constantly hyper fixating on shows

Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isn’t monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except “a behavior I personally disapprove of.”

Addiction is not “I enjoy stimulation.” It is not “I have habits.” It is not “I seek input before I produce output.” Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.

When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about “dopamine” is not enlightened. It’s sloppy. Unserious, even.

There’s also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isn’t explicitly productive, it must be rot. We’ve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.

What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly you’re “stimulus addicted.” If you can’t brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now it’s framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.

This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesn’t trend. Alarmism does.

There’s also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having “bad dopamine habits.” It’s easier to diagnose people’s scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.

Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. That’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.

When I hear the word “addiction” tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesn’t sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.

"But caffeine IS addictive, though!!!"

I never even said the word "caffeine" in this post. I said "coffee." Decaf exists. Don't talk to me about the trace amounts of caffeine in decaf, either, I already know about them. They are not enough for an average adult nervous system to respond to, and that's not the point anyway. The point is, yes, caffeine causes physical dependency, but so do blood pressure regulating meds, corticosteroids, and virtually everything you might get prescribed by a psychiatrist. The point is also "find me somebody who would rather end up homeless or sell their friends/family's valuables than go a couple days without a latte and then we can talk."

"But my friend/SO/family member is addicted to their phone!!! They ignore me to use it!!!"

If you're feeling ignored, that is on you to talk to them about it and set boundaries. You may also want to consider the possibility that you are boring.

"But I'M addicted to my phone. I know this because I end up using it all day and I feel happy when I'm doing it but then I feel bad later. Also, you are probably also addicted to your phone - try not using it for a week and see how you feel."

This is still not addiction. This is having trouble with task transitioning/initiation, avoiding something difficult, "FOMO", struggling to trust that other activities will have as reliable of a return on investment, missing your own emotional cues that tell you when you're getting bored, living in a society where most things require use of a phone, any combination of the above, and/or probably also some other shit I can't think of right now.

The problem wasn’t what I had access to. It was that I didn’t have access to a safe adult I could actually talk to; someone I could trust to help me without immediately cutting me off from everything and everyone. I remember getting messages from strangers on Skype. I didn’t even respond. But when my parents found out, they banned me from using it entirely. That meant losing most of my contact with friends outside of school. So what did I do? I went behind their backs. And once I was hiding, I couldn’t tell them when something actually dangerous was happening, like when I started being groomed. By the time things escalated, I was already alone with it.

I think about an episode of Scared Straight where a girl was dragged through a prison because she’d been talking to adult men online. She wasn’t doing that because she was reckless or malicious; she was lonely. Her parents weren’t present, she was being bullied at school, and these men gave her attention, told her she was pretty, told her she mattered. She was already being harmed. And the adults in her life responded by terrorizing her. Humiliating her. Calling her a slut. Telling her she deserved it. Breaking her to pieces.

What lesson does that actually teach? Not “this is dangerous, come to us.” It teaches: If you get hurt, we will hurt you more. Do you really think that makes her stop, or does it just make the predators look safer by comparison? They might as well have driven her straight into the jaws of those predators with torches and pitchforks. Because when every path back to safety is lined with punishment, kids don’t run away from danger. They run deeper into it.

If you want kids to be safe, stop treating them like problems to control and start treating them like people worth protecting. Stop ripping away their autonomy the second they make a mistake or encounter something risky. Stop teaching them that honesty will cost them everything.

pack it up boys we've made a social blunder

let's run that again

one more time normal style

I'm going to become a statistic

further proof god is out to get me

it's because I tore my acl senior year

I couldn't do it for religious reasons

my ex took my talent in the divorce

She starts off not believing anyone could love her and she doesn't deserve love. She never knew her mom, she assumed her dad didn't love her after learning he left nothing to her in his will, and was abused by her step mom. She always felt out of place and never truly cared for.

But it was Alfie and Irma who helped her get to the masquerade ball. It was Benedict who without even knowing who she was, saved her from the Cavendish house because he saw men attempting to assault a maid. It was Violet who hired her after learning she saved Benedict and who adored her and was eventually supportive of her and Benedict's relationship. It was Posy who literally climbed out a window to warn her that Araminta was trying to find her. It was her fellow maids/staff like Varley, Alfie, and Hazel who tried to get her help when they found out she was arrested. It was Hazel and Alfie who constantly provide her with emotional support. It was Eloise who steps up to distract Cressida while Sophie goes to find her father's will. It was Violet and Benedict who work together to blackmail Araminta into dropping the case against Sophie. It was Lady Danbury and Alice Mondrich who work to get the Queen to support Sophie and Benedict's union. Everyone had Sophie's back and that's how she got her happy ending.