have taken the free online World of Warcraft
Addiction Test. In ten years, the game has grossed more than ten billion dollars,
and attracted more than one hundred million subscribers. If they formed a nation,
it would be the twelfth biggest on Earth. WoW players choose an avatar, which
represents them as they complete quests in a virtual world called Azeroth. Many
players band together to form guilds—teams of allied avatars—which is part of
what makes the game so addictive. It’s hard to sleep at night when you know
three of your guild-mates in Copenhagen, Tokyo, and Mumbai are on an epic
quest without you. As we chatted, I was struck by Foddy’s passion for games.
He believes without a doubt that they’re a net force for good in the world—but
still refuses to sample the charms of Azeroth for fear of losing months or years
of his life.
Games like WoW attract millions of teens and young adults, and a
considerable minority—up to 40 percent—develop addictions. Several years ago
a computer programmer and a clinical psychologist joined forces to open a
gaming and Internet addiction center in the woods near Seattle. The center,
named reSTART, houses a dozen or so young men who are addicted to WoW, or
one of a handful of other games. (reSTART tried admitting a small group of
women, but many Internet addicts also develop sex addictions, so cohabitation
became a major distraction.) Computers have never before had the memory to
run games like WoW, which are much faster, more immersive, and less clunky
than the games of the twentieth century. They allow you to interact with other
people in real time, a huge part of what makes them so addictive.
Technology has also changed how we exercise. Fifteen years ago I bought an
early model Garmin exercise watch, a mammoth rectangular device somewhere
between a watch and a wrist weight. It was so heavy that I had to carry a water
bottle in my other hand to balance its weight. It lost its GPS signal every couple
of minutes, and battery life was so limited that it was useless on long runs.
Today there are cheaper, smaller wearable devices that capture every step. That’s
miraculous, but also a recipe for obsession. Exercise addiction has become a
psychiatric specialty because athletes are constantly reminded of their activity
and, even more so, their inactivity. People who wear exercise watches become
trapped in a cycle of escalation. Ten thousand steps may have been the gold
standard last week, but this week it’s eleven thousand. Next week, twelve
thousand, and then fourteen thousand. That trend can’t continue forever, but
many people push through stress fractures and other major injuries to seek the
same endorphin high that came from a much lighter exercise load only months
earlier.
Intrusive tech has also made shopping, work, and porn harder to escape. It
was once almost impossible to shop and work between the late evening and early
morning, but now you can shop online and connect to your workplace any time
of the day. Gone also are the days of stealing a copy of Playboy from the
newsstand; all you need are Wi-Fi and a web browser. Life is more convenient
than ever, but convenience has also weaponized temptation.
So how did we get here?
T
—
he first “behavioral addicts” were two-month-old babies. In early December
1968, forty-one psychologists who studied human vision met in New York
City at the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Nervous and
Mental Disease to discuss why our ability to see sometimes fails. It was a who’s
who of academic luminaries. Roger Sperry would win the Nobel Prize in
medicine thirteen years later. Neuroscientist Wilder Penfield was once described
as the “greatest living Canadian,” and Stanford’s William Dement was crowned
“the father of sleep medicine.”
In attendance was the psychologist Jerome Kagan, who a decade earlier had
joined Harvard University to create the first program in human development. By
his retirement half a century later, he was listed as the twenty-second most
eminent psychologist of all time—ahead of giants like Carl Jung, Ivan Pavlov,
and Noam Chomsky.
At the meeting, Kagan discussed visual attention in infants. How, he asked,
do two-month-old babies know what to look at and what to ignore? Their
growing brains are bombarded by a kaleidoscope of visual information, and yet
somehow they learn to focus on some images and look past others. Kagan
noticed that very young babies were drawn to moving, hard-edged objects. In
fact, they couldn’t look away when a researcher dangled a wooden block before
them. According to Kagan, these infants were showing “a behavioral addiction
to contour and movement.”
By modern standards, though, it would be a stretch to call the infants
behavioral addicts. Kagan was right that they couldn’t look away, but the way
we think of behavioral addiction today is quite different. It’s more than an
instinct that we can’t override, because that would include blinking and
breathing. (Try holding your breath till you pass out and your brain will
eventually force you to breathe again. The fact that we can’t help inhaling and
exhaling means we’re unlikely to die from forgetting to breathe.) Modern
definitions recognize that addiction is ultimately a bad thing. A behavior is
addictive only if the rewards it brings now are eventually outweighed by
damaging consequences. Breathing and looking at wooden blocks aren’t
addictive because, even if they’re very hard to resist, they aren’t harmful.
Addiction is a deep attachment to an experience that is harmful and difficult to
do without. Behavioral addictions don’t involve eating, drinking, injecting, or
smoking substances. They arise when a person can’t resist a behavior, which,
despite addressing a deep psychological need in the short-term, produces
significant harm in the long-term.
Obsession and compulsion are close relatives of behavioral addiction.
Obsessions are thoughts that a person can’t stop having, and compulsions are
behaviors a person can’t stop enacting. There’s a key difference between
addictions, and obsessions and compulsions. Addictions bring the promise of
immediate reward, or positive reinforcement. In contrast, obsessions and
compulsions are intensely unpleasant to not pursue. They promise relief—also
known as negative reinforcement—but not the appealing rewards of a
consummated addiction. (Since they’re so closely related, I’ll use all three terms
in this book.)
Behavioral addiction also has a third relative in obsessive passion. In 2003,
seven Canadian psychologists, led by the researcher Robert Vallerand, wrote a
paper splitting the concept of passion in two. “Passion,” they said, “is defined as
a strong inclination toward an activity that people like, that they find important,
and in which they invest time and energy.” Harmonious passions are very
healthy activities that people choose to do without strings attached—the model
train set that an elderly man has been working on since his youth, or the series of
abstract paintings that a middle-aged woman creates in her free time.
“Individuals are not compelled to do the activity,” the researchers said, “but
rather they freely choose to do so. With this type of passion, the activity
occupies a significant but not overwhelming space in the person’s identity and is
in harmony with other aspects of the person’s life.”
Obsessive passions, however, are unhealthy and sometimes dangerous.
Driven by a need that goes beyond simple enjoyment, they’re likely to produce
behavioral addictions. As the researchers defined it, the individual “cannot help
but to engage in the passionate activity. The passion must run its course as it
controls the person. Because activity engagement is out of the person’s control,
it eventually takes disproportionate space in the person’s identity and causes
conflict with other activities in the person’s life.” This is the video game that a
teenager plays all night instead of sleeping and doing his homework. Or the
runner who once ran for fun, but now feels compelled to run at least six miles a
day at a certain pace, even as debilitating stress injuries set in. Until she’s on her
back, unable to walk, she’ll continue to run daily because her identity and wellbeing are intimately bound with her as yet unbroken streak. Harmonious
passions “make life worth living,” but an obsessive passion plagues the mind.
T
—
here are people, of course, who disagree with the idea that addictions can be
purely behavioral. “Where are the substances?” they ask. “If you can be
addicted to video games and smartphones, why can’t you be addicted to smelling
flowers or walking backward?” You can be addicted to those things, in theory. If
they come to fulfill a deep need, you can’t do without them, and you begin to
pursue them while neglecting other aspects of your life, then you’ve developed a
behavioral addiction to smelling flowers or walking backward. There probably
aren’t many people with those particular addictions, but they aren’t
inconceivable. Meanwhile, there are many, many people who show similar
symptoms when you introduce them to a smartphone or a compelling video
game or the concept of email.
There are also people who say that the term “addiction” can’t possibly apply
to a majority of the population. “Doesn’t that devalue the term ‘addiction’?
