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July 2010  
  
What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're
all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all
the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process
that created them is accelerating.  
  
We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases:
technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of
what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider
technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more
efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we
don't want to want — when it transforms opium into heroin — it seems bad. But
it's the same process at work.   
  
No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of
things we like will be transformed into things we like too much.   
  
As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest
is the colloquial sense of "addictive." That usage has become increasingly
common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number
of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and
meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and
innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for
the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and
solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become
much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.  
  
The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of
technological progress that produced these things are subject to different
laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive
in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.  
  
The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply
they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in
a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but
you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to
be careful about.  
  
Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more
addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven
ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what
everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the
normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.  
  
These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live
well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is
only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of
thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living
badly.  
  
Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen
that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the
way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population.
Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays
everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither
of my parents smoked. You had to for guests.  
  
As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last
20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally
normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity
shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office
buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the
legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.  
  
It took a while though—on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which
social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which
technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable
to rely on customs to protect us.  Unless we want to be canaries in the
coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson
to future generations—we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and
how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable
strategy) to suspect everything new.  
  
In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just about new
things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's what
bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it
became addictive while I was using it.   
  
Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to
figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an
iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me
out into the world.  My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think
running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time.
Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on
the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.  
  
Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to
solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can't
plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. But if I'm right about the
acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it
will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll
increasingly be defined by what we say no to.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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