I sit and talk into a small recorder, which I have always done when it’s late at night, and I don’t feel like putting pen to paper. Right now, it’s a Plaud. Most of what I record is fine, the kind of thing that disappears if you don’t catch it.

The other day I caught this.

A commercial came on for a video game. Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred. That’s the actual name. There was an earlier one called Vessel of Hatred. I know the obvious argument is about games and kids and violence, and I don’t really want to have that argument. It’s been litigated for forty years and exhausted everyone. What stayed with me was smaller and stranger.

The product is called Hatred.

Not “the villain in the game is hatred.” Not “the game explores themes of hatred.” The expansion is named hatred. Hatred is the brand. Hatred is what you buy. The marketing department sat in a room and decided that the word most likely to land hardest on a TV screen during a commercial break was hatred.

And they were probably right.

Because I don’t think this is a story about kids. I think it’s a story about us.

Somewhere along the way, hatred stopped being a thing we were embarrassed to sell. It became a thing that sells. Not as a warning. Not as a cautionary tale. As the headline. As the offer. The product equivalent of writing YES, HATRED, THAT ONE on the box and watching the box move.

I’m not arguing the game shouldn’t exist. I’m noticing what it tells us about the moment this title landed. That a marketing team workshopped it and won. The world is in a mess. Everyone who is paying attention agrees on that much, even when they agree on nothing else. And in that mess, the products that travel are often the products that name the mess as the feature.

I noticed it because I’m old. That’s not a flex because at my age, flexing hurts, and it’s not an apology. It’s just true that people inside a culture stop smelling the house they live in, and visitors notice the smell immediately. I’m a visitor now. I get to notice.

THE WORD ON THE BOX 

The thing about a name is that it always gives something away. It tells you what a brand thinks will get through, what kind of signal it believes people are ready to receive, and how much work it expects one word to do. A name can be gentle, clever, blunt, or trying a little too hard, but it’s never nothing.

That’s what stayed with me about hatred being used this way. Not buried inside the story, or held at a distance, or treated as dangerous, corrosive, sad, human, ugly. Put right there on the box instead, polished up and made sellable. The stranger thing is that the word doesn’t seem to need much explaining anymore. It arrives already understood.

A brand name has a job. It has to carry mood, promise, category, audience, and energy. It has to move fast because people don’t stop to study most things. They glance, they feel something, they decide whether to lean in or keep moving. So when a product leads with a word like hatred, it’s not an accident. It’s a bet on recognition. It assumes the audience will know what to do with it, and that the word will carry enough heat to pull the eye.

That’s the part that feels different. Hatred is not being smuggled in under the guise of metaphor. It’s not dressed up as conflict or darkness or revenge, some cleaner and safer version of the same appetite. It’s standing in the front window. And maybe that’s where the question begins. Not whether a brand is allowed to use the word, of course it is, but what happens when the hardest word in the room becomes one of the easiest to sell.

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THIS IS NOT REALLY ABOUT VIDEO GAMES 

The easy version of this piece would be to turn it into a complaint about video games. I don’t want to do that. For one thing, I don’t know enough about the game to make that argument honestly. For another, the broader argument has been going on forever, and most people in it already know what they think.

What caught me was the marketing instinct. The commercial confidence of it. The sense that hatred is no longer too much, too dark, too blunt, or too ugly to carry the offer. It can sit there in the title and do its job.

That feels like the more useful thing to notice. Not because this one game explains anything on its own, but because it belongs to a larger weather system. We are surrounded by products, headlines, shows, campaigns, platforms, and personalities that understand how well anger travels. They know resentment has velocity, conflict gets shared, and the darker feelings are often easier to activate than the better ones.

This is not about video games. It’s about what the culture has made available to sell. It’s about the emotional inventory sitting on the shelf now. And hatred, apparently, is in stock.

BRANDS DON’T INVENT THE APPETITE. THEY READ IT. 

Brands are not innocent in all this, but they’re rarely magicians either. They don’t create desire from a blank page. They listen for it. They study where the attention goes, which words carry voltage, which emotions make people pause long enough to care. Then they build around what they find.

A name like “Lord of Hatred” is not just a creative choice. It is a reading of the room. Someone believed the word would work because the culture had already made room for it to work.

That’s the harder truth. Hatred sells because some version of it is already moving through the bloodstream. Not always in the obvious ways. It can show up as contempt, tribal comfort, or the little private pleasure of seeing the people we dislike get what we think they deserve. The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude, which means exactly that, pleasure from someone else’s pain. Those wacky, wacky Germans.

That’s not a gaming problem. That’s not even just a marketing problem. That’s a human problem with a media plan.

Marketing is very good at finding the part of us that is already awake. It can put a handle on a feeling and make the vague thing visible. Once that feeling has a name, a campaign, and a little universe around it, it becomes easier to carry around — and harder to put down.

That may be the part we don’t like to admit. The market doesn’t only sell us what we need. It sells us what we’re willing to recognize in ourselves. Hatred would not make it onto the box if everyone recoiled from it. It gets there because enough people understand the signal, even if they would never describe themselves that way.

