Portraits of an American Dopamine Eater

Taylor Lorenz, the former New York Times and Washington Post tech journalist, recently went on The Guardian’s Stateside podcast, where she told host Carter Sherman that social media is not addictive. “You wanting to communicate and chat with your friends every day is not an addiction,” Lorenz said. “And to frame it that way is incredibly harmful and anti-science.” 

To her credit, Sherman pushed back strongly, but I don’t think I need to cite the full contents of that conversation to stress that Lorenz’s framing is highly suspect. I heard only the protestations of an addict fully in thrall. Lorenz offers a highly visible example of the realities of our addiction-riddled culture. But she’s far from alone. Screens and social media have warped millions of American minds, including high-profile journalists like Lorenz and some of our most powerful lawmakers. More generally, our attention economy incentivizes the profane degradations of fame-seeking and celebrity culture. Elsewhere, sports betting and prediction markets have supercharged gambling habits, made all the more potent by perpetual connectivity of smartphones. 

While these manifestations may vary, America is in many ways the prisoner of the smartphone and the infinite mirror world beneath its glass screen. Too many of us—from college-aged sports betting addicts to journalists and political operatives to our richest and most powerful businessmen and politicians—have been deranged by these habits and enslaved to the distortive effects of trying to get our next hit. I want to explore this in more detail below.

You can’t post your way out

Lorenz is not patient zero for social media addiction, but she is a good example of its deleterious and transformative effects. She was once a stock figure of the online progressive left. But Lorenz has recently boasted that Elon Musk’s X, the site once known as Twitter and which Musk took over with an explicit goal of turning into an anti-woke “free speech” haven, is now roaring and “better than ever.” X continues to be a festering pit of far-right activity and remains a key site for the proliferation of revenge porn and CSAM by users, some produced by X's built-in AI tool Grok. 

Lorenz has continued to insist in subsequent days that X is a good experience, a position that seems wholly derived from her dependence on the platform and the hits of networking and social affirmation it can provide, all this despite her own admission that she also fields “awful” replies on a regular basis. There’s something of Thomas De Quincey to Lorenz, who has credited an adolescent fixation on Tumblr for beginning her journey to turning her extensive use of social media into a prolific career writing about it. Her most recent book is a paean to entrepreneurial gumption of never logging off—people following opposite and much less wise advice than my colleague Katherine Alejandra Cross has offered. Lorenz's Extremely Online is a journalistic work about the rise of content creators over the last two decades, but there’s an undercurrent of confessionalism to her public persona.  

Lorenz told Wired this year that “I think caring about screen time is stupid. It's a waste of mental energy.” In the same interview she admitted to screen time of around 17 hours a day. Across platforms like X and Instagram, she regularly celebrates heavy social media use and castigates those who warn about addiction or the risks to young users. Lorenz’s repeated assertion is that content cannot create addicts: 

"Before doom scrolling btw there was the exact same moral panic about TV, radio, books and more. Instead of feeding moral panics over content we need to fight the moral panic that mass surveillance laws are predicated on"

This is a slippery comparison. At its best, it’s not unlike the distinction between beer and high-proof liquor. As to the substance of her claim that social media isn’t addictive and that calling it such is “very harmful and anti-science,” the reality is that researchers disagree. Plenty of psychologists and other academics do see social media as something that can be addictive. Writing about the research on social media and teens at The Conversation in 2023, a group of Université de Montréal academics noted:

"Social media are designed to be addictive—driven and reinforced by dopamine. Teens and emerging adults are susceptible to acceptance and rejection through social media, making them particularly responsive to such media and emotionally addicted. 

"Daily use of social media is associated with a significantly increased risk of self-harm and depression for adolescents. The added sleep cycle disruptions explain part of the association with depressive symptoms."

Other research has suggested that total screen time is less important than the nature of social media use, with some children who have managed screen time exhibiting increased problematic use when granted access. There is indeed debate within the scientific community about whether social media can be classed as addictive the way we think of other habits like gambling and substance use, but there is also considerable agreement that heavy social media use is most dangerous for younger users. 

It’s natural that much of our focus tends to land on how social media affects young people. But the last decade of politics has put on stark display how social media use and network effects can push people in the very highest positions in American life to places of mental deterioration and emotional desolation. 

Last year, Joe Perticone at The Bulwark wrote a fascinating look at Senator Mike Lee’s descent into the slop swamps of X, helped along by the feedback loop of social media engagement and the algorithm. Lee spent Labor Day weekend 2025 extremely online, posting AI images and fixating on MAGA culture-war talking points. As Perticone observed,

An analysis of Lee’s activity over the three-day break shows that he posted his own content, reposted other accounts, or in some cases reposted himself more than 70 times. In addition, he replied over 200 times to other accounts. Much of Lee’s own content included images and videos he generated using AI. 

