You might find some mileage reading Behavior: The Control of Perception, which presents a hierarchical control system as a model of human behavior. We act to co

You might find some mileage reading Behavior: The Control of Perception, which presents a hierarchical control system as a model of human behavior. We act to control our perceptions. From this model some interesting things can be derived based on control theory, like that some disturbances are too large to be overcome (trivial example, hold your hand out level, add an object to it and watch the control system output of your muscles react to the disturbance, add a very heavy object to it), the speed at which the system can react to a disturbance is limited by the speed at which the system can perceive the disturbance, and that lower level systems act faster than higher level ones which have to form higher level perceptions from a composite of lower level ones. (Beliefs don't come into the author's model until the 8th of 9 levels -- and of course changing beliefs is also a lot harder than rotating your wrist (level 3). Also our low level musculature is capable of much higher response rates mechanically yet is limited by perception speeds.) I'm sympathetic to your argument, but I think it falls on deaf ears for those who need to understand it. There is indeed an issue with "normies" who don't have such extreme challenges and can't imagine them in that they tend to set the policies, but the non-normies arguing with you about how drugs are absolutely necessary either ignore or fight by mischaracterizing other non-normies who have experienced such challenges, yes even at extreme levels, and understand, and nevertheless successfully thought their way out of them. Or at least well enough out of them that they have a satisfying life, and sometimes with more "just happened/got older" mystery than conscious thinking. But these two sets of non-normies form multiple crab bucket mentalities which makes communication difficult. The crabs in the bucket create additional obstacles to escaping the bucket and inevitably when one escapes he tends to look down on (if not resent) the ones still in the bucket, while the ones in the bucket have similar negative feelings for the escapee, even to the extent of thinking he can't imagine what it was like inside the bucket. As an analogy for another kind of crab bucket mentality that can happen, i.e. "there's nothing wrong with me/us", look up some deaf people's thoughts on hearing aids. An attitude of "I thought myself into this way, I should be able to think myself out of it" is hard to internalize and harder to pull off. I'm not sure you can successfully argue it into someone. Especially someone who is using drugs to alleviate their situation has in some sense already given up, and perhaps rationally so -- there are effectively irreversible processes, if your walk into darkness included a fall down a cliff, you can't just "fall" to get back up, and if you get it into you to at least try becoming stronger and climbing back, you may find the cliff is just unclimbable after all. (Though there may be a way around, or a more climbable slope, that can at least get you incrementally closer even if you may never get back to where you were originally.) I think your highlight on video games / other modern media is misguided, but there is something underlying it, which I'd summarize as simply that society is sick. A healthy society does a lot to alleviate the individual pressures described all over these threads, often preempts the need for individual strategies to deal with them, but a healthy society is not one just like ours but without games/YouTube/social media/normies controlling drug access/skyscrapers/[whatever one's particular axe to grind]. What to do then, to alleviate your pressures? Sometimes it's "nothing", they'll go away on their own. Sometimes you can make a go at changing society in a measurable way (though you'll probably just make things worse if you have any impact at all). And sometimes it's drugs, or an escape into games/studies/work/farming, or therapy, or religion, or crafting your own philosophy... I don't see a universal answer. I dislike it when people suggest there is one without solid data, whether that's "more drugs!" or "just Be Well!". On the other hand it's important to look at data and recognize when highly effective treatments do exist for lots of things -- vaccines for instance, or for an obese person rather than "put the cookie down!" (were it so easy they probably wouldn't have gotten that way) it's more useful to point at keto. (Still a "horse led to water..." effect there that may have to be addressed first, but a less intensive one, as you don't have to feel starved. Calling the effect an "executive function disorder" may be useful in having a fancy label for the phenomenon, I prefer "akrasia", but focusing on the label too much risks conflating the map with the territory.)