2025-08-05 00:00 UTC
By the time you finish reading this article, someone in the United States will have died due to an addiction.
It’s widely known that addiction ends and ruins lives. Its effects on almost every aspect of life are profound, but we still haven’t fully addressed its root cause. The paradigm that most often stands out in the aftermath of the United States’ War on Drugs is the disease model: addiction is a disease that needs to be treated. This has given way to a greater tolerance for addictive behavior with the rise of open air drug markets in many major American cities. Additionally, we’ve seen a rise in harm reduction education and a treatment industry worth billions of dollars.
To understand the root cause of addiction, we must come to the understanding that addiction itself is not a disease—it’s an engineered feature of an oppressive society.
In many aspects, addiction is something that is widely recognized and even celebrated. Many industries have it baked into their business models; their key revenue generators are a small section of their market that turn addicts into customers that will fund them perpetually. More industries are seeing the long-term profitability of addiction-based models. Every year, more and more aspects of the human experience are becoming vessels for addictive behavior. To begin, let’s discuss the most obvious offenders.
Back in 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the federal law that forbid states to legalize sports betting and ever since, the floodgates for legalized gambling have opened. Nowadays, advertisements for sports betting sites and applications are unavoidable when watching any sporting event. Sports betting companies have racked up billions of dollars within just a few short years of legalization, and many individuals have developed fierce gambling addictions as a result. Dual sovereignty has given many state governments the opportunity to create yet another revenue stream for their administrations—held on the vulnerabilities of its own constituents.
These vulnerabilities are far from insignificant. Since 2018, search queries such as “am I addicted to gambling” have gone up twenty-three percent (remember to put in link to study). Clearly, the people governed by their states have issues with legalized sports betting, but their governments seem to welcome the free short-term revenue boost.
Addiction is built-in to every aspect of the sports betting experience and it’s not only accepted, but lauded by every player in the sports industry. Sports betting applications wear a mask of financial literacy, telling customers that they aren’t gambling, but investing. With that false sense of security, customers are roped into manipulative nudging from the applications with “risk-free” betting promos to get them hooked and subtle yet deliberate push notifications to keep them playing. Moreover, the customers are constantly bombarded with dopamine spikes from wins and near-wins, urged to bet live on every play to keep their fingers on the pulse. Social proof is embedded into this system to keep customers from seeing the problem; celebrity endorsements and advertising build further upon the customers’ false sense of trust. Their friends push the product to them further, inducing primal fears of missing out and not belonging to their social groups.
Narratives for sports betting switched from conserving the integrity of the game to investing in partnership opportunities with predatory forces. The days of old PSAs urging to protect the public are dead and gone. In their place stand ad blitzes that urge patrons to get in on the action. Unfortunately, many that do face themselves with ruined finances; college and emergency funds evaporate and families are torn to pieces. All the while, profits from sports betting companies go up exponentially year after year with no signs of stopping.
Alcohol hardly needs an introduction. It is one of the world’s oldest and most potent vices. The litany of alcohol-related deaths has been spoken of ad nauseam, so there’s no need for me to repeat any of those narratives. Despite this, people still seem to put alcohol on a pedestal; most bars and parties are nothing without it. Drinking alcohol isn’t something to be feared, but celebrated. In fact, no celebration is truly celebratory without the presence of alcohol in the eyes of many. Alcohol doesn’t just lubricate celebration—it soothes despair. That’s why it sells best where hope is scarce.
This paradigm on alcohol is not accidental; it’s calculated. Brewers and distillers alike spend billions on marketing and advertising to perpetuate the message of alcohol as something that is best enjoyed responsibly. The only problem is that this responsibility has no metrics when it’s coming from alcohol companies. Governments don’t seem to mind either since every bottle sold is a chunk of change put in their pockets. There is no exact way to drink alcohol responsibly, and that’s the entire point. The idea of responsible alcohol usage is placed onto the consumer instead of the distributor so that the addiction model can reign under the guise of a consumption ethos that doesn’t really exist.
Moreover, alcohol companies utilize unique branding strategies to entice people to drink. They mark specific aesthetics onto their products that tantalize consumers to see unrealistic versions of themselves within whatever it is they choose to drink. If someone drinks, they can become attractive, interesting, and affluent. Alcohol companies want consumers to believe that drinking will make their fantasies come true and that all their problems will vanish in the buzz. Of course, we all know that it’s not true, yet we use the manipulation as defense mechanisms to concerned friends and family. This is exactly what alcohol companies want; they want people to think that alcohol doesn’t take from life—it gives us everything we lack.