Doesn’t that make it meaningless and empty?” they ask. When, in 1918, a flu
pandemic killed seventy-five million people, no one suggested that a flu
diagnosis was meaningless. The issue demanded attention precisely because it
affected so many people, and the same is true of behavioral addiction.
Smartphones and email are hard to resist—because they’re both part of the fabric
of society and promote psychologically compelling experiences—and there will
be other addictive experiences in the coming decades. We shouldn’t use a
watered-down term to describe them; we should acknowledge how serious they
are, how much harm they’re doing to our collective well-being, and how much
attention they deserve. The evidence so far is concerning, and trends suggest
we’re wading deeper into dangerous waters.
Still, it’s important to use the term “behavioral addiction” carefully. A label
can encourage people to see a disorder everywhere. Shy kids were suddenly
labeled “Asperger’s sufferers” when the term became popular; people with
volatile emotions were similarly labeled “bipolar.” Allen Frances, a psychiatrist
and expert on addiction, is concerned about the term “behavioral addiction.” “If
35 percent of people suffer from a disorder, then it’s just a part of human
nature,” he says. “Medicalizing behavioral addiction is a mistake. What we
should be doing is what they do in Taiwan and Korea. There they see behavioral
addiction as a social issue rather than a medical issue.” I agree. Not everyone
who uses a smartphone for more than ninety minutes a day should be in
treatment. But what is it about smartphones that makes them so compelling?
Should we introduce structural checks and balances on the growing role they
play in our collective lives? A symptom affecting so many people is no less real
or more acceptable simply because it becomes a new norm; we need to
understand that symptom to decide whether and how to deal with it.
—
J
ust how common are behavioral addictions? The most debilitating
addictions, which hospitalize people or render them incapable of living
vaguely normal lives, are quite rare, affecting just a few percent of the
population. But moderate behavioral addictions are far more common. These
addictions make our lives less worthwhile, make us less effective at work and
play, and diminish our interactions with other people. They inflict milder
psychological traumas than severe addictions, but even milder traumas
accumulate over time to degrade a person’s well-being.
Figuring out how many people suffer from behavioral addictions is difficult,
because most of these addictions go unreported. Dozens of studies have
investigated the question, but the most comprehensive came from an English
psychology professor named Mark Griffiths, who has been studying behavioral
addiction for more than twenty years. He speaks as quickly and passionately as
you’d expect from someone who has published more than five hundred papers
midway through his career. A precocious student, Griffiths finished his doctorate
at twenty-three—a couple of years before the Internet boom. “It was 1994,”
Griffiths says, “I was presenting a paper at an annual British Psychological
Society meeting on technology and addiction, and there was a press conference
after the talk. At that point people were talking about slot machine, video game,
and TV addictions, and someone asked whether I’d heard about this new thing
called the Internet, and whether it could lead to new types of addictions.” At first
Griffiths wasn’t sure what to make of the Internet, but he was fascinated by the
idea that it might be a route to addiction. He applied for government funding and
began to study the topic.
Reporters often asked Griffiths how common behavioral addictions were, but
he struggled to give them a definitive answer. The data just weren’t available. So
he joined forces with two researchers at the University of Southern California to
find out. They published a long and thorough review paper in 2011, surveying
dozens of studies, each carefully vetted before its inclusion. Studies were only
included if they had at least five hundred respondents, both men and women,
aged between sixteen and sixty-five years, and their measurement methods had
to be reliable and supported with careful research. The result was an impressive
eighty-three studies with a grand total of 1.5 million respondents from four
continents. The studies focused on gambling, love, sex, shopping, Internet,
exercise, and work addictions, as well as alcohol, nicotine, narcotic, and other
substance addictions.
The bottom line: a staggering 41 percent of the population has suffered from
at least one behavioral addiction over the past twelve months. These aren’t
trivial disorders; Griffiths and his colleagues were saying that almost half of the
population had experienced the following symptoms:
[The] loss of ability to choose freely whether to stop or continue the
behavior (loss of control) and [the] experience of behavior-related
adverse consequences. In other words, the person becomes unable to
reliably predict when the behavior will occur, how long it will go on,
when it will stop, or what other behaviors may become associated with
the addictive behavior. As a consequence, other activities are given up or,
if continued, are no longer experienced as being as enjoyable as they
once were. Further negative consequences of the addictive behavior may
include interference with performance of life roles (e.g., job, social
activities, or hobbies), impairment of social relationships, criminal
activity and legal problems, involvement in dangerous situations,
physical injury and impairment, financial loss, or emotional trauma.
Some of these addictions continue to grow with technological innovation and
social change. One recent study suggested that up to 40 percent of the population
suffers from some form of Internet-based addiction, whether to email, gaming,
or porn. Another found that 48 percent of its sample of U.S. university students
were “Internet addicts,” and another 40 percent were borderline or potential
addicts. When asked to discuss their interactions with the Internet, most of the
students gravitated toward negative consequences, explaining that their work,
relationship, and family lives were poorer because they spent too much time
online.
At this point, you may be wondering whether you or someone you love is
technically “addicted to the Internet.” This is a sample of five questions from the
twenty-item Internet Addiction Test, a widely used measure of Internet
addiction. Take a moment to answer each question using the scale below, from 0
to 5:
If you scored 7 or below, you show no signs of Internet addiction. A score of
8–12 suggests mild Internet addiction—you may spend too long on the web
sometimes, but you’re generally in control of your usage. A score of 13–20
indicates moderate Internet addiction, which implies that your relationship with
the Internet is causing you “occasional or frequent problems.” A score between
21 and 25 suggests severe Internet addiction, and implies that the Internet is
causing “significant problems in your life.” (I’ll return to the question of how to
deal with a high score in the third section of this book.)
Beyond Internet addiction, 46 percent of people say they couldn’t bear to live
without their smartphones (some would rather suffer physical injury than an
injury to their phones), and 80 percent of teens check their phones at least once
an hour. In 2008, adults spent an average of eighteen minutes on their phones per
day; in 2015, they were spending two hours and forty-eight minutes per day.
This shift to mobile devices is dangerous, because a device that travels with you
is always a better vehicle for addiction. In one study, 60 percent of respondents
reported binge-watching dozens of television episodes in a row despite planning
to stop much sooner. Up to 59 percent of people say they’re dependent on social
media sites and that their reliance on these sites ultimately makes them unhappy.
Of that group, half say they need to check those sites at least once an hour. After
an hour, they are anxious, agitated, and incapable of concentrating. Meanwhile,
in 2015, there were 280 million smartphone addicts. If they banded together to
form the “United States of Nomophobia,” it would be the fourth most populous
country in the world, after China, India, and the United States.
In 2000, Microsoft Canada reported that the average human had an attention
span of twelve seconds; by 2013 that number had fallen to eight seconds.
(According to Microsoft, a goldfish, by comparison, has an average attention
span of nine seconds.) “Human attention is dwindling,” the report declared.
Seventy-seven percent of eighteen-to twenty-four-year-olds claimed that they
reached for their phones before doing anything else when nothing is happening.
Eighty-seven percent said they often zoned out, watching TV episodes back-toback. More worrying, still, Microsoft asked two thousand young adults to focus
their attention on a string of numbers and letters that appeared on a computer
screen. Those who spent less time on social media were far better at the task.
A
—
ddiction originally meant a different kind of strong connection: in ancient
Rome, being addicted meant you had just been sentenced to slavery. If you
owed someone money and couldn’t repay the debt, a judge would sentence you
to addiction. You’d be forced to work as a slave until you’d repaid your debt.
