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Addiction Markets

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384 points toomuchtodo | 3 comments | 31 Oct 25 17:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.699s | source
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zkmon ◴[01 Nov 25 11:32 UTC] No.45780865[source]▶
What happened to America. Maybe 70's or 40's were it's peak. Every activity has become a betting. Investments, sports, relationships, home-buying.

Addictions are a symptom of having an excessive amount of free time, floating money and lack of fear of reprisal from family and society and lack of basic wisdom.

Excessive prosperity breaks social rythm. It removes dependencies and relations across individuals. It's like a tree turned into chips, with freedom for every chip. As individuals, you won (materialistic luxury etc), but as a family, community or country, you fail.

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1. intended ◴[01 Nov 25 13:17 UTC] No.45781418[source]▶
Eh?

Theres too many moving parts in your very short paragraph, to actual engage with without any substantial engagement being minced into woodchips, I fear.

Theres many things that have happened since the 40s, just to name ONE thing that has resulted in this - we have much better psychological technology than we did ever before. Skinnerian conditioning, reward schedules, their results - we never had that.

MS Excel alone would mean we better ways for the statistically inclined to zero in on more attractive addictions, just through better data analysis.

Just consider how common place and obvious A/B testing is. How do you think humanity will fare on average, against industrial strength siren songs?

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2. zkmon ◴[01 Nov 25 13:47 UTC] No.45781613[source]▶
In the din of industrial strength siren songs, you may have not noticed the rot that is accumulating in the society. MS Excel exists only because you have some data that you think you should care about and you can't fit in your mind. As an individual, you shouldn't need that much data to handle.

The accumulated social rot is not compensated by Excel sheets or any gadget toys, you call as tech.

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3. ◴[01 Nov 25 14:16 UTC] No.45781813[source]▶