This is absurd behavior for a sitting Senator. You would like to think someone with his job wouldn’t be so mindless as to engage in this sort of online behavior to begin with. But also you’d assume someone as busy as a member of the United States Senate would want to enjoy a major holiday weekend with his family and friends.

Lee’s obsessive social media habits have led him down not only laughably clownish paths, but also some unsettlingly dark ones as well. In June of 2025, after the murders of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, Lee posted an image of her masked attacker with the caption “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” trying to associate the monstrous crimes with the state's governor Tim Walz.

Lee was already a right-wing Republican, but we shouldn’t discount the role of hours on X in creating the man we are more familiar with today. There is mounting evidence that X, its feeds torqued by its owner and chief power-user Elon Musk, pushes its users to the right. Musk himself appears to be in an extended radicalizing feedback loop with his website, going back to before he took it over. 

And, of course, there is the president. Donald Trump’s online posting habits have become more concerning than ever. He now regularly goes on bizarre tirades in the wee hours, leveling paranoid accusations against his enemies and sharing unhinged AI hagiography of him and his administration. 

All of this makes something like Lorenz’s extremist, indulgent position that social media is just chatting with friends appear wholly untenable. It’s a self-serving lie for someone who pronounced in 2024, “I don’t want to be a full-time writer; I want to be an Internet personality.” And it’s here that our digital dopefiendism overlaps with another contemporary American poison: celebrity. 

Everything is page six

The idea of the influencer, of the self-made and self-packaged celebrity figure in its contemporary form, is rooted in the rise of reality television in the early 2000s, a phenomenon that coincided with our burgeoning social web. I have written before in this column about the ways our modern media creates an increasingly suffocating atmosphere of voyeurism. Now, social media is so ubiquitous and so deeply penetrating into our lives, that it is an engine for celebrity all on its own. And, when fame flows from older media like television and print, social media massively enhances our ability to engage in the voyeuristic celebrity culture around it.  

The Trump era has treated us to a parade of individuals who have tried to parlay insider tell-alls and political apostasies into moments in the pop culture sun. These individuals are frequently written off as grifters, a word that has obtained zeitgeist status since 2016. But the grift we are describing isn’t usually just about money. It’s also about fame, about finding ways to extract that sweet hit of public attention and the concomitant likes, follows, and fans that can bring. 

Through qualitative research with famous people, psychologists Donna Rockwell and David Giles have formulated a four-phase theory of celebrity. Crucially, the second phase, after the initial dizzying achievement of fame, is addictive behavior directed towards staying famous. Speaking to ABC News (Australia), musician Ben Lee, who first gained popularity as a young teenager, said “It's usually the first flushes of fame that are the most disorientating, and it comes with an intense sense of drama."

I think this perspective helps open up a lot of the behavior we see from influencers, reality TV stars, and even increasingly in politics itself. Candidates, commentators, and even staffers now have the chance to be more than public servants and news figures, but personalities with followings and brands. Stoking debate as either a demagogic candidate or a controversial commentator can be a quick, superficially easy way to obtain the fame and attention our political media environment offers. What else explains the obvious desires of the Daily Wire crew to become movie stars, or the mix of mean-girl commentary and pro-Russia lies peddled by “left-wing” commentator Briahna Joy Gray?

This is a dynamic that chases after the ways reality television helped remake who can get famous and how. And what some of the most successful reality stars proved is just as observable in our contemporary politics: you are a brand. Another truism? Conflict and drama sell, even at extremes. 

More generally, the ubiquity of smartphones and widespread use of apps like Instagram and TikTok mean that we are all theoretically fingertips away from launching our own star into the sky. Just the seeking of such attention can itself blur into disordered behavior, and this matters because we all now have the means and incentive to try and become minor public figures.

Fame-seeking is a gamble, even if it’s not always recognized as such. You don’t know what can happen in your attempts to cultivate and obtain celebrity. And even once you achieve fame, our tabloid-style media is as likely to pillory and villainize you as to turn you into man or woman of the year. 

So it’s not surprising that the second Trump administration and the path to it have been even more corrupt and opportunistic than the first time around. Administration officials have behaved like influencers and crooked investors, churning out self-promoting photos, books, and other products like little fascist Kardashians. This has trickled down to low-level staffers. Everyone seems to have a story, from F-list Trump flacks to “why I left the left” hacks. In short, while the pursuit of a paycheck is usually what we mean when we talk about grift in politics, it’s useful to remember that celebrity itself, even if narrow in scope, can be the score people are looking for. 

The house always wins, and the house is in your pocket

New survey data from Siena suggests that 25% of all Americans and close to 50% of men aged 18–49 have an active sports betting account. This is gobsmacking when we step back and consider that this does not simply mean half of men under 50 have gambled but rather that they are engaged in betting via mobile platforms that make betting an ever-present activity. 

