TL;DR:
- Screens are not simply one more addiction among many. They are the delivery mechanism through which several older addictions now reach us at once
- The Roman idea of “bread and circuses” helps explain how comfort and distraction can keep people passive
- We are living in an age of extraordinary abundance, but many of us are too distracted to make use of it
- Social media, porn, speculation, and validation loops all converge inside the same device
- The real question is not whether screens are useful. It is whether we can use them without being used by them
This morning I was speaking to my friend Emma, who lives in Australia. Her daughter is almost a teenager now, and one of the challenges she mentioned is limiting her screen time.
Apparently she hates it. Complains. Resists.
That should tell us quite a lot.
Children don’t react like that when you take away something neutral. They react like that when you interrupt a reward loop.
We tend to talk about screen addiction as if it’s some bizarre new pathology, a modern glitch that appeared out of nowhere. I don’t think that’s right.
In In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Gabor Maté writes about asking his wife to hide the TV remote from him while he was studying to be a doctor. That was decades ago, long before smartphones, infinite scroll, or algorithmic feeds. The compulsion was already there. The tools were just cruder.
The urge to hand our attention over to a screen did not begin with the iPhone. The iPhone simply industrialised it.
There’s an old Roman expression: bread and circuses.
It comes from the idea that if you give people enough to eat and enough entertainment to stay distracted, they become easier to govern. Less likely to ask difficult questions. Less likely to resist injustice. Less likely to notice what is being taken from them.
The Colosseum was not just a venue for spectacle. It was part of the social technology of distraction.
That feels relevant again.
This is, in many ways, an age of abundance.
There are more tools than ever before. More ways to start a business, make art, learn a skill, improve your health, manage your money, find your people, or build a life that would have been inaccessible to most of humanity even twenty years ago.
The opportunity set is extraordinary.
And yet many of us spend huge portions of our lives in states of low-grade digital trance, flicking between apps, feeds, messages, charts, videos, notifications, and ambient noise. We are surrounded by leverage, but too distracted to use it.
That feels like one of the central pathologies of the moment: abundance on one side, compulsion on the other.
When I stopped drinking in 2019, I spent a lot of time studying addiction.
Books like In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Recovery 2.0, This Naked Mind, and Sober Curious helped me understand something important: addiction is much broader than people like to admit. We tend to think of it in narrow terms, mainly drugs and alcohol, but the underlying pattern shows up everywhere.
The pattern is simple enough: continuing to do something repeatedly despite the fact that it is making your life worse.
That can show up through substances. Through food. Through money. Through sex. Through codependency and dysfunctional relationships. And increasingly, through technology.
But technology is not just one addiction among others.
It is the layer through which many of the others now operate.
Open Instagram because you’re bored, and what are you often looking for underneath that boredom?
Connection.
A familiar creator whose face, voice, and format now feel strangely intimate. A sense of company. A break from your own mind. Maybe a little hit of validation if your own post picked up a few more likes than expected. Maybe proof that someone, somewhere, noticed you.
That is not really a screen craving. It is a people craving mediated through a screen.
The same applies elsewhere.
For some, screens intensify sexual compulsion. Graphic content now sits only a few swipes away, often without even requiring a visit to an explicitly pornographic site. For some young men in particular, this appears to be a major driver of passivity, loneliness, and diminished drive.
For others, screens intensify money addiction. A man starts out checking markets, then finds himself six hours deep between Robinhood, Polymarket, sports betting apps, crypto charts, and social feeds built around speculation. It presents itself as research, or opportunity, or staying informed. But often it is just another reward loop wearing the clothes of ambition.
For others still, screens intensify status addiction. Women post more and more images of themselves, perhaps partly in search of attention, perhaps partly in search of economic mobility, perhaps partly because this is now what the environment rewards. And in the process, the notifications themselves become addictive. The original motive almost stops mattering. The loop takes over.
The screen is not always the addiction itself. Often it is the delivery mechanism. The universal solvent. The thing that can carry sex, money, validation, fantasy, outrage, belonging, and escape through the same glowing rectangle in your hand.
That is what makes it so powerful.
It is also what makes it so difficult to deal with.
Because the technology is not evil. In many ways it is miraculous.
I’m in a WhatsApp group with family members scattered around the world. Photos of nieces and nephews arrive daily. Small conversations about ordinary life unfold across time zones. People reminisce. Make plans. Stay in each other’s lives in a way that would once have been impossible.
This is real value. Real connection. Real human warmth made easier by the tools.
Which means the problem cannot be solved through simplistic moral panic. The answer is not that screens are bad and we should all return to some imaginary pre-digital innocence. The answer is that tools this powerful will always amplify whatever is unresolved in us.
They connect us, and they distract us. They educate us, and they numb us. They create opportunity, and they make it easier to avoid taking it.
Part of the reason this matters so much right now is that the wider economy is already destabilising people.
Large swathes of work are changing. Entry-level knowledge work is becoming harder to access. The kinds of roles that once gave young people, especially young men, a foothold into adult economic life are being compressed, automated, or redefined in real time.
That instability matters.
A person with structure, purpose, momentum, and a believable path forward is less likely to disappear into compulsive digital behaviour than someone who feels economically marginal, socially adrift, and vaguely surplus to requirements.
Compulsion does not emerge in a vacuum. It thrives in conditions of dislocation.
If you combine economic uncertainty with infinite digital distraction, you get a culture in which people are overstimulated, underdirected, and increasingly easy to capture.
One of the useful things about recovering from alcohol is that it teaches you a broader lesson about self-regulation.
In my case, I knew that stopping drinking did not mean I had to adopt a purist identity around every substance forever. I needed a long period of real sobriety, and I took that seriously. But I also knew that over time I wanted the freedom to build a more conscious relationship with things I would never have mixed with alcohol before.
That won’t be the right path for everyone. Everyone’s relationship with addiction is unique, and I wouldn’t universalise mine.
But the underlying principle does seem general: maturity is not always about total abstinence. Sometimes it is about building a relationship with powerful things that is conscious enough, clean enough, and bounded enough that they no longer run your life.
That may be the real challenge with screens too.
Because, just as with food, they are hard to escape entirely. You can quit alcohol. You cannot really quit modern technology without opting out of large parts of contemporary life. The question is not whether we will use these tools. We will. The question is whether we can use them without being used by them.
I increasingly think screens are the master addiction of the age, not because they replace every other addiction, but because they can host so many of them at once.
They are where loneliness goes to simulate connection. Where ambition goes to masquerade as action. Where desire goes to become compulsion. Where uncertainty goes to seek relief. Where boredom goes to avoid silence.
And all of this is happening at precisely the moment when the world is offering an extraordinary amount to anyone able to focus long enough to participate in it.
That is the tragedy of it.
We are living through one of the richest expansions of human possibility in history, and many people can barely hold their attention still long enough to make use of it.
Emma’s daughter is not the problem. She is the signal.
The fact that a child hates having screen time limited is not a quirky parenting issue. It is a clue about the environment we have built. One that trains compulsion early, normalises distraction, and then acts surprised when adults struggle to direct their lives.
This is not just a story about children, or parenting, or even technology.
It is a story about attention.
And attention, in the end, is life.