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THE MOMENT TEACHES THE MARKETER 

This is where naming gets serious. A name is not just a label you stick on something after the real work is done. It is part of the work. It tells people where to look, what to feel, and what kind of emotional contract they are entering.

That does not mean every name has to be gentle or morally spotless. Nobody wants a culture where every product sounds like herbal tea for nervous accountants. There is room for names that are sharp, dark, or unsettling. The issue is not whether a brand can use difficult language. The issue is whether anyone in the room stops long enough to ask what the language is doing.

That question matters because marketing has a way of making things feel normal. Put a word in the right typeface, repeat it enough, wrap it in music and motion, and the word starts to change temperature. After a while, it no longer arrives as a shock. It becomes part of the room.

At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time on the hidden work language does before anyone buys, shares, or repeats. The best branding does not just grab attention — it understands the cost of the attention it grabs. A name can do its job and still be cheap. It can be memorable for the wrong reason. Those aren’t always popular things to say in a meeting where everyone wants the sharpest hook. But they should probably be said more often.

THE LINE QUESTION 

The question is not whether a brand is allowed to sell something. Most of the time, the answer is yes. A brand can sell darkness, conflict, or danger. It can push against good taste. It can live in the uglier parts of the imagination. That has always been part of art, entertainment, and commerce. The better question is whether every sellable feeling deserves to be sold as hard as we know how to sell it.

That’s not a censorship argument. It’s not a panic button. It’s the question that seems to disappear when the room gets excited about a strong idea. A name can hit, a campaign can have teeth, and the audience can respond before anyone asks what everyone is actually nodding to.

Maybe that’s the line. Not a rule written in permanent ink. Not a committee with clipboards deciding what words are allowed. Just a moment in the room where someone asks: are we amplifying something we actually want more of?

That question won’t always kill the idea. It probably shouldn’t. Dark ideas can be honest, and uncomfortable language can earn its place. But there is a difference between exploring a hard human feeling and turning that feeling into the cleanest hook in the room.

That difference matters. Not because brands are responsible for the whole moral condition of the planet — that would be a ridiculous burden to put on a naming meeting. But brands participate. They add weight. They make certain feelings easier to repeat. They help decide what starts to feel ordinary. And once something feels ordinary, it gets much harder to notice.

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THE TAKEAWAY 

Maybe the point is not that a video game used the word hatred. The point is that the word felt commercially useful enough to lead with, and most of us barely blinked.

That is what brands should pay attention to. A name can land and still normalize something while it lands. The strongest hook in the room can also be the cheapest one. Speed through the culture is not the same as worth.

At ThoughtLab, we believe language does work before anyone notices it working. A name can invite, sharpen, or sell. It can also make something ugly feel ordinary if enough craft is wrapped around it. That does not mean brands need to become timid. It means they need to become more awake.

Every brand is answering a question, whether it means to or not: what are we putting into the world, and what are we asking people to stop finding strange?

I’m not sure where the line is. I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But I think there should be people in the room willing to ask whether a sellable thing is also a thing worth selling.

I’m going back to the Plaud. Something else will arrive.

My father had this little quirk. Whenever we kids did something wrong, he would pull us aside and say, “Let me tell you a story.” Then he’d basically say, if you do that again, I’m gonna kick your ass. Simple, clear, to the point. However, as I got older, I began to realize he wasn’t really telling us a story. A story has a hero, a journey, guides, and lessons. My father’s stories had him kicking our asses.

Did we go on a journey? Nope. Did we have guides in these stories? No. It was Dad kicking the asses of his kids. Not a story, well certainly not a good story. There were never any surprises. A mean character never had a change of heart. A main character never discovered their purpose. His stories could be boiled down to seven words: “Do it again, I’ll kick your ass.” But no matter what happened, Dad would always start with, “Let me tell you a story.”

Storytelling is really big in branding. Everything has a story, an arc, a main character, and on and on. Brands don’t say to customers, “Here’s a story, buy this product or service, or you’ll get your ass kicked.” Why? Two reasons. One, that’s not something you say to a customer. Threatening has never been a good sales technique. Two, because it’s not really a story. “Once upon a time, I got my ass kicked, so I bought a jet ski” is not a good story.

As a copywriter, I find story important. Finding a brand’s story, the story of a logo, and all sorts of storytelling go into branding and marketing. But from time to time, I have to wonder whether storytelling is really the be-all and end-all I was taught to believe. Does everything need a story, or have we started calling everything a story because it makes the work sound deeper than it is?

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Not Everything Is a Story

That’s the thing about the word story. It can make almost anything sound more important than it is. A company history becomes a story. A mission statement becomes a story. A homepage becomes a story. Suddenly, every piece of brand communication is being treated as if it needs a main character, an emotional arc, and a little music swelling beneath it.

But sometimes a thing is just a thing. A product description is there to describe the product. An About page is there to tell people who you are, what you do, and why you exist. A service page needs to explain the service before it takes anyone on a journey. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, there’s something kind of refreshing about it. 

