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Addiction is usually treated as a problem of the substance or, more recently, of trauma, yet in the people I see it is usually more than either.

At the centre is a refusal. The person cannot accept that they are powerless, meaning they cannot take a little without being pulled back into a lot. That is the loop, and around it grows a delusion, defended with lies to others and, more stubbornly, to themselves.

The defence is often built out of true material: a trauma that happened but is not the main thing driving the use, a pattern of self-sabotage, or relationships arranged almost by design to fail and hand the addiction its reason. It takes a certain confidence to go past all these things because they are real and may look like the whole story.

Underneath, there can be something less like a symptom than a shape the person has taken: a hardened second nature made of lying, unreliability, and selfishness, or a greed never quite satisfied, sitting oddly close to a deep self-hatred.

For some, what society would call a flawed character was there before the addiction. For many more, it is the other way round: years of using slowly eroded a character that had been perfectly sound. Often poor parenting or early harm laid the ground, and the addiction grew on it. Either way, by the time they reach me, the character has been warped.

Here is an example, perhaps not often talked about, that shows how insidious and cunning this can be. People often tell me they felt intense anxiety before using, and that their substance use was a simple ‘medicating anxiety’ story. This is where maybe a well-intentioned psychotherapist would then see an anxiety disorder and start a CBT protocol, or a psychiatrist might reach for the SSRIs.

Sometimes the anxiety would turn out to be about wanting the hedonistic experience of intoxication, a feeling of greed and selfishness. They would sit there with tears of shame streaming down their faces, telling me that they would lie to themselves and others, claiming their anxiety was standalone or trauma-based when, in reality, it stemmed from the guilt that their behaviour was in conflict with their values. A few go further and disclose that they intentionally lied about trauma and anxiety to justify their actions and to get people off their backs. Only then would they start recovering in a meaningful way and rebuilding a self they actually liked.

This is where I have to part company with the trauma-first account, which is now almost an orthodoxy, most associated with Gabor Maté. He is right about a great deal: much of addiction does grow from trauma and pain, and treating people as morally weak has only ever made things worse. I am not suggesting that anxiety isn’t a real condition or that it doesn’t often warrant CBT and medication.

Where I hesitate is with the idea that trauma is always the root cause of addiction. Many people I see have significant trauma that does not seem to be the engine of their addictions.

Sometimes their character was shaped by parenting that was not cruel but inconsistent, or so protective that the child never had to meet a consequence. Other times, the addiction itself did the shaping.

The same need for consequences runs through the present. For people with addiction, it is crucial to have boundaries that are completely inflexible: this or that, never both. The people who love them rarely manage it. Some are afraid, some are worn down by the hot and cold behaviour and the manipulation, and some bend from plain compassion, but every stretched boundary teaches the same lesson to them: that it’s possible to ‘have your cake and eat it’.

That lesson can form the delusion of addiction itself, the belief that this time using the substance will not feed the uncontrollable craving.

Yet, for people with addiction, it always does.

It is an immutable truth, not subject to pleading, bullying, or charming.

It sits there and patiently waits to be accepted as something unchangeable yet liberating.

It’s never too late.

Learn more or speak with Tom Maniatis on complex behavioral and substance dependencies.

Suggested reading:

• The fullest statement of the view that addiction grows from pain and early trauma, the perspective this piece both respects and argues past: Maté, G. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Knopf Canada, 2008.
  
• A history of addiction by a psychiatrist in recovery, resisting every single-cause explanation and arguing for a more nuanced and humane view: Fisher, C. E. The Urge: Our History of Addiction. Penguin Press, 2022.
  
• A neuroscientist’s argument, told through case histories, that addiction is not a disease but a deeply learned habit of desire, which is why willpower alone so often fails and why change remains possible: Lewis, M. The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease. PublicAffairs, 2015.
  
• A philosopher’s case that addiction is neither simple disease nor simple choice but a habit that shapes character, putting the question of responsibility back without reverting to blame: Dunnington, K. Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice. IVP Academic, 2011.

