just a guy

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.

course that turned into drawing them and their opinions on crossdressing/ wearing 'girl' clothes because... because.

Has anyone mentioned how this opens up every woman competing to even more sexual abuse than she would have most likely already experienced during the process of elite athletic training? Like, any woman who wants to compete is being told that the price of going to the olympics is being molested. This is a structural, required component that is now part of the rules.

Hmmmm, what kind of reaction are you looking for, Anon? I am not your enemy.

You need to rethink what "accessible" means wrt clothing. (Especially bearing in mind you are on the blog of a guy who likes to wear vintage style suits, which puts us firmly in "luxury items" territory.)

We are currently living in an era where those who make clothing are criminally under compensated, with ever increasing demands to cut costs, yet produce faster. Fashion is both a sustainability and labor issue.

We are also living in an era where even the raw materials for clothing are undergoing enshitification and this has fucked with people's perceptions for how long clothes should last.

But I am determined to build a wardrobe where pieces last for 10+ years, if cared for properly. And I know I have some things that absolutely will outlive me.

For these reasons, I am not going to recommend $15 or even $50 dress shirts, especially given they will fall apart after a season or two.

My wardrobe is a 25+ year long project of discovering what I like, how to assess quality, and getting my finances in a place where I can buy good pieces. My closet is not meant to be achievable overnight or even within a few years, because it sure as hell didn't happen that way for me.

Trying to build a fashionable wardrobe (again, the word is *fashionable* because presumably that is why you are here) on a budget?

1) Thrifting and garment swaps are still options (be sustainable and get the quality of the past!), with more choices if you can get garments altered. Gem.app will always be high on my recommendations list for this reason.

2) Making relationships with sewists and tailors and working out fair compensation (be it money, trade, being a pattern tester, etc) is an option

3) Saving up where you only buy 1 or 2 new, quality pieces of clothing a year is an option and should actually be the norm for everyone - we all buy too many clothes (myself included) and need to reset our expectations for how big a wardrobe should be + how often to change clothes

4) Learning how to make garments on your own is an option (one I am taking), especially given free resources such as libraries, YouTube tutorials, the Internet Archive, etc.

Good clothing does and should cost money and time. Especially if you want to wear tailored garments made from nice fabrics, which is my style and presumably why you came across my blog. (It's important I reiterate this point.) Honestly, the fact I can find a 3-piece wool suit new, in a vintage cut that fits me off-the-rack for $1k feels like stealing.

I spent most of my adult life climbing the Old Navy > Gap > Banana Republic fashion ladder, not realizing that nearly all of that clothing is cheap crap, especially things made post-2005. Now that I can afford nice stuff, there is a world of difference between my $15 flannel shirts and the $90 ones. Vimes Boot Theory, but with the caveat that the $15 shirt should not even exist.

(I love Vimes Boot Theory, but it needs a companion theory from the perspective of the bootmaker.)

It may sound shocking to you, but nearly all my wardrobe recommendations sit on the low end of price vs quality. I still have to mend my clothes, fix poor workmanship, and alter things to fit.

If you want decent quality clothing ("decent" = lasting for years), you honestly should be expecting to pay at least $100 for a new dress shirt, $300 for new boots, $300 for new woolen trousers. And yeah, $1k for a suit. These are bare minimum fair prices for off-the-rack.

You have to get comfortable with the fact that you will be paying some combination of time + money if you want nice things. (Even inexpensive things that are good quality take time to learn about, find, and maintain!) But the outcome - longer lasting stuff that makes you feel good - is hopefully worth the investment.

Garment construction deserves fair compensation and if your current salary is locking you out where you cannot get a few good, new things a year, the problem is that your own labor isn't being fairly compensated. Scold your boss, not me.

Again, I am not your enemy. But you need to recalibrate your thinking about what our standards for clothing should really be, with all the labor involved to achieve those standards.