Can you resist all the addictions modern life throws at you? Only if you’re rich enough | Martha Gill

Freedom from the temptations pushed at us on a daily basis is now a class issue

They are problems of success, really, these modern ills. Social media addiction, gaming disorders, the compulsive over-eating of sugar and processed gloop: they are products of a society with more than enough food, leisure time and boredom, and without the life-or-death excitement that kept our ancestors busy.

We could perhaps think of our rising addiction problems as something like a peacock's tail or companionable parasite - the costly signal that we no longer need to strain every nerveto stay alive. Only a species that is this superfluously good at survivalcould afford to hack its own anti-survival neural circuitry, targeting the pathways that insteadmake it more likely to die. Problems of success are harder, not easier, to deal with, of course - you wouldn't want to reverse the conditions that got us here. Releasing wolves back among us is not the right policy for tackling TikTok-addled teens. But the troubling fact is that a large portion of the economy now runs on addiction.

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