The problem is not storytelling. The problem is calling everything storytelling because the word makes the work feel deeper. Story sounds warm, human, and meaningful, so we keep reaching for it, even when what we actually have is a message, a claim, a promise, an explanation, or a perfectly useful bit of information.

And those things matter too. A message can be powerful. A promise can mean something. An explanation can be generous. Information can be exactly what someone needs. Not every sentence has to carry the burden of myth.

A real story has movement. Something changes. Someone wants something. Something gets in the way. There’s pressure, consequence, discovery, or at least some kind of shift from where we began. Without that, you may have good copy. You may have smart positioning. You may have a clean paragraph that does its job beautifully. But you probably don’t have a story.

Why Brands Love the Word So Much

There’s a reason storytelling became such a big word in branding. It sounds warmer than strategy, deeper than messaging, and more human than content. Nobody wants to sit in a room and say, “Let’s organize some useful information in a way people can understand.” That may be the right thing to do, but it doesn’t exactly make the lights flicker. 

Story gives the work a little glow. A product can start to feel like part of something bigger. A company history can become more than a timeline. An About page can carry emotional weight rather than just listing names, dates, values, and a polished team photo. 

And honestly, some of that is good. Story helps people care. It gives a brand shape. A founder’s frustration becomes a reason for being. A customer senses there’s a human mind behind the business, not just a group of people trapped forever inside a slide deck. 

The trouble starts when the word becomes automatic. Suddenly, brand exercises have to uncover the story, copy has to tell the story, and presentations promise a narrative arc even when the real job is much simpler than that. At a certain point, story stops being a useful tool and becomes a fancy label we slap on anything that has more than two paragraphs. 

That’s when the word begins to blur. Story starts to mean message, positioning, brand platform, or whatever happens to be on the screen when someone says, “What’s the story here?” 

And maybe that’s the real problem. Not that brands care about story too much, but that we’ve made the word so large it can barely do its job anymore.

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A Real Story Needs Tension

A real story needs something to push against. It doesn’t have to be dramatic in the movie trailer sense. Nobody needs to be running through an airport, chasing a stolen briefcase, or standing in the rain realizing they’ve misunderstood love for the last twenty years. But something has to be unsettled. Someone has to want something, and it has to be difficult enough to make us care what happens next. This is also where my father’s stories fell a little short. There was tension, technically. I’ll give him that. But tension is more than when, where, and how I might get my ass kicked if I did the thing again. That was more of a warning with stage direction. It had stakes, sure, but not much discovery. There was no mystery, no turn, no deeper meaning hiding under the threat. The whole thing started with “let me tell you a story” and ended exactly where you knew it would end.

That’s where a lot of brand storytelling gets thin. The language says story, but the actual material says summary. A company was founded. A product was created. A team believed in quality. A service was built to help people. All of that may be true, and some of it may even be useful, but it doesn’t become a story just because we put it in chronological order and add a few warm adjectives.

The tension is usually hiding somewhere else. It’s in the thing the founder couldn’t stop noticing. It’s in the problem everyone else had learned to tolerate. It’s in the frustration that kept showing up until someone finally said, there has to be a better way to do this. That’s where the story begins to breathe a little. Not in the date the company opened its doors, but in the reason those doors needed to open in the first place.

This matters because people can feel the difference. They may not sit there analyzing structure or asking where the inciting incident is, because thankfully, most people have better things to do. But they can tell when something has weight. They can tell when a brand is circling something real instead of decorating a timeline. They can tell when the words are pointing to actual human pressure, not just arranging facts into a prettier shape.

That’s why tension matters. Without it, you may have a nice origin paragraph. You may have a polished About page. You may have a neat little sequence of events that moves from “we saw a need” to “we built a solution” to “now we’re passionate about helping customers.” But story needs more than movement from one sentence to the next. It needs a reason to keep listening.

Sometimes Clarity Beats Storytelling

This is where brands can get themselves into trouble. They take something that needs to be clear and try to make it feel profound. A simple point gets wrapped in a journey. A useful answer gets buried under so much atmosphere that the customer has to dig through the story just to figure out what’s being offered. Not every brand moment needs that. A product page may just need to explain the product. A service page may need to say what the service is, who it helps, and why it matters. A pricing page may need to be a pricing page, where the real hero isn’t the founder or the bold new future of the industry. It’s the price being easy to find. There’s nothing small about clarity. In fact, clarity can be one of the most generous things a brand offers. It respects the person on the other side. It says, ” We know you’re busy. We know you came here for a reason. We’re not going to make you wander through our emotional landscape before we tell you what we do.”

That doesn’t mean the writing has to be dry. It doesn’t mean the brand has to become a vending machine with a logo. Clear doesn’t have to mean flat. It can still have voice, warmth, and a point of view. It can still feel human. It just doesn’t have to pretend every sentence is part of some grand narrative arc.

Sometimes the strongest copy is not the copy that tells the biggest story. It’s the copy that knows exactly what job it has, does that job well, and gets out of the way before it starts wearing a cape.