This is the one where the deception is most difficult to fight through. Whether the offense is as blatant as Oxycontin or as subtle as antidepressants, the same lies get told over and over again—take the pill and it will make your life better in a healthy and controlled way. People don’t see pharmaceuticals as drugs, but medications. The unfortunate part is that for many of those pharmaceuticals, this is actually true. Many horrendous diseases and maladies have become much easier to deal with because of pharmaceuticals, but many drastically underestimate the trade-off.
The addiction model still persists in pharmaceuticals as it does with its more elicit counterparts like alcohol and gambling: get the consumer to foster dependence to keep them coming back. The deception is deftly masked with legitimate solutions; diseases that can kill are fought well with many drugs that actually save lives. But unfortunately, this same narrative is told with every drug, which leads consumers to a false sense of security. This gives many pharmaceutical companies a license to obfuscate the truth or outright lie about the intensive purposes and effects of their drugs, leaving those who are most vulnerable at the most risk.
Governments aren’t complicit, but active participants. Every pill is tax revenue, so they do whatever it takes to increase their circulation. The profit model is inseparable from every aspect of the establishment, with every aspect of pain as a billing code and suffering as a subscription. Doctors write prescriptions like checks, sales reps seduce them with ideas like “off-label use”, and the profiteering accelerates despite the millions that die. Lobbyists make the loopholes and the price for millions of innocent lives are meager settlement checks.
It’s become so ingrained in every facet of life that every uncomfortable feeling is a new diagnosis, with each one becoming a new script to add to the multiplying revenue stream. Life is no longer about sitting with suffering, but falling into the Faustian bargain of letting it stop for a while until Mephistopheles comes back to collect. The addict overdoses time and time again until their battle ends with their souls stolen. When it’s all said and done, medical complicity doesn’t want to heal, but keep us hooked—one refill at a time.
Not every addiction is a blatant one—the most egregious offenders are the ones that force the functional. If you’re not seen as taking part, you are seen as an outsider to be ostracized. These addictions don’t have warning labels or PSAs, but instead portray a sense of essentiality, an everyday aspect of modern living. To escape these addictions is to escape society, the panopticon that sees every prisoner who wants to break free. It doesn’t crush them brashly, but slowly and deliberately. The potential escapees are shown the walls harshly and slowly manipulated back to their cells to give them the illusion of choice. To understand these walls, we need to understand what they do and why they’re built.
We all know the trappings of the digital world intimately. The infinite scroll and attention economy need hardly any introduction. Everyone knows how algorithms work as an abstraction, but do nothing to stop their infiltration into every aspect of our world. This is because of mass consent and the ill-perceived wisdom of the crowd. We know that indulgent use of technology is harmful, yet we all collectively lie to ourselves and ignore our screen-time reduction apps in a blissful display of irony as the infinite scrolling and clicking continues. We know that too much time is wasted on smartphones and computers and televisions, yet there’s no way to avoid them. Those who reject the technologies of industrialized society are seen as weirdos or even criminals, fighting every day to constantly balance the tightrope of attention and inclusion.
Everyone is trying to fight to stay ahead of the exponential curve, only to always feel left in the dust and unable to keep up. Humanity is being replaced with procedural computations, and no one can ever keep up with the speed of light. Yet here we are, resisting the nature built-in and opting for faster and tighter ways to live life. Every task is a potential automation and every automation is a new layer of abstraction to suppress user control of the systems that keep us swiping, scrolling, and clicking. It all becomes so overwhelmingly impossible to track that the only option is to drown in the noise and hit autopilot, letting the algorithms direct decision-making and giving personal agency a backseat. If time is the new resource, attention is the new currency—and the house always wins.
It reigns as the undisputed king of exchange. It facilitates every transaction down to the smallest of things. It’s the means for the machine as the mechanism for constant and everlasting consumption. Money is the heart of the beast that is addiction and grows more and more powerful with every dollar that circulates. Every facet of every decision holds it in mind as it controls the causes and effects of culture, connection, and conflict. Without it, the walls of any society erode and any semblance of structure rots until there is seemingly nothing left. Money is the world’s greatest addiction, and it feels like we’ll never get clean.
Every habit, hobby, or fleeting moment of attention is now an opportunity for monetization—apps, subscriptions, micro-transactions, and side hustles hail as the imperial zeitgeist. It doesn’t just function as a necessity, but dominates as the central path for security, meaning, and spiritual fulfillment. Even those who control the banks and the treasuries don’t seem to have enough; it produces a void it can never fill. In the eyes of many, it is the absolute measure of value and output. Money isn’t printed, but harvested from the time and energy of its users. It presents the illusion that to attract the intangible things that give life meaning, we must succumb to its material pressures and postulations. If you’re not earning, you’re dying.
