The problem isn't as much that social media is addictive. The issue is that people aren't happy with their other options of what to do. If you have a draining job and don't have energy to put into a hobby, or you don't have lots of friends to hang out with, you're much more likely to waste time on something addictive.
The default human condition is to be slightly bored much of the day. This is true now, this was true in hunter-gatherer societies.
These kind of traps are addictive to even otherwise happy and well-connected people; there are basically no subcultures on earth that has produced individuals who voluntarily abstain from social media (only cultures where such technology is banned entirely, like the Amish).
It's not about abstaining completely. There's nothing wrong spending some time catching up with what your friends are doing using social media. It's when you spend more time than you'd like to that it becomes a problem.
I find your two concepts of boredom incredibly different one from the other.
When you have dopamine tablets as low hanging fruit you use them as much as you can so to keep your mind busy, in a simple society you don’t have those tablets all around 24/7.
People are praying on our boredom in our contemporary society, it wasn’t like that in the past.
Plus, I don’t think the default to be being slightly bored but being slightly mentally inactive, boredom is a modern concept of our very complex modernity.
I'm never bored when I'm outside and moving and with people, I could spend my whole life this way and get inside just to rest and I'm pretty sure I'd be perfectly fine, I think its so much different to be "bored" in real life than it is to be bored locked to cyberspace and screens. Maybe there's a distinction to be made between boredom and alienation? Because These are two very different things to me. I'm not so sure about your hunter-gatherer societies take really. Man has not been alienated forever, or is by default, or is condemned to being, this just isnt true. A lot of this stuff are modernity issues and modernity could very well have developed differently, even though technology would keep on its course just as it has always done.
Politics itself if implemented well, uncorrupted, could very much take care of it. The problem to me is political institutions and other human institutions became too weak and lost to capitalism so now that money has the final say in everything we became paralyzed because we can't imagine things being an inch different, which to me just doesn't make sense.
I mean why the f*ck would unhealthy stuff be impossible to control? Why can't food be healthier? Tech be healthier? Work be healthier? Why can't ignorance be fought and won? There are fallacies buried deep in the arguments people use defending that this specific configuration of stuff we have now is inevitable. All I know is History is deffo not done yet, things do change, one way or another, sooner or later.
In a way, social media is the new tabloid mixed with popularity contests and politics. Very easy to consume, mostly bullshit, mostly doomscrolling eventually, mostly divisive and tribal in the cult-like movements.
It is somewhat scary when people believe the "movements" on social media, they are mostly being engineered. People's first reactions and bad takes are what you find mostly on social media, those are usually worked out in normal reality.
There is some good to social media, for hobbies and information, but it is submerged under the astroturfed and cult/popularity/tabloid madness.
An individual's reality is whatever their brain decides to make of it in the moment. Whatever it is matters not, they're now living it, and only they can change it.
Fighting this "metaverse" from down here is pointless. Showing people close to you how to recognise the manipulation and teaching them how to harden themselves against it is far more effective and worthwhile, I believe.
In this, similar to (other) things recognized as addictions.
Eg (just first thing I found googling for this commonly heard theory/model):
> A strong belief exists among addiction treatment specialists that the primary reason addicts remain addicted is less about pleasure-seeking and more about their need to escape and dissociate from the pain of his or her (often trauma-based) emotional isolation.
> if you have a draining job and don't have energy
Never in modern times have we worked less. It is not that much the 7 or 8 hours of not-quite-daily work which make us tired, it is that on top of it come the 2 or 3 hours of not-really-interesting-but-designed-for-addiction serials watching, the 1 hour of news article browsing, the 2 hours of reading and sometimes writing hundreds of comments about what makes us rage on whichever form of forum or social media or newspaper comment section, the 1 hour on social media of keeping-connected-with-family-and-friends you wouldn't have cared about before, the 1 hour of wanking off to the hundreds of thousands of hours of free porn available in 1 click while you would never have bought a porn magazine before, the 1 hour of browsing online shops for stuff you don't really need of for which you could just have bought the first item at your supermarket without spending hours of research to get the very best one or to save 10 cents.
For most people, at least half of this time spent connected to Internet would have been free 15-20 years go. Free to cook, free to rest, free to read, free to get bored, free to do something a bit more productive or interesting than indulging into one's vices or immediately yet falsely rewarding consumption, which is what the new Internet-backed face of consumerist capitalism excels at providing.
A lot of Internet leisure now occupies many hours a day, and gets placed at the same level as work and duties, instead of being considered as one way of occupying one's free time, so now the free time seems to be only starting after all this leisure consumption has be done, thus it appears extremely reduced.
I have a ton of time and energy, and I'm still hooked. I implemented a bunch of countermeasures, but I'm still not in control. I don't think that the lack of alternatives is entirely to blame.