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The Danger of Story-Shaped Fog

When brands force story where it doesn’t belong, the writing starts to get foggy. Simple ideas stretch into big emotional claims. Clear points become soft and rounded. Everything starts to sound important, but not always useful. You can feel the copy trying very hard to mean something, even when the thing underneath it might have been stronger if someone had just said it plainly.

That’s how you end up with brand language that sounds good until you ask what it actually means. “Our journey began with a simple belief.” “We’re redefining what’s possible.” “We exist to empower people to live better.” None of these are automatically bad, but they become a problem when they float above the real thing. What belief? What possibility? Better how? For whom? In what actual way?

Story-shaped fog happens when brands confuse emotional language with emotional truth. Instead of making the idea more specific, they make the language bigger. The message gets dressed up, but it doesn’t get clearer. 

And people feel that too. Maybe they don’t stop and think, this brand has confused narrative framing with strategic clarity. That would be a strange thing to think while shopping for socks or looking for a dentist. But they can feel when the words are doing too much. They can feel when a brand is asking for emotional investment it hasn’t earned yet.

A real story reveals something. Fog hides something. And if the audience has to keep pushing through all that mood just to understand what the brand actually does, the story is not helping. It’s getting in the way.

The Better Question

Maybe the better question is not always, “What’s the story?” Maybe the better question is, “What is this really?”

Because once you ask that, the work gets more honest. Maybe there really is a story. Maybe there’s a real tension, a meaningful shift, and a reason to care. But at least now the story has to prove it belongs there. 

But maybe it’s not a story. Maybe it’s just a message, a promise, or one clean sentence that tells people what they need to know. 

That doesn’t make it less valuable. It might make it more valuable. The job is not to turn everything into a story. The job is to understand what each piece of communication needs to do, then let it do that thing as clearly and honestly as possible.

The answer might be story, strategy, or plain language with a little life in it. The real skill is knowing the difference. 

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The Takeaway

Storytelling still matters. I believe that. This isn’t an argument against story, and I don’t want it to be. Stories help people understand. They help people remember. They give shape to things that might otherwise feel scattered or flat. A good brand story can carry belief, tension, purpose, personality, and a reason to care all at once.

But not everything is a story. Some things are messages, promises, or useful pieces of information standing there, doing honest work, asking not to be dragged into a hero’s journey against their will. 

That’s where brands need to be more careful. When story is real, use it. When the tension is there, shape it. When there’s a human reason behind the brand, bring it forward and let people feel it. But when clarity would serve the audience better, don’t bury it under narrative just because “storytelling” sounds more important in the meeting.

At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time helping brands find the difference. Sometimes there’s a story worth uncovering. Other times, the better work is sharpening the message and stripping away the fog until the idea is clear enough to use. 

Because the goal is not to call everything a story. The goal is to say the thing in the way it deserves to be said.

Addiction is no joke. No matter what form it takes, it can wreck your life. I know because I’m a recovering alcoholic who hasn’t had a drink in ten years. If you’re in recovery too, you know ten years doesn’t mean the story is over. Encouragement still matters. Understanding still matters. Every bit of reinforcement helps. Addiction is insidious. It lies to you. It makes destructive things feel necessary. And one of the hardest parts about addiction is that people often only recognize it when the damage looks obvious.

Alcohol is easy for people to understand. Drugs are easy for people to understand. But addiction doesn’t only attach itself to things that look dangerous from a distance. It can also hide inside behaviors that seem normal, productive, even healthy. Take working out. Loving exercise is one thing. Structuring your life around it because you enjoy it, feel better, and want to stay healthy is not the same as needing it so badly that missing one day makes you anxious, pushes you to ignore pain, and starts costing you relationships. That’s the shift. Something good stops being a choice and starts feeling like a command.

That difference matters because it helps explain something a lot of people still struggle to take seriously: social media addiction.

I was thinking about this while reading about the lawsuit against Meta and Google. The case centers on whether social platforms can be held accountable for designing experiences that pull people in, keep them there, and contribute to real harm. What struck me wasn’t just the legal argument. It was how familiar the logic felt. If you’ve lived with addiction, you learn something important. The object changes. The mechanism doesn’t.

Functioning is not the same as living

For a long time, I told myself I didn’t have a problem because I was still functioning. I never drank before an audition, a rehearsal, or a shoot day. I was never late. I was never hungover at work. I was never drunk on set, onstage, or on air. From the outside, I looked fine. More than fine, really. Responsible. Reliable. In control.

That’s one of the quieter lies addiction tells you. It teaches you to use competence as proof. It tells you that as long as you’re still showing up, still doing the work, still keeping your life moving, then nothing’s really wrong. It gives you such a dramatic idea of what damage looks like that anything short of collapse starts to seem acceptable.

But functioning isn’t the same as living. Never was, never will be.

What I couldn’t see then was how much of my inner life had already been handed over. Even when I was doing what I needed to do, my mind was somewhere else. A huge amount of my mental energy was going toward when I’d next be free to drink, what I’d drink, how I’d get it, whether I’d go out for it or just go home to the bottles waiting in my apartment. That was the real occupation of my mind. Everything else had to fight for what was left.