This was the first use of the word addiction, but it evolved to describe any bond
that was difficult to break. If you liked to drink wine, you were a wine addict; if
you liked to read books, you were a book addict. There was nothing
fundamentally wrong with being an addict; many addicts were just people who
really liked eating or drinking or playing cards or reading. To be an addict was
to be passionate about something, and the word addiction became diluted over
the centuries.
In the 1800s, the medical profession breathed new life into the word. In
particular, doctors paid special attention in the late 1800s when chemists learned
to synthesize cocaine, because it became more and more difficult to wean users
off the drug. At first cocaine seemed like a miracle, allowing the elderly to walk
for miles and the exhausted to think clearly again. In the end, though, most users
became addicted, and many failed to survive.
I’ll return to behavioral addiction shortly, but to understand its rise I’ll need
to focus on substance addiction first. The word “addiction” has only implied
substance abuse for two centuries, but hominids have been addicted to
substances for thousands of years. DNA evidence suggests that Neanderthals
carried a gene known as DRD4-7R as long as forty thousand years ago. DRD47R is responsible for a constellation of behaviors that set Neanderthals apart
from earlier hominids, including risk-taking, novelty-seeking, and sensationseeking. Where pre-Neanderthal hominids were timid and risk-averse,
Neanderthals were constantly exploring and rarely satisfied. A variant of DRD47R known as DRD4-4R is still present in about 10 percent of the population,
who are far more likely than others to be daredevils and serial addicts.
It’s impossible to pinpoint the first human addict, but records suggest he or
she lived more than thirteen thousand years ago. The world was a very different
place then. Neanderthals were long extinct, but the Earth was still covered in
glaciers, the woolly mammoth would exist for another two thousand years, and
humans were just beginning to domesticate sheep, pigs, goats, and cows.
Farming and agriculture would only begin several millennia later, but on the
Southeast Asian island of Timor, someone stumbled onto the betel nut.
The betel nut is the ancient, unrefined cousin of the modern cigarette. Betel
nuts contain an odorless oily liquid known as arecoline, which acts much like
nicotine. When you chew a betel nut, your blood vessels dilate, you breathe
more easily, your blood pumps faster, and your mood lightens. People often
claim to think more clearly after chewing a betel nut, and it’s still a popular drug
of choice in parts of South and Southeast Asia.
Betel nuts, however, have a nasty side effect. If you chew them often enough,
your teeth will become black and rotten and they may fall out. Despite the
obvious cosmetic costs of chewing the nuts, plenty of users continue chewing
even as they lose their teeth. When Chinese emperor Zhou Zhengwang visited
Vietnam two thousand years ago, he asked his hosts why their teeth were black.
They explained that “betel-chewing is for keeping good sanitary conditions in
the mouth; therefore, teeth turn black.” This is shaky logic, at best. When parts
of you turn pitch black, you need an open mind to conclude that the
transformation is healthy.
South Asians weren’t the only ancient addicts. Other civilizations delved into
whatever grew locally. For thousands of years, residents of the Arabian
Peninsula and the Horn of Africa have been chewing the khat leaf, a stimulant
that acts like the drug speed, or methamphetamine. Khat users become talkative,
euphoric, and hyperactive, and their heart rates rise as though they’ve had
several cups of strong coffee. Around the same time, Aboriginal Australians
stumbled upon the pituri plant, while their contemporaries in North America
discovered the tobacco plant. Both plants can be smoked or chewed, and both
contain heavy doses of nicotine. Meanwhile, seven thousand years ago, South
Americans in the Andes began chewing the leaves of the coca plant at large
communal gatherings. A hemisphere away, the Samarians were learning to
prepare opium, which pleased them so much that they etched instructions on
small clay tablets.
S
—
ubstance addiction, as we know it, is relatively new, because it relies on
sophisticated chemistry and expensive equipment. In television’s Breaking
Bad, chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-cook Walter White is obsessed with the
purity of his product. He produces “Blue Sky,” which is 99.1 percent pure, and
earns immense global respect (and millions of dollars in drug money). But, in
reality, meth addicts will buy anything they can find, so meth dealers cut the raw
product with fillers that dilute its purity. Regardless of the emphasis on purity,
the process of manufacturing the drug is intricate and technical. The same is true
of many other drugs, which are chemically quite different from the raw plants
that contain their primary ingredients.
Before drugs were big business, doctors and chemists discovered their effects
by trial and error, or by accident. In 1875 the British Medical Association
elected seventy-eight-year-old Sir Robert Christison as its forty-fourth president.
Christison was tall, severe, and eccentric. He had begun practicing medicine fifty
years earlier, just as homicidal Englishmen were learning to poison each other
with arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide. Christison wondered how these and other
toxins affected the human body. Volunteers were hard to come by, so he spent
decades swallowing and regurgitating dangerous poisons himself, documenting
their effects in real time just before he lost consciousness.
One of those toxins was a small green leaf, which numbed Christison’s
mouth, gave him a burst of long-lasting energy, and left him feeling decades
younger than his eighty years. Christison was so invigorated that he decided to
set out for a long walk. Nine hours and fifteen miles later he returned home and
wrote that he was neither hungry nor thirsty. The next morning, he awoke
feeling fit and ready to tackle the new day. Christison had been chewing on the
coca leaf, the plant responsible for its famous stimulant cousin, cocaine.
In Vienna, one thousand miles to the southeast, a young neurologist was also
experimenting with cocaine. Many people remember Sigmund Freud for his
theories of human personality, sexuality, and dreaming, but he was also famous
in his day for promoting cocaine. Chemists had first synthesized the drug three
decades earlier, and Freud read of Christison’s miraculous fifteen-mile stroll
with interest. Freud found that cocaine not only gave him energy, but also
calmed his recurring bouts of depression and indigestion. In one of more than
nine hundred letters to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, Freud wrote:
If it goes well I will write an essay on [cocaine] and I expect it will win
its place in therapeutics by the side of morphium and superior to it . . . I
take very small doses of it regularly against depression and against
indigestion, and with the most brilliant success.
Freud’s life was filled with highs and lows, but the decade that followed this
letter to Martha was particularly turbulent. It began with a high point: the
publication of his essay titled “Über Coca” in 1884. In Freud’s words, “Über
Coca” was “a song of praise to this magical substance.” Freud played every part
in the “Über Coca” drama; he was experimenter, research subject, and animated
writer.
A few minutes after taking cocaine, one experiences a sudden
exhilaration and feeling of lightness. One feels a certain furriness on the
lips and palate, followed by a feeling of warmth in the same areas . . .
The psychic effect of [cocaine] . . . consists of exhilaration and lasting
euphoria, which does not differ in any way from the normal euphoria of a
healthy person.
“Über Coca” also hints at cocaine’s darker side, though Freud seemed more
fascinated than concerned:
During this first trial I experienced a short period of toxic effects . . .
Breathing became slower and deeper and I felt tired and sleepy; I yawned
frequently and felt somewhat dull . . . If one works intensively while
under the influence of coca, after from three to five hours there is a
decline in the feeling of well-being, and a further dose of coca is
necessary in order to ward off fatigue.
Many psychologists have criticized Freud because his most famous theories
are impossible to test (are men who dream of caves really preoccupied with the
womb?), but he championed careful experimentation with cocaine. As his letters
show, Freud discovered that cocaine, like any addictive stimulus, wore off and
its effects weakened over time. The only way to recreate the original high was
with repeated, escalating doses. He took at least a dozen large doses, and
ultimately became addicted. He struggled to think and work without the drug,
and became convinced his best ideas flowered under its influence. In 1895, his
nose became infected and he endured operations to repair his collapsed nostrils.
