> The question you really want to be asking is "does it materially affect most peoples' mental heath?". Personally, I think the answer is no not really. Obviously it becomes a vice for some.
The real question is how would you know if it did?
Addiction thinking sounds a lot like self reflection too: “I’m not addicted, I just like it very much. I can stop at any time I want, I just don’t want to”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting everyone who likes something is addicted. It is just the means of finding that out is pretty tricky, especially for hyper-normal stimulus like processed food, porn, cocaine or some bits of the internet.
We can’t infer our ways out of self-deception, if we could it wouldn’t be self-deception.
Hence the requirement of proper objective tooling to measure such effects on (mental) health.
The real question is how would you know if it did?
Addiction thinking sounds a lot like self reflection too: “I’m not addicted, I just like it very much. I can stop at any time I want, I just don’t want to”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting everyone who likes something is addicted. It is just the means of finding that out is pretty tricky, especially for hyper-normal stimulus like processed food, porn, cocaine or some bits of the internet.
We can’t infer our ways out of self-deception, if we could it wouldn’t be self-deception.
Hence the requirement of proper objective tooling to measure such effects on (mental) health.