The Great Unreality

There is a particular kind of photograph that has begun to dominate LinkedIn. A man in his early forties, jaw too symmetrical, teeth too white, standing in front of an office window that looks out onto a city that does not exist. He is wearing a suit that fits him the way clothes only fit in advertisements. Beneath the image, a caption begins: I used to think success was about hustle. Then my grandmother said something that changed everything. What follows is eight hundred words of confected wisdom written by a machine, posted by a man who did not write it, read by an audience increasingly aware that none of it is real.

This, more than the keynote speeches and the obesity cures, is the actual texture of the AI age. A man who is not quite a man, telling a story that did not happen, to an audience that is not entirely human, in front of a window that has never existed. And we are told, by people whose personal wealth depends on the story holding together for the next four years, that this is the future, and that the alternative is to be left behind.

Left behind by what, exactly?

The money doesn’t work

Begin with the economics, because everything else follows from them. The hyperscalers, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, are collectively spending somewhere in the region of three hundred billion dollars a year on AI infrastructure.

That is more than the upper estimate of what economists say it would cost, each year, to end extreme poverty worldwide.

All of it being spent on data centres whose primary commercial output, as of this writing, is chatbots that write LinkedIn posts and image generators that produce the photographs described above.

The defenders will tell you this is investment in a transformative future. Perhaps. But the chips inside these data centres are not fibre-optic cable laid in 1999, sitting patient in the ground, waiting for YouTube to be invented. They are GPUs, among the most rapidly obsolescing pieces of hardware in computing. A graphics processor bought today is expected to be economically uncompetitive within five years or so, not because it has broken, but because the electricity bill required to run it will exceed the value of what it produces. The bubble in this technology, when it comes, will not leave behind useful infrastructure. It will leave behind warehouses full of scrap metal and very large electrical substations.

The investment thesis, then, requires the revenue case to materialise inside a roughly five-year window. The internet took about a decade. The personal computer fifteen years. The mobile phone twenty. There is no clear historical precedent for a technology of this scale repaying its capital expenditure on the timeline its financiers require. None I can find, anyway. And the people inside the industry, behind closed doors, know this. They are not building for the medium term. They are building for the narrative, for the next funding round, the next earnings call, the next quarter in which the appearance of inevitability has to be sustained long enough to sell stock.

That is not the financing pattern of a transformative technology. It is the financing pattern of a confidence trick. The dot-com bubble at least had the decency to crash before it consumed the energy budget of a small country.

What the tools actually do

The honest case for AI, stripped of the millenarian rhetoric, is that it produces a measurable productivity gain, perhaps ten to twenty percent, on a narrow set of bounded tasks. Drafting routine emails. Writing basic code. Summarising documents one would otherwise have to read. This is useful, but it is also by historical standards, modest. The spreadsheet did more. The word processor did more. None of these technologies required reorganising the global electrical grid.

But the modest, true version is not the version being sold. What is being sold instead is that this technology will replace lawyers, doctors, teachers, writers, designers, and the entire white-collar class (and the blue collar jobs with AI robots) within the decade. That human creativity is a soon to be obsolete biological accident. That version requires the technology to do things it has not yet demonstrated it can do, on a timeline nobody has yet justified, funded by capital nobody has yet shown how to repay.

In the gap between the modest truth and the grandiose pitch, an entire industry of slop has bloomed.

The aesthetics of fraud

This is where the LinkedIn man with the symmetrical jaw comes back into focus. The reason his image is unsettling is not that it is fake. Humans have been faking photographs since photography was invented. It is that it is fake without conviction. Fake without art. Fake in the manner of something assembled by a process that does not know what a face is for, generating an image that does not know what a man is, to be consumed by an audience the algorithm does not know is human. Fakery all the way down, and nobody involved in the production has stopped to ask whether the result is worth looking at.