In one letter to his friend and ear, nose, and throat specialist, Wilhelm Fliess,
Freud described in graphic detail the effects of cocaine. Ironically, the only thing
that soothed his nose was another dose of cocaine. When the pain was
particularly bad, he painted his nostrils with a solution of water and cocaine. A
year later, dejected, he concluded that cocaine was more harmful than helpful. In
1896, twelve years after first encountering cocaine, Freud was forced to stop
using the drug completely.
How could Freud see cocaine’s upside but not its staggering downside? Early
in his infatuation with the drug, he decided it was the answer to morphine
addiction. He described the case of a patient who quit morphine cold turkey and
went into “sudden withdrawal,” wracked by chills and bouts of depression. But
when the man began ingesting cocaine, he recovered completely, functioning
normally with the help of a heavy daily dose of cocaine. Freud’s biggest mistake
was to believe that this effect was permanent:
After ten days he was able to dispense with the coca treatment altogether.
The treatment of morphine addiction with coca does not, therefore, result
merely in the exchange of one kind of addiction for another . . . the use of
coca is only temporary.
Freud was seduced by cocaine in part because he lived during a time when
addiction was presumed to affect people who were weak of mind and body.
Genius and addiction were incompatible, and he (like Robert Christison)
discovered cocaine at the height of his intellectual powers. Freud so deeply
misunderstood the drug that he believed it could replace and eliminate morphine
addiction. He wasn’t the only person to hold this belief. Two decades before
Freud wrote “Über Coca,” a Confederate Army colonel became addicted to
morphine after he was injured during the final battle of the American Civil War.
He, too, believed he could overcome his morphine addiction with a cocainelaced tincture. He was wrong, but his medicine ultimately became one of the
most widely consumed substances on Earth.
—
T
he Civil War ended with a brief but bloody battle on the evening of Easter,
April 16, 1865. The Union and Confederate armies converged on the
Chattahoochee River, near Columbus, Georgia, and fought on horseback near
two bridges that spanned the river. One unfortunate Confederate soldier, John
Pemberton, encountered a wall of Union cavalrymen when he tried to block a
bridge that led into the heart of Columbus. Pemberton brandished a saber, but
before he could use it he was shot. As he reared back in agony, a Union soldier
inflicted a deep slash across Pemberton’s chest and stomach. He slumped down,
near death, but was dragged to safety by a friend.
Pemberton survived, but his saber wound burned for months. Like thousands
of other injured soldiers, he treated his pain with morphine. At first, army
doctors administered small doses spread many hours apart, but Pemberton began
to tolerate the drug. He demanded bigger doses more and more often, and
eventually developed a full-blown addiction. The doctors did their best to wean
him off the drug, but they were undermined at every step—Pemberton had been
a chemist before the war, so his old suppliers stepped in when the army’s
contribution dwindled. His friends became concerned, and Pemberton was
ultimately forced to acknowledge that morphine was doing his body more harm
than good.
Like any good scientist—and like Freud after him—Pemberton
experimented. His goal was a non-addictive replacement for morphine to relieve
chronic pain. By the 1880s, after several false starts, Pemberton found a winner
in Pemberton’s French Wine Coca: a combination of wine, coca leaves, kola
nuts, and an aromatic shrub called damiana. There was no Food and Drug
Administration in the 1880s, so Pemberton was free to wax lyrical (and
ungrammatical) about the tonic’s medical properties, even if he wasn’t quite sure
how it worked. He paid for one newspaper ad in 1885, which read:
French Wine Coca is indorsed by over 20,000 of the most learned and
scientific medical men in the world . . .
. . . Americans are the most nervous people in the world . . . All who
are suffering from any nervous complaints we commend to use the
wonderful and delightful remedy, French Wine Coca, infallible in curing
all who are afflicted with any nerve trouble, dyspepsia, mental and
physical exhaustion, all chronic wasting diseases, gastric irritability,
constipation, sick headache, neuralgia, etc. is quickly cured by the Coca
Wine . . .
. . . Coca is a most wonderful invigorator of the sexual organs and
will cure seminal weakness, impotency, etc., when all other remedies
fail . . .
To the unfortunate who are addicted to the morphine or opiate habit,
or the excessive use of alcohol stimulants, the French Wine Coca has
proven a great blessing, and thousands proclaim it the most remarkable
invigorator that every sustained a wasting and sinking system.
Like Sigmund Freud, Pemberton believed that a combination of caffeine and
coca leaves would conquer his morphine addiction without introducing a new
one in its place. When the local government introduced prohibition laws in 1886,
Pemberton removed the wine from his medicine, rechristening it Coca-Cola.
The story splits in two here. For the product, Coca-Cola, the sky was the
limit. Coca-Cola went from strength to strength, sold first to business tycoon Asa
Candler, and then to marketing geniuses Ernest Woodruff and W. C. Bradley.
Woodruff and Bradley devised the brilliant idea of selling Coke in six-packs, to
be carried more easily between the store and home, and both became
immeasurably rich. For the man, John Pemberton, the opposite was true. CocaCola turned out not to be a viable replacement for morphine, and his addiction
deepened. Instead of replacing morphine, cocaine compounded the problem,
Pemberton’s health continued to decline, and in 1888, he died penniless.
It’s easy to look back at how little Freud and Pemberton understood of
cocaine with a sense of superiority. We teach our children that cocaine is
dangerous, and it’s hard to believe that experts considered the drug a panacea
only a century ago. But perhaps our sense of superiority is misplaced. Just as
cocaine charmed Freud and Pemberton, today we’re enamored of technology.
We’re willing to overlook its costs for its many gleaming benefits: for ondemand entertainment portals, car services, and cleaning companies; Facebook
and Twitter; Instagram and Snapchat; Reddit and Imgur; Buzzfeed and
Mashable; Gawker and Gizmodo; online gambling sites, Internet video
platforms, and streaming music hubs; hundred-hour work weeks, power naps,
and four-minute gym workouts; and the rise of a new breed of obsessions,
compulsions, and addictions that barely existed during the twentieth century.
And then there’s the social world of the modern teen.
—
I
n 2013, a psychologist named Catherine Steiner-Adair explained that many
American children first encounter the digital world when they notice that their
parents are “missing in action.” “My mom is almost always on the iPad at
dinner,” a seven-year-old named Colin told Steiner-Adair. “She’s always ‘just
checking.’” Penny, also seven, said, “I always keep on asking her let’s play let’s
play and she’s always texting on her phone.” At thirteen, Angela wished her
parents understood “that technology isn’t the whole world . . . it’s annoying
because it’s like you also have a family! How about we just spend some time
together, and they’re like, ‘Wait, I just want to check something on my phone. I
need to call work and see what’s going on.’ Parents with younger kids do even
more damage when they constantly check their phones and tablets. Using headmounted cameras, researchers have shown that infants instinctively follow their
parents’ eyes. Distracted parents cultivate distracted children, because parents
who can’t focus teach their children the same attentional patterns. According to
the paper’s lead researcher, “The ability of children to sustain attention is known
as a strong indicator for later success in areas such as language acquisition,
problem-solving, and other key cognitive development milestones. Caregivers
who appear distracted or whose eyes wander a lot while their children play
appear to negatively impact infants’ burgeoning attention spans during a key
stage of development.”
Kids aren’t born craving tech, but they come to see it as indispensable. By
the time they enter middle school, their social lives migrate from the real world
to the digital world. All day, every day, they share hundreds of millions of
photos on Instagram and billions of text messages. They don’t have the option of
taking a break, because this is where they come for validation and friendship.