And when that much of your attention is wrapped up in the anticipation of escape, you’re not really present for your own life. You may be there physically. You may be doing the work. You may be saying the right thing at the right time and hitting every mark. But some central part of you is already gone. Your body’s in the room. Your mind’s on the clock.

That’s one of the big things people miss about addiction. They think the problem starts when life visibly falls apart. They look for missed appointments, public mess, and obvious ruin. Sometimes that comes. Sometimes it comes fast. But a lot of the time, addiction starts doing its real damage much earlier and much more quietly. It steals focus, narrows your world, and makes your life smaller before it makes it look broken.

That was true for me. Alcohol didn’t blow up my life in one dramatic burst. It slowly reorganized it. It changed what I prioritized, what I avoided, and how much of me was actually available to the people, the work, and the relationships in front of me. Even before the consequences looked dramatic, the cost was already there. I was living in a reduced state and calling it fine.

That’s why the phrase functioning alcoholic can be so misleading. It almost sounds reassuring, as if the word functioning somehow takes the edge off the word alcoholic. Like competence cancels out compulsion. It doesn’t. It just means the damage is easier to hide, excuse, and overlook. Sometimes it’s easier for you to miss too.

The truth is simple and hard. A person can be highly functional and deeply unwell. A person can be productive, punctual, talented, outwardly steady, and still be giving an addiction the best part of their attention. That doesn’t make the addiction less real. In some ways, it makes it harder to confront, because the absence of obvious collapse gives you endless reasons to postpone the truth.

That was the trap. Not disaster, but delay. Not the spectacular crash, but the quiet permission to keep going. And that’s part of why addiction can be so hard to recognize in other forms. If we’ve been taught to only notice it once life becomes visibly unmanageable, we’ll miss the earlier signs. We’ll miss the shrinking freedom, the internal dependency, the way a person’s attention and emotional life can start revolving around something long before the outside world decides it counts as a problem.

That blindness matters. It matters in private life and in culture. Because once you understand that addiction doesn’t always announce itself with chaos, you start to see how easily it can hide inside ordinary routines, accepted habits, and systems that look harmless from the outside.

People only easily recognize the addictions they understand

One of the stranger things about addiction is how quickly people believe in the ones they already understand and how slowly they recognize the ones they don’t. Most people don’t need alcohol explained to them. They get it. They know what it looks like when drinking starts running someone’s life. Same with drugs. The danger is already built into the public story. People know what they’re supposed to notice there, so they notice it faster.

But once addiction shows up in a form that looks ordinary, useful, or socially acceptable, people get weird about it. They minimize it. They joke about it. They treat it like bad discipline or a bad habit instead of asking whether something deeper is going on.

I had that reaction myself when I started reading about social media addiction. My first thought was, how could anyone be addicted to that? To me, social media has always felt hostile. Loud, negative, brain-frying, exhausting. I’ve never looked at it and thought, yes, here’s something I want more of in my life. So the idea of being addicted to it didn’t land naturally for me at first. Then I caught myself.

Because I know better than that. The fact that I don’t feel the pull of a thing doesn’t mean the pull isn’t real. There are people who can have one drink with dinner and forget the bottle exists. Good for them. Truly. That was never my relationship with alcohol. To me, bourbon was glorious. It felt like relief, escape, reward, anesthesia, and celebration all at once. Someone else could take a sip and think, how could anyone get addicted to that? I could wonder how anyone could possibly stop.

That’s the part people miss. We tend to assume our own instincts are universal. If something doesn’t hook us, we assume it shouldn’t hook anyone. If we can put it down, we assume everyone else can do the same. But addiction doesn’t care about that logic. It doesn’t ask whether the thing makes sense to outsiders. It only asks whether it’s found the right opening in the right person at the right time.

And once it does, the object almost matters less than people think. What matters is the mechanism. The craving. The ritual. The relief. The dependency. The way something starts as a pleasure or comfort and slowly becomes something you organize your life around. That’s why I don’t think the most useful question is “How could anyone get addicted to social media?” The more honest question is, why are we so surprised when they do?

These platforms are built to be returned to. They offer stimulation, distraction, validation, novelty, outrage, connection, comparison, and escape, sometimes all in the span of a few minutes. They fit into every dead space in a day. They’re always there. They’re socially normalized. In a lot of cases, they’re professionally expected. That doesn’t automatically make them addictive for everyone. But it does make them the kind of thing addiction can attach itself to very easily.

And because they don’t look like the addictions we were taught to fear, people are slower to take the harm seriously. If somebody’s drinking alone every night, people worry. If somebody’s checking their phone a hundred times a day, losing focus, sleeping badly, feeling worse, and getting twitchy the second they’re away from the feed, that still gets brushed off as modern life.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. Social media addiction doesn’t always look dramatic. It can look productive. It can look connected. It can look like staying informed, building a brand, keeping up, promoting your work, responding to messages, being reachable, and staying engaged. From the outside, it can look like participation. From the inside, it can still feel like compulsion.

And that’s where this starts to matter more than people want to admit. Because the addictions that do the most cultural damage are often the ones we’ve decided look normal.

