Harry Frankfurt, the late American philosopher, distinguished between first-order desires (what we want in the moment) and second-order desires (what we want to want). In his framework, "addiction" occurs when an agent has second-order desires but cannot make them effective. It describes a structural incapacity to shape one's will rather than a simple failure of resolve. To know whether we're addicted, we need to ask two things: whether the self that reflects on our desires endorses our appetite for Twitter or TikTok, and whether that self can make its endorsement stick...
https://substack.com/@harrylaw/note/p-178792853?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
And of course he also wrote:
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis... (continues)
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