Reporting on this crisis for ProPublica, Jake Pearson intentionally gambled on some of the leading betting platforms, using increasingly risky and problematic behavior, purposely exposing himself to the full barrage of tools and tricks these companies deploy to bait and hook their users. Pearson stresses the way the apps and their designs, teeming with push notifications and one-click betting options, are especially predatory:

"Computer scientists have a term for this choice of user design: They call it a 'dark pattern.' Critics say this is a key way that apps essentially trick you into subscribing to or purchasing things you don’t want or need with just one click.

"And boy, was I getting fed opportunities to click. I’d selected the open settings for notifications on DraftKings, and as a result I was just getting pummeled with push alerts to my phone. Sometimes there’d be six in a day, offering BOOSTS. In the app, they’ve even got their own tagline: 'BOOSTS DON’T STOP.'"

The old Vegas adage that “the house always wins” is a warning to gamblers whatever their luck to cut their losses or take their winnings and leave the betting floor before this statistical fact of nature asserts itself. In other words, get out while you can. And that physical space used to mean something. Once upon a time, sports betting was confined to Vegas, and gambling in general was the province of geographically defined locations like reservation casinos and hotel resorts. But Pearson’s experience is what happens when the house comes to you. 

There’s a grim circularity to betting apps aping the push notification tools of the social media giants considering how social media platforms perfected their own dopamine distribution systems by turning feeds, likes, and comments into a slot machine interaction. The stories of how these platforms and apps have affected true addicts and problem gamblers are harrowing. Take Adam, a 33-year-old Massachusetts man whose story was reported by Patrick Madden and WBUR last year:

With the DraftKings and FanDuel apps on his phone, Adam could bet on multiple games at once. Over time, his wagers got more frequent and riskier as he tried to win the money back.

When he was out with his girlfriend, he'd repeatedly excuse himself — sometimes to a restroom — to go use his phone.

“What I was doing was checking scores and putting in more bets, things of that sort,” said Adam. “I would be up at all hours of the night — betting on this sport, that sport, sports in other countries that I knew nothing about."

One night in February 2024, as the gambling losses piled up, he decided to put everything he had left on a single Bruins game.

"I walked into our bedroom where she was sleeping and I woke her up," he said. Boston had lost.

What happens to our country as this cohort of men age into what should be their peak earning years and then into retirement? What will our society and economy look like then? The financial risks are self-evident to the outside observer, but gambling addiction and the toll taken by losing also contribute to depression and suicide.

But instead of fighting what is clearly an emerging crisis, we have some of the biggest names in professional sports acting as spokespeople for DraftKings and Kalshi. LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal promote DraftKings. Omnipresent ESPN personality Pat McAfee promotes FanDuel. Giannis Antetokounmpo isn't just a spokesperson for Kalshi, he’s a shareholder. The only winners in America’s burgeoning gambling crisis are the companies and the already super-rich athletes willing to leverage their status as heroes to millions of fans to hook a generation of young men on a devastating habit. 

Detox democracy 

I wish I had a conclusion with a simple, programmatic answer for how to pull out of these crises. Yes, we should implement better regulations. In cases like sports betting, we should fight to force it back into its Vegas-sized jar. But the habits that our environment saturated with social media and mobile gambling has enabled are still built on more fundamental human predispositions. 

We can’t get out of this just by trying to restrict vice. We have to find ways to rebuild the affirmative and mutually edifying communities that provide a social bedrock for a healthy democratic society. In my columns, I have repeatedly made recourse to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone thesis. It remains a lighthouse for me. 

We have to go out and create the physical, analog spaces where constructive relationships can flourish. And those are crucial because addictive habits are not just about the thing we are hooked on. They’re about the existential needs that define the human experience—love, purpose, security, control. As Dr. Gabor Maté observes in the preface to his seminal book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction:

No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side. I believe there is one addiction process, whether it is manifested in the lethal substance dependencies of my Downtown Eastside patients; the frantic self-soothing of overeaters or shopaholics; the obsessions of gamblers, sexaholics, and compulsive Internet users; or the socially acceptable and even admired behaviors of the workaholic. Drug addicts are often dismissed and discounted as unworthy of empathy and respect. In telling their stories my intent is twofold: to help their voices to be heard and to shed light on the origins and nature of their ill-fated struggle to overcome suffering through substance abuse. They have much in common with the society that ostracizes them.

This is not ultimately an essay about other people. It’s a self-portrait and a warning. Lorenz places what others call addiction on other needs and wants in kids’ lives—boredom, economic turmoil, lack of parental presence. But rather than this being a way to differentiate addiction from other behaviors, scholars like Maté insist that all addiction exists on a “continuum” driven by deeper emotional and psychological factors, a constellation of responses to these essential human needs. 

Featured Image is a personal sitting on the ground with a tablet, by Mia Anderson / Unsplash