> Just like we have always done, if something constantly disturbs day to day activities, then it is an addictive behaviour. I highly agree with your point in g

> Just like we have always done, if something constantly disturbs day to day activities, then it is an addictive behaviour. I highly agree with your point in general, but I highly disagree that this is a straightforward distinction to make. In order to tell when something is disrupting day-to-day life, we need to have agreement about what day-to-day life is and what changes to day-to-day life count as disruption. It is not true at all for me that non-addictive, beneficial forms of media have never disrupted my day-to-day life. Arguably, getting into programming itself has been the biggest disruption -- because I got into programming the way I thought about problems changed, I started spending additional money on books and computers, my hobbies and friends changed to accommodate the new activity I was focused on. You'll see the same changes in behavior, groups, friends, and time management for someone who starts getting heavily involved in a local church, or exercise, or volunteer work. We don't think of these activities as "addictive" in the traditional, harmful sense because we think that the changes they force you to make to accommodate them are desirable. And who hasn't had the experience of reading a book so powerful and compelling that they couldn't get it out of their head the next day at work, or where it changed their worldview to the extent that it affected their daily routine? These sound like pedantic arguments, but I've been in communities that disagreed about whether a behavior was addictive purely based on the idea, "well, people are spending a lot of time on it, and it's causing them not to do things that everyone else does." No, the qualification of an addictive behavior is one that disrupts what our daily life should be, and while we can easily classify some behaviors (smoking, for example) as being problematic, it is much harder to draw an objective line in the sand on everything else. How you classify addiction is partially dependent on your worldview, because your worldview helps define what "normal" functioning looks like.