In this essay, I will tell you something about vices. What are they, why they exist, and what we can do about them.
Vice is a habit. But not your typical habit. What differentiates it from other habits is that it hurts you and the people around you in many ways.
We can divide vices into groups by their negative effects. Some have mental effects, some physical, some will make you poor, others anti-social. And the worst of them? The worst will lead to all the effects combined.
As you can see. Having a vice is nothing to strive for. Some would even say you should avoid them at all costs (I agree with this statement). And yet, 99% of people have some vice that is ruining their life. Why?
Imagine a funnel. At the top, there are reasons behind specific vices and the lower we go, the more general the reasons will become. Until we arrive at the bottom, where we will find the underlying reason for all the vices in the world.
The funnel goes as follows:
At the highest level, we find reasons such as substance dependency, coping mechanisms, escape activities, lack of self-control, the need to fill some kind of void, or the fear of not fitting in.
These are a few reasons why people develop a vice. Now, these reasons are actually not at the core of the problem. They have some underlying reasons as well. They are the results of something else. They are the result of either trauma, curiosity, or social pressure.
Throughout our lives, we all experience a bunch of traumatic events. Some are worse than others, and the worst of them will develop into trauma. Once we develop a trauma, we need something to cope with it. Unfortunately, it is much easier to use a vice as a coping mechanism than some habit, that may be even beneficial for you, such as meditation or exercise. That’s why there are much more alcoholics than meditators.
Another path to vice is through curiosity. Curiosity is an amazing quality for a human but it can, unfortunately, lead to some very dangerous places. The most typical example I can give you is pornography. So many young kids that are just curious about the adult world, girls, or just the internet in general, are exposed to pornography at a very young age, and they become hooked, addicted.
Last and in my opinion the saddest path to developing a vice is through social pressure and normalization.
“Everyone around me is drinking alcohol, so I should too to fit in.”
“All the boys are masturbating and watching porn, that means it is ok if I do it too.”
“I will be an outcast if I don’t use social media as everyone around me.”
These are just a few examples of the social pressure I faced throughout my teenage years. The problem here is that you just don’t know better. As a teenager, you don’t know what is right and what is wrong. And the last thing you want is to not fit. To be an outlier. So you indulge just like anyone else.
At the first glance. These 3 reasons seem like the true underlying reasons why one develops a vice, but yet, there’s still one singular reason that is all of them. It is dopamine.
Dopamine has a very bad reputation nowadays and I don’t want to be another person demonizing it on the internet, because the fact is, we can’t even exist normally without it. And that’s a fact. Dopamine is the reason behind every vice, every addiction, and pretty much everything else that makes us move in life.
Now to connect these two things. Dopamine and vice. What makes a vice so dangerous compared to any other activity that also generates dopamine?
All vices will sooner or later become addictions. There’s one simple reason for that. They contain large amounts of easily accessible dopamine. And that’s something our brains love. The easier the dopamine is to get, the better.
However, this leads us to the need to chase the one (or more) vice we have developed. And the evilest part about this is how our brain adapts to the excess amount of dopamine we sooner or later gain from our vice. It reduces our overall sensitivity to dopamine. This is a double-edged sword. First, it means that the world around us will become much less satisfying. And second, we will need a bigger and bigger dose of our vice to feel the same stimulation as before. This is especially dangerous if we’re addicted to some dangerous substance because we can overdose, and die.
I’m sure you can now imagine what negative effects can vices have on your life.
Things like degrading physical and mental health, financial costs, large time demands, or even overdose. I could write an entire paragraph about what negative things can vices bring into your life but I don’t think it’s necessary.
Let’s ask a different question. Is there something vices are good for? Can we benefit from them in some way?
We can. A little. Some vices in moderation can improve your creativity, decrease stress, help with socializing, and maybe some other things. But in the end, all of these “benefits” of vices can be achieved in some better and more healthy way. So these arguments about “Vices having benefits for you” are in the end just another way to cope with and excuse the fact you’re addicted to something you don’t want to be addicted to. There is no benefit worth becoming addicted to things that will sooner or later ruin your life.
This is a difficult question to answer because we as a human species were obsessed with toxic habits since time immemorial. Yet, I think that once we take into consideration all the facts of our current society we can say that the proneness to getting addicted to some vice is getting higher.
The first factor is access. In previous times, the most typical vice was smoking and drinking alcohol. To access these things. You usually needed to get to some places where they were selling them, and then buy them. This means you had to invest time, money, and energy to satisfy your urge to indulge in your vice of choice. Now, look at the present. You’ve got a smartphone at all times with you (you probably even read this essay on your smartphone). On your smartphone, you’ve got access to stuff like social media and internet porn and it costs you nothing. You don’t need to get into a specific place and you don’t need to pay for them, which means the barrier of entry is lower than it ever was to indulge in some cheap dopamine activity.
The second factor is social acceptance. This factor in my opinion stays pretty much the same throughout the years. In the past, there was no stigma about smoking or drinking. It was considered normal because most of society indulged in these activities. Even though now these two activities are becoming a little more stigmatized we now have other and in my opinion, even more, dangerous vices, that are considered acceptable by society like the already mentioned internet porn and social media.