Online interactions aren’t just different from real-world interactions; they’re
measurably worse. Humans learn empathy and understanding by watching how
their actions affect other people. Empathy can’t flourish without immediate
feedback, and it’s a very slow-developing skill. One analysis of seventy-two
studies found that empathy has declined among college students between 1979
and 2009. They’re less likely to take the perspective of other people, and show
less concern for others. The problem is bad among boys, but it’s worse among
girls. According to one study, one in three teenage girls say that people their age
are mostly unkind to one another on social network sites. That’s true for one in
eleven boys aged twelve to thirteen, and one in six boys aged fourteen to
seventeen.
Many teens refuse to communicate on the phone or face-to-face, and they
conduct their fights by text. “It’s too awkward in person,” one girl told SteinerAdair. “I was just in a fight with someone and I was texting them, and I asked,
‘Can I call you, or can we video-chat?’ and they were like, ‘No.’” Another girl
said, “You can think it through more and plan out what you want to say, and you
don’t have to deal with their face or see their reaction.” That’s obviously a
terrible way to learn to communicate, because it discourages directness. As
Steiner-Adair said, “Texting is the worst possible training ground for anyone
aspiring to a mature, loving, sensitive relationship.” Meanwhile, teens are locked
into this medium. They either latch onto the online world, or they choose not to
“spend time” with their friends.
Like Steiner-Adair, journalist Nancy Jo Sales interviewed girls aged between
thirteen and nineteen to understand how they interacted with social media. For
two and a half years she traveled around the United States, visiting ten states and
speaking to hundreds of girls. She, too, concluded that they were enmeshed in
the online world, where they learned and encountered cruelty, oversexualization,
and social turmoil. Sometimes social media was just another way to
communicate—but for many of the girls, it was a direct route to heartache. As
addictive contexts go, this was a perfect storm: almost every teenage girl was
using one or more social media platforms, so they were forced to choose
between social isolation and compulsive overuse. No wonder so many of them
spent hours texting and uploading Instagram posts every day after school; by all
accounts, that was the rational thing to do. Echoing Sales’ account, Jessica
Contrera wrote a piece called “13, Right Now” for the Washington Post.
Contrera chronicled several days in the life of a thirteen-year-old named
Katherine Pommerening, a regular eighth grader who lumbered beneath the
weight of so many “likes and lols.” The saddest quote from Pommerening
herself comes near the end of the article: “I don’t feel like a child anymore,”
Katherine says. “I’m not doing anything childish. At the end of sixth grade”—
when all her friends got phones and downloaded Snapchat, Instagram, and
Twitter—“I just stopped doing everything I normally did. Playing games at
recess, playing with toys, all of it, done.”
Boys spend less time engaged in damaging online interactions, but many of
them are hooked on games instead. The problem is so visible that some game
developers are pulling their games from the market. They’ve begun to feel
remorseful—not because their games feature sex or violence, but because
they’re devilishly addictive. With just the right combination of anticipation and
feedback, we’re encouraged to play for hours, days, weeks, months, and years at
a time. In May 2013, a reclusive Vietnamese video game developer named Dong
Nguyen released a game called Flappy Bird. The simple smartphone game asked
players to guide a flying bird through obstacles by repeatedly tapping their
phone screens. For a while, most gamers ignored Flappy Bird, and reviewers
condemned the game because it was too difficult and seemed too similar to
Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. For eight months Flappy Bird languished at the
bottom of the app download charts.
But Nguyen’s fortune changed in January 2014. Flappy Bird attracted
thousands of downloads overnight, and by the end of the month, the game was
the most downloaded free app at Apple’s online store. At the game’s peak,
Nguyen’s design studio was earning $50,000 a day from ad revenue alone.
For a small-time game designer, this was the Holy Grail. Nguyen should
have been ecstatic, but he was torn. Dozens of reviewers and fans complained
that they were hopelessly addicted to Flappy Bird. According to Jasoom 79 on
the Apple store website, “It ruined my life . . . its side effects are worse than
cocaine/meth.” Walter19230 titled his review “The Apocalypse,” and began
“My life is over.” Mxndlsnsk warned prospective gamers not to download the
game: “Flappy Bird will be the death of me. Let me start by saying DO NOT
download Flappy Bird . . . People warned me, but I didn’t care . . . I don’t sleep,
I don’t eat. I’m losing friends.”
Even if the reviews were exaggerated, the game seemed to be doing more
harm than good. Hundreds of gamers made Nguyen sound like a drug dealer
when they compared his product to meth and cocaine. What began as an
idealistic labor of love appeared to be corrupting lives, and Nguyen’s conscience
overshadowed his success. On February 8, 2014, he tweeted:
I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy
Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.
Some Twitter users believed Nguyen was responding to intellectual property
claims, but he quickly dismissed that assumption:
It is not anything related to legal issues. I just cannot keep it anymore.
The game disappeared on cue and Nguyen evaded the limelight. Hundreds of
Flappy Bird imitations popped up online, but Nguyen was already focused on his
next project—a more complex game that was specifically designed not to be
addictive.
Flappy Bird was addictive in part because everything about the game moved
fast: the finger taps, the time between games, the onslaught of new obstacles.
The world beyond Flappy Bird also moves faster than it used to. Sluggishness is
the enemy of addiction, because people respond more sharply to rapid links
between action and outcome. Very little about our world today—from
technology to transport to commerce—happens slowly, and so our brains
respond more feverishly.
A
—
ddiction is today better understood than in the nineteenth century, but it has
also morphed and changed over time. Chemists have concocted
dangerously addictive substances, and the entrepreneurs who design experiences
have concocted similarly addictive behaviors. This evolution has only
accelerated over the past two or three decades, and shows no signs of slowing.
Just recently a doctor identified the first Google Glass addict—an enlisted naval
officer who developed withdrawal symptoms when he tried to wean himself off
the gadget. He’d been using it for eighteen hours a day, and he began to
experience his dreams as though he were looking through the device. He’d
managed to overcome alcohol addiction, he told doctors, but this was much
worse. At night, when he relaxed, his right index finger would repeatedly float
up to the side of his face. It was searching for the Glass power button, which was
no longer there.
2.
The Addict in All of Us
war films ignore the boredom that sets in between bouts of action. In
M ost
Vietnam, thousands of American G.I.s spent weeks, months, or even years
just waiting. Some waited for instructions from their superiors, others for the
action to arrive. Hugh Penn, a Vietnam vet, recalled that G.I.s passed the time by
playing touch football and drinking beer at $1.85 per case. But boredom is the
natural enemy of good behavior, and not everyone took to wholesome, allAmerican pastimes.
Vietnam lies just outside a region of Southeast Asia known as the Golden
Triangle. This region encompasses Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand, and was
responsible for most of the world’s heroin supply during the Vietnam War.
Heroin comes in different grades, and most Golden Triangle labs at the time
were producing a chunky, low-grade product known as no. 3 heroin. In 1971,
that all changed. The labs invited a series of master chemists from Hong Kong
who had perfected a dangerous process known as ether precipitation. They
started turning out no. 4 heroin, which was up to 99 percent pure. As the price of
heroin rose from $1,240 to $1,780 per kilo, it began to find its way to South
Vietnam, where bored G.I.s were just waiting to be entertained.
Suddenly, no. 4 heroin was everywhere. Teenage girls sold vials from
roadside stands along the highway between Saigon and the Long Binh U.S. army
base. In Saigon, street merchants crammed sample vials into the pockets of
passing G.I.s, hoping they would return later for a second dose. The maids who
cleaned the army barracks sold vials as they worked. In interviews, 85 percent of
the returning G.I.s said they had been offered heroin. One soldier was offered
heroin as he disembarked from the plane that brought him to Vietnam. The
salesman, a heroin-addled soldier returning home from the war, asked only for a
sample of urine so he could convince the U.S. authorities that he was clean.
