The point I'm making is that the scale of this is unprecedented. If you wanted to read comic books or watch TV or smoke cigarettes, there were effective physical limits. Yes, people ruined themselves with addictions then, too. But now, every person I know has a slot machine in their pocket they can pop out and get a dopamine hit by using. And it is never-ending.
You can binge watch or binge on social media or binge on anything, with unlimited supply. It's completely unprecedented.
I notice little compulsive ticks in myself now too — they're hard to escape. I have many friends I only contact through WhatsApp or Instagram. That pulls me into my phone and a nightmarish sea of influencer garbage every time I want to talk to someone. It sucks!
If you were born in and living in this generation, for any living generation younger than maybe the Baby Boomers, that's only even potentially technically true because the teams optimizing stickiness of entertainment of all kinds including youth entertainment, didn't involve programmers (in the computing sense) until fairly recently. But they absolutely have for a long time included psychologists, and the have been serving the intereste of corporate behemoths including in the advertising field.