I believe pg's contention of why more things become addictive is too simplistic. Sure, we make more of what we want, but not everything we want is addictive, an

I believe pg's contention of why more things become addictive is too simplistic. Sure, we make more of what we want, but not everything we want is addictive, and not everything we want has the capacity for becoming addictive. While reading the article, I couldn't help but think back to a David Foster Wallace essay (I think it was E Unibus Pluram, on the nature of television) that proposed the following definition of addictiveness: Something is addictive in the worst way if it proposes itself as a solution to the problems that the addiction itself creates. For example: - I enjoy practicing Judo, but Judo isn't addictive. It isn't because it isn't a solution to the problems associated with it (i.e.: I don't play more Judo to elevate injuries). Whereas if I drink and feel guilty for drinking, I can drink more to elevate the guilt, which just leads me to feeling more guilty, and so then I drink some more, etc et all. (Or if I feel guilty because I'm on the Internet so much, I can go find a game or surf Facebook or do fake work to elevate the guilt - so I can 'worry about it later', and this leads me down a vicious cycle of procrastination.) The point I'm making here is that not everything we want will turn out addictive - that is, not everything can propose itself as a solution to the problems it creates. Those traits are limited to only a few kinds of things. And so it would perhaps be better to say that addiction is accelerating because accelerating technology allows us to create more things, and some of these things are bound to have those addictive traits.