Few of these soldiers had been within a mile of heroin before joining the
army. They arrived healthy and determined to fight, but now they were
developing addictions to some of the strongest stuff on the planet. By the war’s
end, 35 percent of the enlisted men said they had tried heroin, and 19 percent
said they were addicted. The heroin was so pure that 54 percent of all users
became addicted—many more than the 5–10 percent of amphetamine and
barbiturate users who developed addictions in Vietnam.
Word of the epidemic filtered back to Washington, where government
bureaucrats were forced to act. In early 1971, President Richard Nixon sent two
U.S. congressmen to Vietnam to gauge the epidemic’s severity. The
congressmen, Republican Robert Steele and Democrat Morgan Murphy, rarely
saw eye to eye, but they agreed it was a catastrophe. They discovered that ninety
enlisted men had died from heroin overdoses in 1970, and expected the numbers
to rise by the close of 1971. Both men were approached by heroin vendors
during their short stay in Saigon, and they were convinced the drug would find
its way back to the United States. “The Vietnam War is truly coming home to
haunt us,” Steele and Morgan said in a report. “The first wave of heroin is
already on its way to our children in high school.” The New York Times printed
an enlarged photo of Steele with a vial of heroin in his hand to show how easy it
was for G.I.s to access the drug. A Times editorial piece argued for the
withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam “to save the country from a
debilitating drug epidemic.”
At a press conference on June 17, 1971, President Nixon announced a war on
drugs. He looked into the cameras with grave determination, and said, “Public
enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.”
N
—
ixon and his aides were worried, not just because the soldiers were
addicted to heroin in Vietnam, but about what would happen when they
returned home. How do you deal with a sudden influx of 100,000 heroin
addicts? The problem was all the worse because heroin was the most insidious
drug on the market.
When British researchers assessed the harm of various drugs, heroin was the
worst by a big margin. On three scales measuring the likelihood that a drug
would inflict physical harm, induce addiction, and cause social harm, heroin
scored the highest rating—three out of three. It was by far the most dangerous
and addictive drug in the world.
It was hard enough to wean heroin addicts off the drug, but 95 percent
relapsed at least once even after they’d detoxed. Few ever completely kicked the
habit. Nixon was right to worry. He put together a team of experts who spent
every waking hour planning for the onslaught of 100,000 new rehab patients.
Nixon’s team decided that the addicted G.I.s should stay in Vietnam until they
were clean.
The government settled on a two-pronged attack, bolstering resources in
Vietnam and at home. In Vietnam, Major General John Cushman was charged
with cracking down on heroin use, which was so widespread that Cushman
could see the problem by walking through camp. Doctors confirmed that
hundreds if not thousands of men were addicted to the drug. Shocked by the
extent of the problem, Cushman pursued a crackdown. At 5:30 one morning, he
surprised his troops by confining them to base for twenty-four hours. Everyone
was searched, and emergency medical clinics were set up to treat users as they
detoxed. Heroin was so hard to come by that desperate users were forced to pay
forty dollars per vial—up from three dollars per vial just a day earlier. At first
Cushman seemed to have the upper hand, as three hundred men turned
themselves in for treatment. But days later, as soon as he relaxed the travel ban,
usage rates spiked again. Within a week heroin was selling for four dollars per
vial, and more than half of the men who tried to detox were back on the drug.
At home, the government appointed a researcher named Lee Robins to
monitor the progress of returning soldiers. Robins was a professor of psychiatry
and sociology at Washington University, in St. Louis, where she studied the root
causes of psychiatric epidemics. Robins was known for her uncanny ability to
ask the right interview questions at just the right time. People trusted her, and
she seemed to uncover sensitive information that interview subjects usually
preferred not to share. The government decided that Robins was the perfect
person to interview and track the recovery of thousands of addicted G.I.s as they
returned home.
For Robins this was an extraordinary opportunity. “[Studying] heroin use in a
highly exposed normal population was unique,” she reflected in 2010, “because
there is nowhere else in the world where heroin is commonly used.”
In the United States itself, heroin use is so rare that [a national survey] of
2,400 adults obtained only about 12 people who had used heroin in the
last year. Because heroin users are scarce both worldwide and in the
United States, most of our information about heroin comes from treated
criminal samples.
But when Robins began following the returning vets, she was confused.
What she found made no sense at all.
N
—
ormally just 5 percent of all heroin addicts stay clean, but Robins found
that only 5 percent of the recovering G.I.s relapsed. Somehow, 95 percent
managed to stay clean. The public, waiting for a calamity after Nixon’s highprofile press conference, was naturally convinced that Robins was hiding the
truth. Robins spent years defending the study. She wrote papers with headings
like “Why the study was a technical success,” and “The study’s assets.” Her
detractors asked her, over and over, how she could be sure her results were
accurate, and, if they were accurate, why so few of the G.I.s used the drug after
they had returned home. It’s easy to understand their skepticism. She had been
appointed by a beleaguered president who declared a war on drugs, and Robins’
report suggested he was gaining the upper hand. Even if she had been above
politics, her results were simply too good to be true. In the world of public
health, victories take the form of incremental reductions—a 3 percent drop here
or a 5 percent drop there. A 90 percent drop in relapse rates was outlandish. But
Robins had done everything right. Her experiment was sound and the results
were real. The problem was explaining why only 5 percent of her G.I. subjects
had relapsed.
The answer, it turned out, had been uncovered more than a decade earlier in a
U.S. neuroscience lab some eight thousand miles away.
G
—
reat scientists make their discoveries using two distinct approaches:
tinkering and revolutionizing. Tinkering slowly wears down a problem,
like water erodes rock, whereas in revolutions, a great thinker sees what no one
else can. If the engineer Peter Milner was a tinkerer, the psychologist James
Olds was a revolutionary. Together they made a superb team. In the early 1950s,
in a small basement lab filled with caged rats and electrical equipment at
Montreal’s McGill University, Olds and Milner ran one of the most famous
addiction experiments of all time. What made the experiment so remarkable was
that it wasn’t actually designed to reshape our understanding of addiction.
In fact, it might have gone unnoticed if Olds had done his job properly.
Olds and Milner met at Montreal’s McGill University in the early 1950s. In
many ways they were opposites. Milner’s biggest strength was his technical
know-how. He knew all there was to know about rat brains and electrical
currents. Olds, on the other hand, lacked experience but overflowed with big
ideas. Young researchers floated in and out of Olds’ lab, drawn to his flair and
talent for spotting the next big thing. Bob Wurtz, Olds’ first graduate student in
the late 1950s, knew Olds and Milner well. According to Wurtz, “Olds didn’t
know the front of the rat from the back of the rat, and Milner’s first job was to
educate Olds on rat physiology.” But what Olds lacked in technical prowess, he
more than made up for with brio and vision. “Jim was a very aggressive
scientist,” says Wurtz. “He believed in serendipity—if you see something
interesting, you drop everything else. Whenever he and Milner stumbled on
something newsworthy, Jim would deal with the media while Milner continued
working in the lab.”
Gary Aston-Jones, who also studied with Olds, remembered him the same
way. “Olds was focused on big questions. He was always more conceptually
driven than technically driven. When we were trying to understand how a fruit
fly could learn about the world, Olds dropped to his hands and knees, crawled
around on the floor, and pretended to be a fly.” Milner would never have
approached the problem that way. Aryeh Routtenberg, a third student who
worked with Olds, explained that “Milner was sort of like the other face of Olds.
He was quiet, humble, and self-effacing, while Olds would proclaim ‘we’ve
made a big discovery!’”
For decades, experts had assumed that drug addicts—laudanum lushes,
poppy tea drinkers, and opiate addicts—were predisposed to the condition,
somehow wired incorrectly. Olds and Milner were some of the first researchers
to turn that idea on its head—to suggest that, perhaps, under the right
circumstances, we could all become addicts.
