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The concept of addiction is inherently unstable.

The assumption that addiction is inherently harmful does not help us in regulating corporations.

What if we understood addiction as an often glorious, sometimes scary, and very common state?

Banning social media for kids would be about preventing children from self-harm while being sold things.

Mark Zuckerberg was in court last month testifying in a lawsuit brought by school boards, parents, and minors claiming that Instagram is designed to addict children. There is an underlying problem, however, with this claim: Both the plaintiffs and defendants assume addiction is inherently harmful.

This assumption has gotten us nowhere. Nowhere in helping our kids. Nowhere toward regulating the corporations who damage us. The certainty that addiction always harms has not created a safer world for the US or other nations, nor brought us any closer to preventing overdose deaths.

Part of the problem with pinning the harm of Instagram on addiction is that addiction has no clear definition, which makes it easier for Meta to argue its way out of culpability. In fact, during the Meta trial, Instagram’s chief executive officer testified that the app is not “clinically” addictive. Given that clinical addiction is yet one definition among many, that incorporates all the substances and all the processes we have come to describe as addictive from methamphetamines to sports betting, he is probably correct. But an argument about Instagram’s addictiveness — yes or no — misses the larger issue of where harm actually lies. Re-examining our fundamental assumptions about addiction could help us out of the quandary that defines this lawsuit as well as our overall understanding of addiction.

I’d like to put forward a different framework — not one that I’ve invented, but one I witnessed and studied in the course of my work as an anthropologist in Mexico City. My neighbors, who invited me into their lives, praise addiction to drugs, alcohol, soda, and even Facebook for keeping them enmeshed in dependency with their loved ones.

Vices, on the other hand, are compulsive dependencies that take them away from loved ones. The community I spent time with assumes everyone is an addict and everyone will fall prey to vice at least sometime in their life. No shame in either. They drink and do drugs, and are in fact addicted to Facebook, but since they live in very dense households, drinking and Facebook are communal activities: You don’t do your addictions alone.

For my neighbors, those lost to vice don’t need to overcome their compulsive dependencies. They need replacement addictions to keep them with their loved ones. One afternoon, Cristian, a teenage boy, was telling me how he had just given up soda, after drinking two liters a day for years. Cola was making his sleep suffer, which made his family suffer since they all slept in the same room. I congratulated him and turned to his mother Renata for affirmation. But instead of praising Cristian for his capacity to assert his willpower over his compulsion, Renata expounded, “Everyone is addicted to something. When you give up one you must replace it with another.” Renata was matter-of-fact, as if this was something everyone knew. Like her neighbors, she cultivated compulsive dependencies.

But we hate dependency in the United States. In our predominantly Protestant nation that preaches individuality, we are profoundly uncomfortable feeling dependent on anything or anyone. This discomfort is ever-present in how we define addiction. Over the last 100 years, researchers have classified addiction as a metabolic disorder, a chemical imbalance, a brain pathology, and a genetic propensity, with the common throughline being an overarching fear of out-of-control dependencies. Addiction is a “riddle,” a surprise, a malfunction, in how people ought to be. It’s unbearably abject.

If the concept of addiction is so unstable, maybe we need a different starting point. What if we understood addiction as an often glorious, sometimes scary, and very common state? What if we anticipated that we all will be swept away repeatedly in life by forces larger than ourselves, whether heroin or Heated Rivalry? And then we go from there.

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As a nation we have decided alcohol is legal but you can’t operate heavy machinery while on it. In a few places in the US, we have experimented with safe injection sites, which allow opioid users to do drugs in a safely monitored space so that they don’t overdose. Some countries, like Switzerland, have gone even further and provide regulated doses to addicts, allowing them to go about their lives knowing where and when they will get their next hit. They are kept enmeshed with their loved ones and participate in society instead of being cast out for their dependencies. Policies and programs like these, that accept addiction as a human reality, are an antidote to the never-ending drug wars that have killed millions and incarcerated even more.

These same principles apply to children, whom we already treat as more vulnerable to powerful substances and forces. We don’t give children firearms, cigarettes, or alcohol, which are all legal for adults.

So what about Instagram? We don’t need the courts to tell us that endless click-through content can be obliterating for users—adults and children alike. Of course, Instagram is addictive. I’ll never forget my daughter in front of me on her knees sobbing and quivering, begging for her phone, when I made her quit cold turkey in high school.

And of course, Meta wants to make its products maximally addictive, as it reaps enormous profits off our clicks. Like all corporations, Meta’s addiction (or should we say vice?) is profit.

Banning social media for kids, as has been done in Australia, wouldn’t be about preventing addiction, which we simply can’t do. It would be about preventing children from self-harm and suicide while being sold things as they click alone.

A ban would force us to notice that we currently have little replacement for social media. The reality is, given parents’ harried lives and a world where kids can’t run feral with other kids in compulsive play, social media is what we have to offer.

If addiction is the exalted state my neighbors in Mexico City describe—compulsive, yes, but binding people to each other—then Instagram, as currently designed, isn’t an addiction. It’s a vice. It pulls children away from the people around them. They click alone, scroll alone, hurt alone. And Meta profits from that isolation, engineering a product that severs exactly the connections that addiction, at its best, sustains. So the question isn’t whether Instagram is addictive. Of course it is. The question is: How shall we be addicted? From there we can ask, do we want to entrust Mark Zuckerberg with our children’s compulsions? I'd bet, for most of us, the answer is no.

© Psychology Today