… what’s disturbingly obvious is the addictive nature of Ultra-Processed Life: it’s captivating by design. Once we taste the snack, pick up the phone, or start scrolling on social media, we’re hooked. More subtly, the many downsides of Ultra-Processed Life drive us to seek the comfort, relief and escape of Ultra-Processed Life’s perverse circle of mal-adaptation: pressured and drained, we seek the comforts of addictive-by-design distractions.
Even a cursory search reveals a long list of things people report as addictive: not just alcohol, tobacco and drugs, but food, gaming, pornography, dating apps, social media, smartphones, work, the approval of others, working out and even sleeping. What’s striking is how these are all escapes from intolerable situations or pressures. Equally striking is how Ultra-Processed Life transforms natural activities such as eating, sleeping and romance into profitable addictions—not profitable for the addict, but profitable for the purveyor of the products and services.
On the surface, Ultra-Processed Life is a classic win-win: those making and marketing the products are making money—a feel-good outcome as increasing wealth is the core goal of our economy—and the products make consumers feel good. No wonder Ultra-Processed Life has seeped into every nook and cranny of human life so successfully. But this superficial assessment misses what’s happening beneath the surface.
The mechanisms of Ultra-Processed Life disconnect us from long-term consequences in favor of gratification in the moment, a process that replaces the foundations of our humanity and happiness with commoditized facsimiles that are reliably profitable due to their exploitation of our hard-wired reward circuitry: bet you can’t have just one. These facsimiles replace the complex interconnectedness of Real-World Life with a simplified, easy to digest eternal now of temptations that can be indulged: Ultra-Processed Life is like living in a candy store without any adults to stop us from eating as much as we want.
This is the tragic irony of an Ultra-Processed Life: it delivers all the things we instinctively want in life—tasty snacks, comfort and convenience, novelty, higher status, feeling good about ourselves—but only in the moment. The longer-term consequences are perversely negative: our physical and mental health are diminished, our anxieties and insecurities are stimulated into overdrive, our sense of self is unmoored, and our ability to recognize our declining quality of life is effectively buried beneath an avalanche of feel-good distractions.