The World's Dumbest Addiction

Last week I found myself in a smoke shop, the kind that makes you wonder how it stays open. Fluorescent lighting, a glass case full of vapes organized by flavor like a candy store for people who've given up, and an employee behind the counter who smiled with about three teeth that were hanging on for dear life.

I was with a friend. We didn’t discuss why I was leading us to this dingy smoke shop… the “It's vacation… it doesn't count!” was implicit. There's a whole unspoken grammar to enabling. You don't have to ask. You just walk in together and the silence does the work.

I bought a disposable vape. Spearmint Ice.

I always tell myself it's a vacation thing, a temporary indulgence, which is the same lie I've been telling myself on and off for about a decade. I know it's a lie because I've tried to quit nicotine more times than I can count. I've tried the gum and the mints, even the patches. I've tried cold turkey and reading Allen Carr's Easyway, which boasts a cult following who all swear by his methods. My record is about 6 months nicotine free, but time and again I find my way back to a dingy smoke shop or gas station, buying another disposable, feeling like a person with no spine and no plan.

I hate this about myself. ‘Hate’ is not a word I use casually. I really, really hate this one thing.

I know the psychology of compulsive behavior, and nicotine still has an iron grip around my throat. I cannot stop buying fruit-flavored poison.

Not all addictions are built the same. Some give you something back.

I love to drink and I love cannabis. These are not confessions, they're just facts about my life that I've stopped pretending to feel guilty about. I've sat across from enough friends who genuinely struggle with alcohol to know the difference between my relationship with it and theirs. I hold that distinction carefully and I try not to get too comfortable with it.

Churchill had a famous quote that I clutch as my own sometimes: “I’ve gotten more out of alcohol than it's gotten out of me." I believe that about myself. Mostly. There's some doubt in there, sure. But by and large my drinking today serves me. Sitting around a table with friends until midnight feels like the original human use case working exactly as intended. Every culture on earth independently fermented something and then sat around drinking it together. Ten thousand years of people using a chemical to do the thing that is apparently very hard to do sober: be fully relaxed in a room full of other humans.

The new U.S. Dietary Guidelines, released in January, actually lean into this. The previous edition recommended strict daily limits: two drinks for men, one for women. The 2025-2030 guidelines removed those numbers entirely, replacing them with the vague instruction to "consume less alcohol for better health." The guidance cited the Blue Zones, regions where people live the longest, and points out that moderate, social drinking is often part of their culture. The exact framing: there's probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way.

Still… the WHO classifies alcohol as a Group 1 carcinogen, same category as asbestos and tobacco. The alcohol industry spent millions lobbying on these exact guidelines. I'm not naive about who benefits from telling Americans that drinking is fine, but I do think there's a kernel of uncomfortable truth buried in the politics: alcohol solves a real problem. We've built lives so over-stimulating and over-scheduled that people need a chemical just to sit comfortably across from each other.

Nicotine is where I lose the plot entirely.

I ask myself constantly what nicotine has ever actually given me. What have I gotten from a decade of this? The honest answer is nothing. No pleasure, no community, no focus, no calm. Alcohol at least has the raucous dinner and the stories and new friends. Cannabis gives me my best workouts and the occasional keen insight. Nicotine has given me absolutely nothing I can point to and say, that's why.

Carr's Easyway actually nails the diagnosis, even if the cure didn't stick for me. His core insight is that nicotine creates a withdrawal cycle so subtle you mistake the relief for pleasure. You don't actually enjoy nicotine, you just briefly escape the discomfort that the last vape created. It's like wearing tight shoes just to feel the relief of taking them off. Thus, you are not giving something up when you quit, you are escaping something. He's right about all of it, but I still can't stop.

Because I think there's a layer underneath the chemistry that Carr doesn't fully reach. I reach for the vape when I feel out of control. When I'm stressed, or anxious, or overwhelmed, or sitting in a moment that feels too undefined. The world and work gets noisy and I don't know what to do, and then I hit the vape, and for about fifteen seconds the world shrinks to one small thing. One input, one output. I am a person who is doing a specific thing instead of a person who is adrift in something undefined.

For a second, I have control.

I think that's what all of it is. The vape, the drink, the urge to open Instagram. Every addiction is the same gesture: find the moment someone feels overwhelmed, offer them one tiny guaranteed decision, and charge accordingly.

A trillion-dollar economy built on a single human vulnerability: the terror of not knowing what to do next.

In the late 1970s, a psychologist named Bruce Alexander ran an experiment that should have changed everything.

He put isolated rats in cages with two water bottles. One was plain water and the other was laced with heroin. The isolated rats used compulsively, predictably, the way you'd expect from any creature trapped alone in a box with nothing else to do.

Then Alexander built something he called Rat Park. An open space with other rats, things to climb, room to move. He transferred the addicted rats in, and they mostly just… stopped. The heroin was there, but they had so many friends and activities, cessation came naturally.

Twenty percent of American soldiers in Vietnam were addicted to heroin while deployed. When they came home, the vast majority simply stopped. They returned to families, to people, to lives with enough texture that heroin couldn't compete.

The science has been saying the same thing for fifty years: the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety, it is connection.

This is also the real reason AA is so effective. The Twelve Steps get all the attention, but research from a 2020 Cochrane review of 27 studies found that AA's effectiveness comes primarily through social mechanisms: replacing drinking networks with sober ones, building a community where people are heard without judgment. More of AA's twelve steps deal with repairing relationships than with abstinence itself. It's Rat Park with coffee and donuts.

We keep ignoring this because the answer is free, and therefore unprofitable. There is no subscription model for belonging. No pill or app for enough.

Which brings me back to the smoke shop in Marina del Rey, and the thing I hate most about myself.

I use nicotine because for a decade it's been my answer to the question what do I do right now when I don't know what to do. It is a placeholder for something I haven't built yet. And I suspect if most people interrogated their "thing", whatever it is, they'd find the same motivations underneath. The scroll that starts when you're anxious or the drink you pour when your home gets too quiet.

We are addicted to the feeling of choosing something, anything, when the alternative is sitting with the open, undefined, terrifying weight of a moment that has no instructions.

So once again, this week I am proud to share that I have quit nicotine.

And I've stopped asking how do I stop and started asking what is this holding the place of. That question is harder and more useful and I don't have a good answer yet.

The antidote is fullness. What that actually looks like, practically, in a life as oversubscribed and under-connected as most of ours... I'm still figuring it out. I don't think the answer is a product or a protocol. I think the answer is probably Rat Park, and I'm still building mine.

Up and to the right.