What social media addiction actually looks like

This is where people can get a little slippery, because the second you start talking about social media addiction, somebody says, well, everyone’s on their phone. Which is true. Everyone is. That’s part of what makes this hard to talk about clearly. Heavy use and addiction aren’t automatically the same thing. Liking something isn’t the same as being trapped by it. Using it a lot isn’t the same as losing control of your relationship to it.

It’s probably important for me to say plainly here that I don’t think social media is evil, and I don’t think the answer is to strip it away from everybody or hand every detail of it over to the government. I don’t think that any more than I think alcohol is evil or that the answer to alcoholism is prohibition. My weakness was not a reason to punish everybody else. There are millions of people who can have a drink, enjoy it, and move on with their lives. There’s no reason they should lose that just because I couldn’t handle my liquor.

Same here. The fact that some people can use social media without being consumed by it matters. It should matter. Not every user is addicted. Not every platform experience is destructive. Not every bad habit needs to turn into a moral panic. But none of that changes the fact that addiction is still real when it happens, and real harm is still harm even when the thing causing it is normal, legal, and woven into daily life. The difference, at least to me, has to do with freedom.

Can you put it down without feeling pulled back almost immediately? Can you be away from it without getting itchy, anxious, or weirdly unsettled? Can you go through your day without needing that hit of distraction, validation, stimulation, outrage, connection, or whatever your particular version is? Or has it started running in the background of your mind all the time, calling to you like a jar of chocolate chip cookies, breaking your attention into little pieces, making actual presence feel harder and harder to hold onto. Making you buy inhuman amounts of milk. That’s where it starts to look familiar.

Because addiction doesn’t always announce itself with some giant dramatic moment. A lot of the time, it shows up as compulsion disguised as routine. You check your phone without thinking. Then again, a minute later. Then, while someone’s talking to you. Then, in the middle of work. Then, while watching something. Then right before bed. Then, when you wake up. Then, in the strange dead zones of the day when nothing much is happening, your own mind might otherwise have a chance to breathe.

And after a while, it’s not even about enjoyment anymore. That’s another tell. You’re not necessarily having a good time. You may not even like what you’re seeing. You may feel worse after being on it. More agitated, distracted, envious, and depleted. But you still go back. That’s the piece people tend to miss. They assume addiction always looks like pleasure. A lot of the time, it looks like repetition in spite of the fact that the thing isn’t even giving you much anymore.

That feels important here because social media can do so many things at once. It can distract you, flatter you, or numb you out. It can make you angry and briefly connected. It can make you feel left out, but also feel seen. It can make you feel invisible or give you a little spike of novelty when your day feels flat. It can give you something to do instead of sitting quietly with yourself. That’s a powerful mix.

And because it’s woven into daily life, the consequences are easier to wave away. You’re a little more distracted than you used to be. A little less able to read, rest, or focus. A little less present with people. A little more fragmented. A little more dependent on being interrupted. A little more uncomfortable with silence. None of that sounds as dramatic as somebody drinking themselves into oblivion. But quieter damage is still damage.

I think that’s why the language of control and flexibility matters so much. Can you choose, or do you just obey? Can you step away, or does stepping away make you feel off? Can you let a moment stay empty, or do you have to fill it immediately? Those questions tell you a lot.

Because once something starts colonizing every spare second, it’s not just taking your time. It’s changing your inner life,  training your attention, reshaping your tolerance for boredom, your relationship to silence, and your ability to stay with one thing long enough for depth to happen. And that has consequences far beyond the feed.

That’s why I don’t think social media addiction is some soft or exaggerated idea people invented to sound alarmed about technology. I think it’s often a real pattern of dependency that’s harder to see because it’s so normalized, so portable, and so thoroughly built into modern life.

The old picture of addiction is a person alone with a bottle. The newer picture might be of a person surrounded by everyone, yet still not fully there, because some part of their attention is always being pulled elsewhere. And that, to me, is still addiction territory.

Why social media is especially hard to see clearly

Part of what makes social media addiction so hard to talk about is that the thing itself is woven into ordinary life. Alcohol, at least, still carries a visible warning label in people’s minds. Same with drugs. There’s already a story there. People know those things can go bad. They know excess has consequences. They know addiction is part of the territory.

Social media doesn’t come with that same built-in suspicion. It comes wrapped in normal life. It’s where people talk to friends, follow the news, promote their work, share their lives, watch clips, kill time, flirt, argue, joke around, post pictures of their dogs, and keep one eye on the world while pretending they’re just checking one thing. It doesn’t present itself as a danger. It presents itself as participation. That makes a difference.

It’s harder to spot a problem when the behavior looks exactly like what everyone else is doing. If someone is drinking bourbon alone every night, most people will clock that as possible trouble. If someone is on their phone all day, bouncing from app to app, checking notifications, losing focus every ten seconds, and feeling a low-grade panic whenever they’re away from it, that can still pass for normal life now. In some circles, it practically is normal life. That’s part of what makes it slippery. It hides in plain sight.