T
—
heir biggest discovery began modestly. Olds and Milner were trying to
show that rats would run to the far end of their cages whenever an electric
current zapped their tiny brains. The researchers implanted a small probe, which
delivered a burst of electric current to each rat’s brain when the rat pressed a
metal bar. To their surprise, instead of retreating, Rat No. 34 stubbornly
scampered across his cage and pressed the bar over and over again. Rather than
fearing the shocks as many other rats had done earlier, this rat hunted them
down. The experimenters looked on as Rat No. 34 pushed the bar more than
seven thousand times in twelve hours: once every five seconds without rest. Like
an ultramarathon runner who deliriously refuses to stop for sustenance, the rat
ignored a small trough of water and a tray of pellets. Sadly, he had eyes only for
the bar. Twelve hours after the experiment began, Rat No. 34 was dead from
exhaustion.
At first, Olds and Milner were confused. If every other rat avoided the
shocks, why would Rat No. 34 do the opposite? Perhaps there was something
wrong with his brain. Milner was ready to try the experiment with a different rat
when Olds made a bold suggestion. Olds had once crawled around to imagine
life as a fruit fly, and now he tried his hand at reading the mind of a rat.
Considering Rat No. 34’s behavior carefully, he became convinced that the rat
was enjoying the shocks. It wasn’t that he was seeking out pain, but rather that
the shocks felt good. “The genius of Jim Olds was that he was open-minded
enough and crazy enough to think that the animal liked being shocked,” AstonJones said. “At the time, no one imagined that electrical stimulation in the brain
could be pleasurable, but Olds was crazy enough to think the animal was having
a good time.”
So Olds investigated. He removed the probe from the rat’s brain and noticed
that it was bent. “Olds had been aiming for the mid-brain, but the probe bent into
the rat’s septum,” says Aston-Jones. A fraction of an inch made all the
difference between delight and discomfort. Olds took to calling this area of the
brain the “pleasure center,” a simplistic name that nonetheless captures the
euphoria that rats—and dogs, goats, monkeys, and even people—feel when the
area is stimulated. Some years later, when neuroscientist Robert Heath inserted
an electrode into a depressed woman’s pleasure center, she began to giggle. He
asked why she was laughing, and though she couldn’t offer an explanation, she
told him that she felt happy for the first time in as long as she could remember.
As soon as Heath removed the probe, the patient’s smile disappeared. She was
depressed again—and worse, she now knew what it felt like to be happy. She
wanted more than anything for the probe to remain implanted, delivering regular
shocks like a small hedonic pacemaker. Like Olds and Milner before him, Heath
had shown how addictive euphoria could be.
A
—
fter the demise of Rat No. 34, Olds and Milner found the same addictive
behavior when they stimulated the pleasure center of other rats. Those rats,
too, ignored food and water while they pushed the little bar over and over again.
Aryeh Routtenberg worked on some of these follow-up experiments, and he
recalls that the rats behaved like addicts. The bar-pushing rats were no different
from rats that had addictive substances injected directly into their brains. “We
threw all sorts of feel-good drugs at the animals—amphetamines,
chlorpromazine, monoamine oxidase inhibitors—and they behaved just like the
self-stimulating rats.” Routtenberg remembers an experiment that showed the
power of the pleasure center:
One of the nice things about being a professor is that you can study
whatever you like. I wanted to see what would happen if I made the barpressing animals drunk. I injected the alcoholic equivalent of a threemartini lunch into several rats, who just fell over. We lifted them up—as
you’d drag a drunkard from the bar—and we led them over to the small
metal bar. We laid them down so their heads brushed against the bar,
which delivered a shock to their brains. In no time, these rats started
pressing the bar over and over again. They were catatonic just a minute
ago, but now they looked absolutely normal! After ten or fifteen minutes,
we disabled the shocks, and the rats fell back into a stupor.
That wasn’t the only reason why the researchers saw the rats as tiny addicts.
They showed the same restlessness that human drug addicts show between hits.
When the researchers prevented the rats from shocking themselves more than
once every few minutes, the rats took to drinking lots of water to pass the time.
“The minute the reward stopped, they’d start drinking like crazy,” recalls
Routtenberg. “I’d come back between experimental sessions and they were
sitting there, completely bloated! It’s like they were doing something—anything
—to pass the time. The reward was so great that they would need to find a way
to pass the time until the next reward was available.”
Word of the experiments got out, and the researchers began to hear rumors.
“We heard that the military was training goats,” Bob Wurtz recalls. “They would
guide the goats to bring ammunition to soldiers, or even to carry bombs to the
enemy.” The soldiers could encourage the goats to walk in a specific direction
by shocking or withholding shocks from the pleasure center. The research
influenced how experts like Wurtz, Aston-Jones, and Routtenberg understood
addiction. Olds and Milner originally believed that Rat No. 34 was predisposed
to be an addict. They assumed that a problem with his internal wiring had driven
him to place electric stimulation above all else—even food, water, and
ultimately life. But at Olds’ urging, they realized that there was nothing wrong
with Rat No. 34. He wasn’t an addict by nature. He was just an unfortunate rat
that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
T
—
his is one of the great lessons from Olds and Milner’s experiment. Rat No.
34 behaved like an incurable addict but that didn’t mean there was
something wrong with his brain. Like the Vietnam G.I.s, he was a victim of
circumstance. He was simply responding as any rat would have done when a
probe delivered shocks to his pleasure center.
Routtenberg wondered if this might tell us something about addiction in
humans. But perhaps anyone could descend into oblivion like Rat No. 34. “We
started to think of addiction as a form of learning. You can think of addiction as
part of memory,” says Routtenberg. Addicts had simply learned to link a
particular behavior with an appealing outcome. For Rat No. 34, this was
stimulation of his pleasure center; for a heroin addict, the flush of pleasure from
a fresh hit.
To measure the link between addiction and memory, Routtenberg visited the
local pet store and bought a squirrel monkey named Cleopatra. Ethics boards
weren’t as strict as they are now. “I had my own lab room, so I could do
whatever I wanted. I operated on her and put electrodes in the reward systems of
her brain. This had never been done before with a monkey.” Routtenberg placed
Cleopatra in a cage in front of two metal bars. The first sent an electrical current
to her pleasure center, and the second released a fresh supply of food. At first
Cleopatra pushed the bars randomly, but very quickly she began to behave like
Rat No. 34, ignoring the food bar and pressing the electric shock bar over and
over again. Olds saw what Routtenberg had done, and he was delighted. “He
came down to the lab with a friend, who was a big-time researcher at Johns
Hopkins, and showed him what Cleopatra was doing,” Routtenberg says. “It was
one of the proudest days of my life.” Later, Routtenberg removed Cleopatra
from the cage for hours or even days. Outside the cage, she detoxed, becoming
the same healthy monkey she had been when she first arrived at the lab. But as
soon as Routtenberg returned her to the cage, she would frantically begin
pressing the bar again. Even when the bar was removed from the cage, she
would stand where it had once been. As Routtenberg guessed, Cleopatra’s
addiction had left a powerful imprint in her long-term memory.
J
—
im Olds’ lab held the solution to Lee Robins’ conundrum. The reason why
her Vietnam vets escaped their heroin addictions was because they had
escaped the circumstance that ensnared them. That was the case for Cleopatra,
Aryeh Routtenberg’s squirrel monkey, who was every bit the addict inside her
cage. She pounded the metal bar that delivered shocks to her pleasure center
over and over again. She ignored her food and water. This cage was to Cleopatra
what Vietnam was to the bored G.I.s who developed a taste for heroin. Cleopatra
was healthy until she joined the lab. When Routtenberg eventually removed her
from the cage, she became healthy again. But when she sat inside her cage, the
addiction returned with a vengeance.
