July 12, 2025 - Epoch Times
05:01
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| This is what I call the drugification of modern life. | |
| Almost everything that we eat, that we engage in, including traditional drugs like cocaine, heroin, nicotine, alcohol, have all become more accessible, more potent, more novel, more bountiful. | |
| And those factors make them, in essence, more addictive. | |
| Even healthy behaviors, things like playing games or connecting with other human beings or exercise, have become druggified through the application of technology, again, made more accessible, more potent, more novel, more bountiful. | |
| So we're living in this strange day and age when we've essentially biohacked all of the things that we do and really come to organize our lives around our little rewards, right? | |
| So we wake up in the morning, we reach for our phones, we have our cup of coffee, we have our favorite muffin, we drive to work, we listen to whatever we want to listen to. | |
| Throughout our day, you know, we work and then we take a series of breaks, we scroll on our phones. | |
| At the end of the day, we look forward to going home and eating some kind of delectable food or binging on Netflix or eating cupcakes or smoking pot or drinking. | |
| And I just think, you know, intoxicants have been around since the beginning of human time, but the extent to which they are readily accessible at the touch of a fingertips, the extent to which we organize our time around rewards, the extent to which they're incredibly potent, easy to obtain, cheap, right? | |
| All of this means, and really free when you look at digital media, all this means that we're sort of constantly bombarding our brains with these small and large rewards. | |
| This is just a normal part of our reality now, right? | |
| And it's acceptable. | |
| This is the other part. | |
| I've been thinking about this for a few years. | |
| It's morally acceptable in our society to create technologies to basically to manipulate people or addict people as part of what we do through things put into food, through, another example of something we've covered on the show has been how a marijuana has been actively bred into something completely different today than it was even 20 years ago, just because of the potency and the impact. | |
| People get psychotic breaks from it and so forth. | |
| It's just, it's this whole culture. | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, I shop, therefore I am. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| I mean, we're really, we've reached this kind of tipping point where, you know, in a successful capitalist system, not to denigrate capitalism, it's a fine system in many ways, but, you know, in any successful capitalist system, we would all be the ultimate addicts, right? | |
| So we are really, we've organized modern life around consumption, optimizing our consumption. | |
| At the same time, we have, you know, many of us living in wealthy nations have our basic survival needs met. | |
| We've got machines doing our work, so we have more leisure time than ever before in the history of humanity. | |
| We have access to more luxury goods. | |
| We have more disposable income. | |
| And all of that combined means that we're living in the kind of perfect storm for all of us to become addicted. | |
| More and more those of us who thought we would be immune to this problem are actually experiencing the addiction pattern in our own lives, whether addicted to our phones and digital media, addicted to our drug-ified food supply with the addition of salt, fat, sugars, flavorants, which lights up the same reward pathway as drugs and alcohol. | |
| So I think it's fair to say that many, many modern people are struggling with some form of compulsive overconsumption. | |
| And we can really look to people with severe addiction in recovery as modern-day prophets for the rest of us, because they've had to figure out how to manage their compulsive behaviors as a matter of life or death. | |
| You know, for those of us who have more minor addictions, it may not be life or death, but it certainly is quality of life. | |
| So looking to kind of the recovery world, you know, how people get into recovery, how they think about their consumptive behaviors. | |
| Plus, we've now got surgical interventions to help us manage our appetites, right? | |
| People are for the first time in human history getting their intestines rerouted so that they don't eat so much food. | |
| We've got medications that we've now invented that we take for appetitive control of all sorts, meaning that the boundary of the problem of addiction is now extending much further and including many, many more of us as we've changed our ecosystem, |
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