Myisha Nawar
What does hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin and crack have in common? They are all concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most of all things we describe as ‘addictive’ are. And the frightening thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.
We wouldn’t want to stop it-it’s the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. Things we want to want is ‘good’ technological progress but when progress concentrates something we don’t want to want-when it transforms opium to heroin-it seems bad. It’s the same process at work. No one doubts this process is accelerating.
As far as I know there’s no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of “addictive”. This usage has become increasingly common and it’s clear why-there are an increasing number of things we “NEED”. Sitting at the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by Clash of Clans and FarmVille. TV has taken up a much more engaging transformation, and even so it can’t seem to compete with Facebook. Let’s face it. The world is more addictive now than it was forty years ago and unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next forty years and so on.
The coming forty years will bring us some wonderful innovations. I don’t mean to imply that they are all to be lined under ‘Avoid’. Alcohol is dangerous but I’d rather live in a world with wine than one without! Most people can coexist with alcohol. Most things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about! Unfortunately, most people won’t.
Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven further apart. One sense of normal is what is statistically normal, that is, what everyone does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of machinery: what works best.
We’ll have to worry not just about new thing, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That’s what bit me. I’ve avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it.
If I am right about the acceleration of addictiveness, we’ll start to be defined increasingly by what we say no to.