We’re told money is a tool, but in the end, it’s the master. Everything we dream of, love, or strive for is filtered through its logic. To question it is to risk exile from the very society it built. The machine keeps running because it keeps us running: after more, after enough, after something that will finally make us whole. But in the end, the chase leaves us emptier than before, trapped in an addiction so total it’s mistaken for life itself. If addiction is a feature and not a bug, then what does it take to break free? Where do we find antidotes worth more than what’s for sale?
The battle against addiction isn’t fought drastically, but just as slowly as it tries to keep us within the walls. If the addiction machine bites at even the smallest micro-decisions, then it makes the most sense to start there. Every day is a series of tasks, so the battle is one of discernment—is this task something that can slow the machine down? The idea isn’t to bust the walls down, but to expose the cracks and carve at them meticulously until the outside becomes more and more exposed.
Despite the crowd’s wisdom, there are always ways to opt out. Every addiction is an embedded system; the worst ones should get opted out of first, but slowly. Whether it’s deleting a compulsively checked app or refusing to join yet another loyalty program, the most important thing to understand is that the best way to opt out is to introduce friction by doing things the hard way just because it’s still possible. Many times, most people prefer the path of least resistance. But this isn’t about personal discipline; it’s about refusing to manufacture consent.
The point isn’t to suffer for suffering’s sake. Too much of that happens already. This is about reclaiming agency and converting users and consumers back into people who can finally give themselves space for their own thoughts. These aren’t grand gestures, but they’re seeds of a new reality—one where the individual shapes the boundary and not the system that oppresses them. To do something the slow way in a world obsessed with speed is an act of spiritual rebellion; every deliberate inconvenience puts another tiny crack in the machine’s perfect wall.
The best way to kill a business is to stop feeding it. This means that any business that models itself on addiction must be avoided and ignored. If the money doesn’t touch their hands, they cease to exist. But it’s not just important to opt out—we need to cultivate communities that aren’t manufactured on dependence. The addiction model thrives most in isolation, so the best way to curtail its advances is to develop and sustain local businesses over conglomerates and encourage people to pursue what’s in their backyard and not the enshittified crap in digital space.
If we promote community engagement, people will be more incentivized to seek out things they can make themselves as opposed to a cheap plastic solution—they’ll have help. It doesn’t have to evolve necessarily into farmer communes, but if there’s something a person likes, they should have the option to seek it out locally in some capacity. It could be as simple as buying coffee from an independent shop instead of a chain, or spending a Saturday at the farmers market instead of scrolling delivery apps. When something breaks, fix it—or find someone who can—instead of clicking ‘Buy Again.’ Many major cities across the world have expansive resources in this regard, spanning from ubiquitous to niche, but even smaller communities can cultivate a DIY spirit.
Slowness as Sacred Rebellion In a culture that equates speed with value and distraction with happiness, slowness is not laziness—it’s rebellion. And rebellion is spiritual; it’s a refusal to surrender the soul to the compulsory. The machine is designed to promote restlessness and wanting, so the simple act of being still—just for even a moment—is a revolt. Every minute given to silence, contemplation, or real connection is an act of faith. It’s faith that life is more than consumption, addiction, and control. The idea isn’t to take it easy or manage stress, but to take back stolen energy and use it for something good and worth doing.
In moments of slowness, a vacuum emerges and allows for presence and meaning to re-enter. It gives us the opportunity to think, question, and create. Some of the greatest ideas in human history have been forged in the fires of small, private moments. To preserve greatness, these moments must be held close. If we unplug from digital space for a while, do something for someone out of kindness and not for money, and take the time to listen to the silence, then we will get closer each day to seeing what lies beyond the panopticon’s walls. When we reclaim our time and attention, we become unpredictable again. Presence can never be automated.
The cost of addiction is more than attention or even money—it’s sovereignty. Regimes all over the world fight to control the independence of the individual, but the way to overcome them isn’t to lash out with violence or terror. The greatest weapons are irrelevance and decay; let the power erode by refusing to acknowledge it. Our greatest assets are our time and attention, so we must put practices in place that keep them sacred and not for sale. The machine did not rise overnight. Its fall will not be swift. Every act of presence, every minute reclaimed, is a blow against the system that profits from our emptiness.
To honor the ones we’ve lost, don’t let their suffering be in vain. Honor them not with silence, but with revolt—quiet, daily, sacred. Show clear evidence that addiction is not destiny; a feature can be refused, and a soul is not engineered. Every small refusal is a seed to plant a world where addiction serves no master—and the machine is left to rust.