The same disease has spread to the prose. The grandmother who said the thing that changed everything. The five lessons learned from a failed startup. The thread that begins, “Yesterday I fired my best employee. Here’s why.” All of it written by the same machine, in the same voice, with the same false-intimate cadence, the same fabricated specificity, the same final line that lands like a verbal punch from someone who has never thrown one. Counterfeit feeling, manufactured at industrial scale, by people who have decided that authenticity is a friction cost to be optimised away.

I have also begun to notice something in psychotherapeutic work that I think is connected. Younger patients, late teens, early twenties, increasingly describe their internal lives in the manner of the content they consume. The sentences are shorter, and the self-narration is more polished. The reflections arrive pre-packaged, as if rehearsed for an audience that isn’t in the room, and I do not think this is always a coincidence. If you grow up swimming in synthetic emotion, your own emotional vocabulary starts to borrow from it. The slop economy is not just a marketplace; it is becoming an inner voice.

The authenticity reaction

Every aesthetic excess produces its opposite. The ornament of the Victorian drawing room produced Bauhaus. The slickness of mid-century advertising produced punk. The polish of stock photography produced the entire visual language of independent journalism in the 2000s, with its grain and its handheld camera and its insistence on the visible imperfection of the real. We are now living through the gilded age of synthetic content, and somewhere, in a notebook, on a four-track recorder, in a darkroom, its opposite is being prepared.

You can already see the early signals. The resurgence of film photography among people who were not alive when film was the only option. The premium being placed on handwritten correspondence. The growing audience for podcasts in which two people simply talk to each other, with no production, no script, for three hours at a time. Writers who publish their drafts with the typos intact, because the typos are now the proof that a human was present.

I would guess, though I cannot prove, that the market for the unmistakably human is going to expand rather than contract as AI-generated content saturates the rest. A handwritten letter is going to mean more in 2030 than it did in 1990. A photograph taken on actual film, of an actual face, in an actual room, will become the new luxury good. A novel written slowly by a person, with the marks of struggle still on the page, will command a premium over the novel generated in four minutes. Not because the human version is necessarily better in some measurable way, but because it is evidence. Evidence that someone was there. Evidence that the time of a living person was spent on the thing you are now consuming.

The companies pouring three hundred billion a year into this have not priced this reaction in. They cannot. The reaction is, by its nature, a refusal of the categories in which they think.

What comes after the bubble

The technology will not disappear. It will find its proper, modest scale. It will be a useful tool for bounded tasks, deployed quietly, in the background, the way spellcheck is deployed now. The data centres built for the speculative version will be partly stranded, partly repurposed, partly abandoned. The people who became billionaires on the way up will mostly remain billionaires on the way down, because that is how these cycles work. The people who lost their jobs in the meantime will not get them back. The carbon released to power the buildout will remain in the atmosphere.

And the rest of us will be left to do what we always do after a great craze. Take stock of what was real, what was hype, and what, if anything, was gained. Rebuild the institutions of trust that the slop economy corroded. Learn, again, to recognise the human in what we read and see, and to value it because it is rare.

The man in front of the impossible window will fade. The grandmothers who never spoke will fall silent. And the actual people who were here all along, flawed, slow, expensive, irreplaceable, will get back to the work of being alive.

The ones who lost their authenticity will be the ones left behind.

Suggested readings:

• The sharpest single piece on why the AI bubble will burst, by the journalist who has been ahead of every major beat on this story. Indispensable on the financial mechanics. Zitron, E. (2024). The Subprime AI Crisis. Where’s Your Ed At. https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/

• A key essay on what large language models actually are: a compression of the web, dressed up as comprehension. Chiang, T. (2023, February 9). ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

• The clearest argument for why the slop reaction is coming, and what it will mean to prove you are human on a web flooded with generated content. Appleton, M. (2023). The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI. https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

• The establishment view, from inside one of the institutions most exposed to the trade. Goldman Sachs’ head of global equity research argues the technology is not built to solve the problems that would justify its costs. Goldman Sachs. (2024, June 27). Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit? Top of Mind, Issue 129. https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/top-of-mind/gen-ai-too-much-spend-too-little-benefit

Gay and lesbian couples can adopt jointly in roughly 39 countries and territories. Most of the world does not allow it, and many countries restrict adoption further by barring single applicants altogether. Where it is permitted, the conversation often turns on whether prospective parents are being treated equally, whether agencies are complying with equality duties, and whether refusing a placement amounts to discrimination. These are real questions, but they are not the same question as what is the child’s wish.

