everyone I've watched drop their addictions did not try
doomscrolling, vaping, porn, overworking, dating — they were surprised when their addictions stopped happening.
contrast this with “whack-a-mole”—
“four moles whacked, only one left…”
“one mole whacked, only one left…”
“one mole whacked, only eight left…”
two months in, an AI founder I worked with said he’d stopped vaping a month earlier.
this was cool— I forgot he vaped.
he said he’d tried to quit before, but it felt like a fight requiring lots of willpower. can you believe it didn’t last?
except the person above, none of them came for help with their addictions. they just felt something was off.
other people:
a researcher was doing 5 hours of chatgpt per day for validation. we worked on dating. the chatgpt petered off. he hadn’t even realized until I followed up a year later
“I used to watch all this mindless TV. Recently… I just got bored of it.”
neat. didn’t know you watched TV
simply swapping one addiction for another would not be ideal.
if a sufficiently longstanding addiction could be unlearned through more willpower, it would’ve already been.
“I don’t have the urge at all anymore”
I was hoping to get at least a hint of the common mechanism behind all this.
I’ve been thinking about this and I think it’s because most addictions are fundamentally rooted in isolation. I’ve personally noticed at my loneliest times I was spending a ton of time on my phone. When I went on vacation, was in a happy relationship, or with friends often my screen time would drop from 6-8 hours a day to 30 mins a day overnight and STAY that way with no effort.
I think many other addictions are similar, forms of distraction we use to habitually avoid a fundamental need we are not getting for whatever reason. Focusing on fixing the addiction doesn’t fix the fact that you are relying on that addiction because your body and brain are trying to find any way they can to survive, and your basic survival needs do not give a damn about your more moral aspirations. Maslows hierarchy of needs maybe? If you aren’t getting some basic need, you won’t be able to easily fulfill or prioritize higher order needs.