The third factor is stress and pressure. Nowadays we’re much more prone to stress because of stuff like constant connection, information overload, social isolation, financial problems, and so on. The more stressed we’re, the more prone we’re to fall into some vice as a way to cope with the stress.
And the last factor I will mention is advertising and marketing. Do you know the most valuable currency of the 21st century? It is your attention. The person that is able to catch your attention best is the person who’s making the most money from you. That’s the strategy of every large social media. To hook you up on their easy source of dopamine and then flood your brain with ads. It is cruel and in some ways even inhuman, yet it is mostly accepted in our society.
So 3 out of the 4 factors that are main contributors to developing a vice are worse these days than they were. Because of this, we can assume with a good amount of confidence that nowadays people are more prone to developing a vice.
Now we’ve discussed what are vices and why they exist let’s analyze the most dangerous ones.
The vices I will analyze are the ones I’ve had the most personal experience with. This means that the list will be very subjective, so keep that in mind. I’ve decided to present the subjective view because the question of vices and addiction is very complex. That makes it pretty much impossible to be presented completely objectively. I also think that it is much better for you to see some real experiences than to read a bunch of generic truths from the internet.
If you’re between the age of 15 to 30, there’s a high probability you’ve heard from your peers how watching porn is normal or even good for you, especially if you’re male.
Hopefully, I’m not the first person that’s telling you that it’s a lie. Sometimes the things that are considered the most normal and accepted by the majority are at the same time the worst things for your overall well-being. Porn is for sure one of these things.
The most mainstream negative effects of pornography are a distorted view of relationships and sexuality, and the risk of erectile dysfunction for men. But this is just the tip of the iceberg that is now presented by mainstream media. I, myself was addicted to porn for nearly 10 years and even today there are times when I struggle with urges to watch some. And let me tell you, there’s so much more that can ruin your life than just these two reasons that are repeated over and over again like they are the only ones. So let me now bombard you with stuff that I’ve experienced in those 10 years.
1. Time:
Let’s start easy. An average addict can spend up to an hour every day watching porn (I don’t count only the actual “act” but also the “prepping” and “cleaning after” phases). This hour could’ve been spent reading, exercising, learning new skills, sleeping, or anything else. This one lost hour sums up to 365 hours every year. During this time you could’ve learned a new skill, got fit, or read a bunch of books. And yet, many people are preferring ruining their lives instead.
2. No motivation:
The amount of pleasure and dopamine released during an average PMO (porn-masturbation-orgasm) session cannot be matched by anything else in your normal day-to-day life (If you don’t do hard drugs or similar stuff of course). If you look at this from a biological point of view, this activity of PMO seems to your brain as the best thing to do, it feels like you’re reproducing which is the most important activity for us as a species and because of that, it has no reason to motivate you to do anything else then to jerk off to those pixels you’ve got on screen. Your brain literally thinks you’re the biggest chad in the world because of the number of women “you’re having sex with”. Think about this. An average teenager has seen more beautiful naked women than Genghis Khan has seen in his entire life. Isn’t that completely mad?
3. Dissatisfaction with normal life:
This one correlates with the previous one a lot. As the amount of dopamine you receive from PMO increases, your sensitivity to it decreases, which means that you will need much more intense and stimulating inputs to reach the same high.
You can do this with porn, but you cannot do this with the rest of your daily activities. You cannot decide to receive more dopamine from taking a walk or reading a book. The value stays constant, which means the more messed up and dopamine-rich stuff you consume, the less pleasure you’re able to get from other sources. The world will just feel gray to you, and the only colors you will be able to see will be those on your display.
4. Destroyed self-image:
We’re getting real now. No matter how much you cope, no matter how often you hear everyone talking about how normal PMO is, no matter how much or how little you consume porn. Somewhere deep down in your head, you will always know that there is something undeniably wrong and twisted about the thing you just did. You feel dirty, lethargic, and empty. Sometimes you feel like you’re no longer a human. Just an empty shell obeying the orders of your dopamine system.
5. You’re becoming a spectator in life:
And the last one I will give you. The biggest red flag for anyone who wants to achieve anything in life. By watching porn you learn to become nothing more than just a spectator in life. Instead of banging those chicks, you watch some other dudes bang them. This will sooner or later translate into other parts of your life. You will watch other dudes get fit, and you will watch other dudes get smart, rich, and successful, but you will never do it yourself because you’re too used to solely watching.
I hope these few reasons made you disgusted with this activity. Now if you’re addicted to porn I have to warn you. It’s a tough addiction to deal with. Maybe even the hardest of them all because the process of reproducing is so hard-wired inside our brains and porn completely kidnaps it. This means that getting rid of this addiction will take a long time. The important thing is to not give up, and keep going. Now let’s move on to another vice, that once again kidnaps a natural instinct of men.
Another vice that was ruining my teenage years were video games. I was a big gamer, but also a loner. Most of the time I played alone which meant I didn’t even have a chance to benefit from the one positive aspect of playing games, social interactions. This left me with only the negatives.