It also gets cover from usefulness. Social media isn’t just entertainment. For a lot of people, it’s professional. It’s how they network, market themselves, stay visible, promote projects, maintain contacts, and avoid disappearing. That usefulness gives it a kind of protective camouflage. The more necessary something seems, the harder it is to question the hold it has on you.

And then there’s the fact that it’s not always making you feel bad in one obvious way. It can feel good, useful, distracting, or energizing, yet still somehow keep you there. It can be the place where you laugh, compare, get attention, or where you feel ignored. The place where you learn something, and the place where your brain turns into a room full of fire alarms. That mix makes it harder to pin down. It doesn’t behave like one thing. It behaves like a delivery system for whatever your nervous system is most likely to respond to.

And because of that, people tend to misread the problem. They think that if something is useful, it can’t also be harmful. If it’s normal, it can’t also be addictive. If everybody’s doing it, then maybe nobody should make too big a deal out of it. But that’s never been a very good standard. Plenty of destructive things become easier to ignore once enough people are doing them together.

I also think social media gets protected by the fact that its damage often looks soft at first. Not soft in reality, but soft in appearance. You’re distracted, restless, fragmented, or less able to sit still. You’re less able to read deeply, listen well, or stay with one thought long enough for it to become anything interesting. You feel pulled apart all day. Your attention gets thinner. Your moods get more reactive. Your sense of self starts leaning a little too hard on response, feedback, visibility, and affirmation. None of that looks as dramatic as someone passed out drunk on a floor. But it can still hollow out your life in its own way.

And maybe that’s the bigger problem. Social media addiction often doesn’t look like collapse. It looks like erosion. A little less focus, stillness, and tolerance for boredom. Less real presence, and less ability to be where you are while you’re there.

That kind of damage is easy to dismiss because it arrives in fragments. It doesn’t always announce itself as a catastrophe. It just keeps taking small bites out of your attention, your peace, and your ability to live unbroken.

That’s why I think so many people miss it, or at least miss it for a long time. They’re looking for the old picture of addiction. The public mess, obvious downfall, or the flaming wreckage. But some addictions don’t come at you with that kind of theater. Some just slowly train you to be somewhere else all the time. And when that happens at scale, when millions of people are living in that low-level state of tugged-apart attention and calling it normal, it stops being just a private problem. It starts becoming a cultural one.

Why the Meta and Google lawsuit matters

What makes this lawsuit matter isn’t just the verdict itself. It’s what the verdict suggests about where the culture is starting to move. For a long time, a lot of the conversation around social media harm has lived in that vague space where everybody sort of knows something is off, but nobody seems especially eager to name it too clearly. Parents worry. Teachers worry. People talk about anxiety, distraction, depression, comparison, isolation, and attention spans turning to dust. But even with all that, there’s still been a strange reluctance to say that maybe these platforms aren’t just popular. Maybe some of them are built in ways that make dependency more likely. That’s why this case feels important to me. It pushes the conversation out of the realm of private suspicion and into public accountability.

And that’s a big shift.

Because once a case like this gets taken seriously in court, once a jury is willing to look at a platform’s design and ask whether it contributed to real harm, the whole frame starts to change. The question is no longer just, do people spend too much time on these apps. The question becomes, what exactly are these systems designed to do, and what happens when they do it very, very well? That’s the part that matters.

I don’t think this lawsuit matters because it proves every argument people have ever made about social media. It doesn’t. I don’t think it means every platform is equally harmful, or that every user is trapped, or that the whole thing should be smashed apart by sunrise tomorrow. It means something more specific than that, and in some ways more useful. It means the old defense, that this is all just harmless engagement and personal choice, is starting to crack.

Because if a product is deliberately built to keep people coming back, if it rewards compulsion, if it weakens stopping cues, if it feeds dependence while pretending to offer connection, then at some point we have to stop talking about it as though it were neutral.

That doesn’t mean people have no agency. Of course they do. I had agency when I drank. I also had an addiction. Those two things can exist at the same time. Personal responsibility is real. So is design. So is vulnerability. So is exploitation. The fact that a person makes choices does not magically erase the reality that some systems are built to lean hard on human weakness.

And that, to me, is where this starts becoming more than a legal story. It becomes a cultural one.

Because if we keep treating every destructive pattern as a purely private failure of discipline, we let the systems behind those patterns off the hook. We act as though the only thing worth examining is the user. Not the architecture. Not the incentives, the design choices, the business model that benefits when people stay pulled in, overstimulated, emotionally reactive, and unable to stop.

That’s why this case matters. It asks whether the design itself belongs in the conversation. It asks whether the people building these platforms get to shrug and say, well, nobody forced anyone to log in. It asks whether a system can be profitable and normalized while still doing real damage at scale. And honestly, I think that’s overdue.

Because one of the smartest tricks harmful systems ever pull is convincing people that the harm is too diffuse to name. Too ordinary to challenge. Too wrapped up in daily life to question. This lawsuit doesn’t settle every argument. It doesn’t end the debate. But it does make one thing harder to ignore. More and more, the question is no longer whether social media can be harmful in an addictive way. The question is how long we plan to keep acting surprised by it.

