Going Cold Turkey in our Addiction Economy

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We’re prone to addiction, and addiction is highly profitable. They know it, and we know it.

We inhabit an Addiction Economy. We all know the cure for addiction is to go Cold Turkey: drop the denial and delusion of control, and excise the source of the addiction from one’s life.

This is of course not easy; it’s agony on multiple fronts, for we’ve come to depend on the source of addiction for dopamine hits, pain management, and distraction from our troubles and travails.

Sources of addiction that tie into our identity and need to be recognized and valued are especially pernicious, as these are what make us feel that we exist in a meaningful way.

We’re talking of course about social media as the source of our most compelling and tenacious addiction, for social media is the means by which we say “I exist, my opinion matters, I matter, and here is the tangible evidence, everyone can see my selfie, photo, tweet, post, note or comment, and since everyone has a device to access my opinion, I can imagine multitudes seeing it, for I can see it.”

In a physical world where we’re invisible and don’t matter, the universal, tangible visibility of social media is addictive, for there is no substitute for it in the real world in which we’re anonymous and invisible. Try getting your photo or opinion in the Mainstream Media, on network TV or in a mass media publication. Unlike these rigorously gated forms of media, social media is open to all, an irresistible opportunity to stake a claim to becoming visible.

There is nowhere in the real world to express oneself with such ease. Shouting on a street corner will get attention, but not the sort most desire. Standing up in a public hearing will provide three minutes of public exposure, but this only whets the appetite for a wider audience and a more substantial self-confirmation.

But this confirmation of selfhood is a chimera. That others see our selfie, photo, opinion or post is no substitute for relationships in the real world, and the relationship we have with ourself, in which our integrity and actions earn our self-respect, regardless of what others see or don’t see and what they think or don’t think about us. Our worth has nothing to do with visibility, and neither does our identity.

Let’s stipulate that the phone is a mechanism of addiction, but it can be used sparingly for non-addictive practicalities. Sales people may well spend much of their day on their phone communicating with clients and making cold calls. Brief SMS texts serve as efficient communications, as do quick emails and phone calls.

The iPhone software identifies this communication as social, which confuses it with social media. Practical communication isn’t social, it’s communicating essential information in the most efficient manner.

The mobile phone also serves as a business tool–doing a bit of online banking, mapping a route, etc.–and as a modest platform for creating content: recording an idea or melody, sharing an idea for a podcast, etc.

But how much of our staring at the little screen is essential communication and creation, and how much is time wasted on social media or other distractions? Here are two screenshots of our household phones. The first records total use through mid-afternoon (3:14 pm): 3 minutes. The workday is largely done and essential communication took a few minutes.

Here’s a weekly total: 2 hours and 22 minutes for the week, or 20 minutes average per day. Some days might require a long phone conversation, or numerous texts, but others don’t require much in the way of essentials.

The phone’s addictive feature is its constant pinging, demanding “look at me!” as apps notifications are constantly nagging us to generate income for the platform by opening the app and giving it our attention, for the Attention Economy depends on our engagement as the source of profit.

So Cold Turkey the notifications: delete the apps, turn off notifications, mute the device.

Also delete / Cold Turkey the social media apps and notifications. Consider social media as a snack designed to addict you to something that tastes good but is ruinously toxic, even as it generates billions of dollars in profits for the pushers / dealers.

Technology is a useful servant but a terrible master. Addiction itself is slippery; we deny we’re addicted (I can stop any time), and maintain the fiction that we’re in control even as we compulsively stare at our phone dozens (or hundreds) of times a day.

The phone and every app are engineered to be addictive. For each of us, it’s our rational understanding of the mechanisms of addiction and our will versus thousands of people working feverishly to break down our rationality and will by appealing directly to our insecurities and dopamine circuitry.

Social media is intentionally designed to reward our addictive behavior because this behavior generates tens of billions of dollars in profits for the purveyors. The algos track what you click on, and give you more of that, notify you when a “friend” posts anything, cheer you on when your post gets a “like,” and so on. The mechanisms of addiction are all in plain sight but we fall for them anyway because our insecurities and dopamine circuitry are so easy to manipulate.

The endless feed / scroll is addictive. They know it, we know it, but we’re snared anyway. The way out is Cold Turkey.

The other common addiction based on products engineered to be addictive is our addiction to junk food, snacks and fast food. Once again, thousands of people are tasked with engineering and marketing these products to light up our dopamine / pleasure circuitry as the means of maximizing private profits. Our health is being ruined, slowly but surely, as the inevitable consequence of milking our dopamine circuitry for profits.

Once again, the only real solution is Cold Turkey: eliminate all junk food, snacks and fast food from our lives. If there are no snacks in the house, we won’t consume them. It’s that simple. So go Cold Turkey on buying bags of addiction like this:

And only have real food like this in the house. Need a snack? Then have a banana or apple or carrot or a few unprocessed peanuts.

Everyone complains that there’s no time or energy to prepare a real-food meal. Yes, modern life is a pressure cooker. But how much time do we spend every day compulsively staring at a screen, not for essential communication but for all the other digital snack food we’re being prompted to consume?

It’s not going to make the cover of a magazine, but a can of plain black beans, some corn tortillas, a jar of salsa, some chopped up lettuce, a few olives and carrot sticks is a taco / burrito meal of real food that we control, unlike an ultra-processed substitute. Preparing a meal isn’t a substitute for staring at a screen; it’s the real world. There is no substitute for real food and the real world.

Preparing a stir-fry meal is pretty quick. Yes, it take some prep, but the process of prepping meat, onions and vegetables is a form of meditation on the real world that heals our compulsions and addictions. We could sit and meditate to clear our minds or we can prepare a meal, which serves the same purpose.

One of the most perniciously addictive qualifies of engineered, ultra-processed junk food is that it ruins our taste for real food. Junk food / snacks are addictive because they’re loaded with completely unnatural concentrations of sugar, salt and low-quality fats. An apple is sweet, and so is a fresh carrot. But are they as sweet as breakfast cereal? No.

Everyone says real food is too expensive. Yes it is, but what are your life and health worth? We complain about the cost of food but manage to throw away a significant percentage of all the food we buy. We also tend to eat too many low-nutrition calories. Buy on sale, waste nothing, eliminate low-nutrition calories, and costs become more bearable.

We’re prone to addiction, and addiction is highly profitable. They know it, and we know it. The only real way out is to go Cold Turkey and eliminate the sources of addiction from our lives. This is painful, as the pushers and dealers know oh so well, as we’ve lost our taste for real food and the real world. To recover our taste for real food and the real world, there’s one path: Cold Turkey.

The pushers and dealers insist it can’t be done. Of course they do. They’re terrified by the prospect of their tens of billions of dollars in Addiction Profits slipping away as those whose health they’re diminishing choose health over addiction.

Cold Turkey (Plastic Ono Band, 5 min)

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Source: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2025/03/going-cold-turkey-in-our-addiction.html