Some of the aspects are pretty similar to porn addiction and they will repeat in the next ones too. Especially the time consumption of this vice is large, also the dissatisfaction with life because of large dopamine hits is here.
But there is one more negative effect that makes this vice one of the most dangerous vices of the 21st century. It is a fake indication of progress.
Video games are the traps. Especially for men, because men are naturally built to seek progress in life and video games are abusing this to the fullest. When you play a game and you’re leveling up, climbing the rank, or just progressing through the story you feel like achieving something. Your brain is tricked to think you’re making actual real-life progress. And this leads to lost motivation to do anything else with your life than just play games.
Alcohol is with us since forever. We already know how addictive and damaging it is to a human being and yet, it is still widely accepted in our society. Especially if you live in an eastern European country you’re usually exposed to regular drinking before you even turn 18 and no one thinks there’s something wrong with that.
You realize how bad this mindset is once you start to think about the negative effects alcohol has on the human body.
Stuff like drowsiness, dehydration, stomach irritation, occasional memory loss, and problems with coordination. All of this is pretty obvious but did you know about the negative effects on your sleep?
Alcohol is a sedative. Which may seem like a good thing when it comes to sleep. After all, there are many people who have a glass of wine or whiskey before they go to sleep, but it is one of the worst things you can do. Even though alcohol acts as a sedative, which will help you fall asleep initially, it will then completely disrupt your regular sleep patterns. I won’t go too deep here into the science of the proper sleep process, but I’ll give you an example to imagine. Let’s say you had an 8-hour long sleep session, but you drank alcohol before sleep. Because of that your 8 hours of sleep have an actual value of only a 6-hour-long session. You’ve lost 2 hours of sleep just because you got yourself a drink before bed. Do this every day for multiple years and your risk of premature death highly increases.
This vice was pretty much defining my year 2022 as well as the struggles with my porn addiction. Throughout the years I’ve realized I’m a pretty obsessive person. When I do things I do them on 200%. I don’t know when to stop. This is a positive ability when it comes to achieving goals, but when it comes to stuff like eating, it’s total hell there. I’m able to eat over 3000 calories in less than half an hour. It was a real struggle for me to get this demon under control, but I’m glad to say I did and I haven’t binged on food since December 2022.
Now, why should I even care? What is so bad about binge eating?
Well, the first obvious thing is it doesn’t align with fitness goals if you have any. I wanted to get shredded in 2022 and I wasn’t able to do it because for 6 days a week, I was able to keep my diet, and then on day 7 I just binged on some shit and ended the week sometimes even in the caloric surplus.
This unsurprisingly leads to a bunch of psychological problems. I’ve realized I’m slowly developing an eating disorder where I preferred to not eat at all instead of eating in normal amounts, I also hated my body and wasn’t even able to go to the restaurant to have “normal” food. I became obsessed with proper eating and yet I binged on some shit at least once a week. I pretty much ruined my relationship with food and my body, and it will probably take me a long time to completely recover from this way of thinking.
The moral of the story: Avoid binge eating at all costs. The best way to do it is to not set yourself an extreme diet plan you’re unable to keep up with.
It may sound funny, but you’re probably addicted to thinking, or to be more precise, to overthinking. Overthinking is an excessive and persistent rumination on a specific situation, leading to unhealthy levels of stress and anxiety. The fascinating thing is, that we do it once again because of dopamine. Even though overthinking usually makes us stressed, it also releases a non-negligible amount of dopamine, which makes it addictive. Now don’t get me wrong here. You shouldn’t live your life without thinking of the consequences of your actions, however, if you spend your day in imaginary scenarios and weird traumatic spirals like most of our society. I recommend you consider a change. You can start with meditation or journaling and see where these two activities will lead you to.
Now, this was my list of vices that haunted my life the most. I’m sure I’ve not covered them all and you may struggle with some completely different ones. So just to be complete, here are some honorable mentions of vices you should eliminate from your life:
Nicotine, especially smoking cigarettes or vaping.
Drugs (obviously)
Social media addiction
Gambling
Now, what can we do about it? The first and most important step is to admit that we have a problem. How can you find you have a problem? Chose a vice and try to go 30 days cold turkey. Remove it completely from your life. Track how you feel, if you feel any withdrawal symptoms, and so on. Usually, this experiment is enough to realize if you have a problem or not. Then the next step is all about dealing with addiction that correlates with your vice. How I dealt with my addictions will be the topic of my next essay so if you’re interested, stay tuned.
The point of this essay was to help you understand the vices, why they exist, and what are their dangers. I also wanted to emphasize the role of society that is in many of these cases does more harm than good. In the end. I wanted to make you think. Think about your life, about your daily habits. Can some of your habits be described as vices? Are they affecting your life in some negative ways? What can you do about them?
Questions like these are very important to ask. You should use them regularly to reflect on your life. When you realize you’ve got some vice that is affecting your life in a negative way it should be your number one priority to get rid of it.
In the world of self-improvement, it is usually much more emphasized to build new habits, but if you think about it. It is impossible to build a new habit if all your time is occupied by some life-sucking addiction. So before you start building, you first need to get rid of things that are holding you down.
Hope you’ve liked this essay, wish you a wonderful day, and see you soon.