The responsibility question

This is the point where people can get a little twitchy, because the second you start talking about responsibility, somebody hears control. Somebody hears censorship. Somebody hears the government kicking down the door and replacing every app with a pamphlet. That’s not what I mean, and it’s not what I’m arguing for.

Responsibility doesn’t mean treating grown adults like children. It doesn’t mean banning everything that can be misused. By that logic, we’d have to outlaw liquor stores, casinos, sugar, dating apps, and half the internet before lunch. That’s not serious thinking. And it’s not my point.

My point is simpler than that. If you build something designed to capture human attention, shape behavior, and keep people coming back, you have some responsibility for what that design does in the world. That shouldn’t be a radical statement. It should be obvious.

We already understand this in other areas of life. If a company makes a product that harms people at scale, we don’t usually shrug and say, well, nobody forced them to buy it. We look at the product. We look at the design. We look at what the company knew, what it encouraged, what it ignored, and what it profited from. Somewhere along the way, social media got treated like it should be exempt from that kind of scrutiny, as if code were somehow morally weightless just because it lives on a screen.

It isn’t.

Design choices matter. Incentives matter. Friction matters. The absence of friction matters too. What gets amplified matters. What gets rewarded matters. If outrage keeps people engaged, and engagement drives profit, then pretending those outcomes are accidental starts to look a little silly.

And I don’t think this only lands on tech companies. It lands on all of us who work in any area related to persuasion, engagement, brand building, content, growth, product, and experience design. At some point, everybody in those worlds has to ask the same uncomfortable question. Are we helping people use something, or are we helping a system use them?

That’s not always an easy line to find. I get that. Every brand wants attention. Every company wants relevance. Everybody wants to be memorable, useful, sticky, and engaging. None of those goals is automatically sinister. But there’s a line somewhere between making something compelling and making it hard to leave. There’s a line between usefulness and dependency. Between resonance and compulsion. Between building a relationship and building a trap.

That line matters.

Because once a business starts depending on dysregulation, once it starts making more money when people are more compulsive, more reactive, less present, and less able to stop, then we’re not just talking about good product design anymore. We’re talking about a system that benefits from human weakness and has every incentive to deepen it.

That should bother people.

It should especially bother people now, because we’ve spent years talking about attention as though it were an endlessly harvestable resource, as though the human mind were just one more field to strip for yield. More clicks. More time spent. More return visits. More engagement. The language sounds clean. The effects often aren’t.

And this is where I think the whole conversation gets more honest. The question isn’t whether people should have agency. Of course they should. The question is whether companies should be allowed to pretend they bear none. Whether the people designing these systems get to benefit from compulsive use while acting shocked that compulsive use happened.

I don’t buy that anymore.

If you build a system that keeps finding the cracks in people, you don’t get to wash your hands of what comes through them.

That doesn’t mean every platform is malicious. It doesn’t mean every designer is a villain. It doesn’t mean every user is helpless. It just means responsibility has to exist in more than one place. The user matters. The system matters. The incentives matter. The people profiting from the behavior matter too.

And if we can’t say that plainly by now, then we’re probably still not being honest about the problem.

The Takeaway

I know what addiction feels like from the inside. I know what it is to build your day around the thing you keep insisting you still control. I know what it is to look functional from the outside while something else is quietly taking up far too much room on the inside. I lived that way for years.

And because I did, I want to be careful here.

I don’t blame anyone else for my alcoholism. I don’t blame bartenders. I don’t blame bars. I don’t blame restaurants. I don’t blame bourbon for existing. My addiction was mine. My recovery is mine too. There are millions of people who drink, enjoy it, and go on living their lives without it taking them over. They shouldn’t be punished because I couldn’t handle my liquor.

That’s how I feel about social media, too.

I don’t think it’s evil. I don’t think every platform is predatory in the same way. I don’t think the answer is panic, prohibition, or trying to regulate every inch of public life until it goes flat and joyless. That’s not what I mean.

What I do mean is simpler than that. We should be honest about what addiction is, how it works, and how easily it can hide inside things that look normal. We should be honest that something can be useful and still harmful. Popular and still damaging. Legal and still be built in ways that lean hard on people’s weak spots.

That’s why this feels like more than a story about social media to me. It feels like a wider question about the kinds of systems we build and what we ask people’s minds to absorb every day.

And to me, that’s where ThoughtLab comes in.

Because this isn’t just about platforms and lawsuits. It’s about design, experience, incentives, and about what happens when engagement becomes the highest good, and nobody wants to ask what that engagement is costing the people giving it. If you work in strategy, brand, digital experience, content, or product, that question belongs to you, too. Not in some abstract, hand-wavy way. In a real one.

What are we building people toward, rewarding, and what are we normalizing? And at what point does something built to attract attention start asking for too much of a person’s life in return?

I’ve been sober for ten years. I’m grateful for that. I’m proud of it. I also know addiction doesn’t always show up the way people expect it to. The object changes. The mechanism doesn’t. The more honest we are about that, the better chance we have of building a world that asks a little less from people’s weakest places.