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karaterobot 16 hours ago

> With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.

One difference that may possibly affect the strength of your argument is that fentanyl is a physically addictive drug. Social media may be "addictive" but they aren't addictive. If you genuinely believe they're equivalent, use social media for a year, and fentanyl for a year, and see which is easier to quit.

Actually, scratch that: make it a thought experiment. But if you can see that they aren't equivalent, you can see that it's not a good comparison.

Hasu 14 hours ago | parent [-]

As someone who has struggled with physical and mental addictions for my entire life: breaking a physical addiction is trivially easy compared to breaking a mental addiction. And breaking a physical addiction is really hard (I'm currently suffering withdrawal effects from a recent decision to quit vaping nicotine and it sucks).

Mileage varies for different people, of course. But dopamine is dopamine and addiction is addiction and it's neither kind nor fair to tell someone else that their addiction isn't real because there's no change in their blood chemistry.