Cleopatra returned to her cage, but few of the G.I.s ever returned to Vietnam.
They arrived home to a completely different life. There was no trace of the
jungle; the steamy summers in Saigon; the rattle of gunfire, or the chop of
helicopter blades. Instead, they went grocery shopping, they returned to work,
they endured the monotony of suburbia, and enjoyed the pleasures of homecooked meals. Both Cleopatra and the soldiers showed that Routtenberg was
right: addiction embeds itself in memory. For Cleopatra, the cage was a trigger.
It transported her back to the time when she had been an addict, and she couldn’t
help falling back on old habits. The lucky Vietnam vets never confronted those
memories, because once they left Vietnam they escaped the cues that went along
with the act of shooting up.
This is why most heroin users struggle to stay clean. Like Cleopatra, they
return to the scene of the crime over and over again. They see friends who
remind them of a time when they were addicts; they live in the same homes; they
walk through the same neighborhoods. Nothing changes once they’re clean,
except the fact that instead of giving in to the addiction, they’re resisting it every
day. This is why the temptation is so great. What else are they supposed to do
when every sight, smell, and sound rekindles the moment of bliss that follows a
hit?
I
—
saac Vaisberg, a former gaming addict, knows the dangers of returning to the
scene of the crime. Nothing marks Isaac as a natural candidate for addiction.
He was born in Venezuela in 1992 to a wonderfully supportive mom and an
overworked but attentive dad. When Isaac was a boy, his parents divorced and
he moved to Miami with his mom. His dad remained in Venezuela, but the two
talked often, and Isaac visited when he wasn’t in school. His grades were stellar,
rarely dropping below an A. At the end of his junior year of high school, he
scored 2200 out of a possible 2400 on the SATs, which placed him in the top 1
percent of all students in the United States. He was admitted to Worcester
Academy, one of the country’s most competitive boarding schools, not too far
from Boston, and later to American University in Washington, D.C. Isaac wasn’t
just a scholar—he was also an athlete. Worcester granted him a football
scholarship, and he arrived in great physical shape, ready to play as a first-string
linebacker.
Unfortunately, that’s only half the story. Isaac was lonely. “My parents got
divorced when I was very young, and I ended up ping-ponging between the
United States and Venezuela. Because of that ping-ponging, I was adept at
forming new relationships, but not very good at forming deep relationships.”
Instead, he found friends online.
When Isaac was fourteen, he started playing World of Warcraft. WoW is
addictive for a number of reasons, but Isaac found the game’s social dimension
irresistible. Like many players, he joined a guild, a small band of players who
share resources and chat regularly in guild-specific chat rooms. His guild-mates
became his closest friends, and their friendship ultimately came to stand in for
the meaningful relationships he lacked in the offline world.
Isaac’s first dangerous binge began during his junior year in high school. “I
had picked up and dropped World of Warcraft many times, but this time it
became my sole means of socializing and my sole release. I got a small
dopamine hit every night, and it helped me overcome my anxieties.” He stopped
sleeping, his grades plummeted, and he became physically sick when his mother
insisted he go to school. “I would flip out and have panic attacks. Getting in the
car in the morning I’d feel nauseated. The second I knew I didn’t have to go to
school, these symptoms went away.” Isaac ultimately recovered after this first
binge, and by the end of that school year he was doing so well that he aced his
SATs.
Isaac’s second binge began a couple of months into his time at Worcester
Academy. Left in his dorm room without supervision, he rejoined his old guild
and rekindled the online friendships he’d formed the year before. Soon it became
an obsession again. “When I arrived at Worcester Academy, I weighed about
one-ninety-five. I was fit and playing football. By the end of the first semester, I
weighed about two-thirty-five. I lost a significant amount of hair on my head,
quit the football team, and had Cs across the board.” Isaac was resilient, though.
He managed to complete his senior year and gain acceptance to American
University. At this point he still believed his binges were flukes. He wasn’t
concerned that his addiction might follow him to college.
His first semester at American was a success—he aced his classes and
remained fit and healthy. In his second semester, though, he became stressed. He
decided to “play just a bit” of WoW as a release, and ultimately failed his second
semester classes. Isaac’s transcript was a roller coaster of As and Fs, and his
mom was so worried that she arrived unannounced and presented him with a
pamphlet for the reSTART addiction recovery center, located just outside
Seattle. He agreed to enroll in an inpatient program, but only after logging in to
his WoW account to tell his guild-mates that he’d be offline for a while.
reSTART is the world’s first gaming and Internet addiction treatment center.
Its founders recognize that Internet use differs from substance addiction, because
it’s almost impossible to return to society without using the Internet. You can
hold a job, pay your bills, and communicate without using drugs and alcohol, but
not without using the Internet. Echoing the green movement, the center therefore
aims to teach patients how to use the Internet “sustainably,” rather than
encouraging them to avoid it altogether.
Isaac began his six-week program with enthusiasm, making friends, painting,
hiking the spectacular trails around the center, and regaining his strength at its
gym. He formed close bonds with some of the mentors, who told him that WoW
had given him an illusion of control over his life. Outside the game his world
had continued to crumble, but that seemed to matter less and less as he
conquered one WoW quest after another. Despite making good progress, at
times he felt frustrated. Though reSTART had helped, Isaac saw his time there
as a roadblock that distracted him from finishing college and moving on to a
healthier, self-sufficient phase of his life. He couldn’t really be “better” until he
settled back into the real world. Though he went as far as buying an airline ticket
to D.C. online, he ultimately stayed for the full six weeks.
Then Isaac made his biggest mistake. “I got through the rest of the program,
my chest puffed up, and I was a little bit more confident in what I was doing.
But when it came time to present my life balance plan at the end of the program,
the one thing everybody criticized was my decision to go back to D.C.” Isaac
describes this using the language you’d expect from a veteran gamer: “I just felt
like I couldn’t leave something unconquered. I couldn’t leave American
University without my degree—it just wasn’t gonna happen. Against medical
advice I decided to go back east.”
Isaac’s experience differs from the lives of Lee Robins’ Vietnam vets.
Instead of escaping the context of his addiction forever, Isaac returned to D.C.
For two or three months, things went well. He got a job, he started working as a
math tutor and made good money, and his guidance counselor admitted him
back into American University. Things were looking up—until they weren’t.
Isaac told me that the most dangerous time for an addict is the first moment
when things are going so well that you believe you’ve left the addiction behind
forever. “You’re convinced that you’re fixed, so you can go back to doing what
you were doing before. I let my guard down, and a buddy of mine sent me a text
message that said, ‘Hey, you wanna play with us a little bit?’ And I went, ‘Hey,
sure!’”
That was Thursday, February 21, 2013. Isaac is sure of the date, because it
left an indelible imprint in his memory. Two days later he was scheduled to tutor
a kid who had an algebra exam, but he missed the appointment. He didn’t go to
class on Monday either, and then he spent five weeks alone in his apartment. He
didn’t leave once and he didn’t shower. In exchange for a small tip, his doorman
brought food he ordered by phone to his room. His place began to smell and
empty containers towered around his desk. He played twenty hours a day and
collapsed, numb, for a few hours of sleep before returning to the game when he
awoke. He completed one mission after another, chatted with his guild-mates for
days, and lost touch with the outside world. Five weeks passed quickly. He
missed one hundred and forty-two phone calls (another number he says he can’t
forget), but, for some reason that escapes him even now, he decided to answer
the one hundred and forty-third call. It was his mother, and she told him that she
was visiting in two days.
After one final binge, he decided to clean his apartment and take a shower.
This was his …