I have worked with adopted adults and the ones placed with gay or lesbian couples sometimes described something that the official literature does not capture. A felt absence. A longing for a mother and/or a father that their loving home could not provide. A sense of standing out at school in a way that compounded the standing out they already did as adopted children. The pattern was sharper among those adopted when they were already old enough to have a sense of what a traditional birth family was meant to look like, and to feel the gap between that and what they were given. None of them said the question of what kind of family they would have chosen was put to them before the placement was made. This is despite many expressing that they would not change their adoptive parents, who they treasured.

These are not isolated voices. Heather Barwick, raised in the United States by her mother and her mother’s female partner, published an open letter in “The Federalist” in 2015 titled “Dear Gay Community, Your Kids Are Hurting”. She wrote that her father’s absence created a huge hole in her, that she ached every day for a dad, and that her mother’s partner, however loved, could not replace the father she had lost.

The standard response is to point at the research. Population studies, the argument goes, show that children raised by gay or lesbian parents do as well as their peers on wellbeing, development, and academic outcomes. Therefore the family form is irrelevant and any preference for mother and father placements is prejudice in another costume.

Both halves of that argument may be weaker than they sound.

The research base may not be as solid as its defenders present. The most cited UK longitudinal study, by McConnachie, Golombok and colleagues at Cambridge, follows 33 gay fathers, 35 lesbian mothers and 43 heterosexual parent adoptive families. Methodologically respectable, but a small, mostly white, middle class, urban sample recruited in part through support groups for gay and lesbian adoptive parents. Similarly, Mark Regnerus’s larger 2012 study in Social Science Research, which found worse outcomes among adults whose parents had had a same sex relationship, has been heavily criticised for comparing across unlike family situations and has its own defenders and critics.

The honest summary is that the evidence base is contested, the methodologies are imperfect on both sides, and the field has not earned the certainty its loudest voices project.

More importantly, even if the outcome studies were unimpeachable, they would not settle the question. Outcome equivalence on measured variables is not the same as equivalence in every respect that matters to a child. A young person can grow into a well adjusted adult by every scale a researcher can construct and still carry a loss the scales do not see. The question of what a child would have chosen, given the choice, is not answered by showing that the child turned out fine.

The same drift away is visible in the normalisation of single adopters as equivalent candidates to couples. Single people can be, and sometimes are, the right placement for a particular child. But the principle that two parents sharing the load produces more resilience, more time, more income, and a backup when one adult falls ill or dies is not controversial except when it becomes politically inconvenient.

Treating single adopters as routinely equivalent to couples, rather than as the right answer for specific cases, may just be a concession to adult fairness instead of focusing on the child.

In England, for example, where roughly one in five adoptions is now to a gay or lesbian couple, the practical situation is that adopter numbers have collapsed since the pandemic. Around 2,940 children with a placement order were waiting to be matched in mid 2025, against just 1,420 approved adopters, and the average wait for a child between entering care and being placed with a family is now around two years and five months. In that context, a loving gay or lesbian couple ready to take a child is straightforwardly preferable to the alternative, which is continued time in care, and anyone who pretends otherwise is using the child as a prop in someone else’s argument. But the comparison is not always that. Sometimes a mother and father placement may also be available, equally suitable and ready to take the child. In those cases the child’s preference for a family that resembles the one they lost is a real factor. Treating it as if it weighs nothing, because acknowledging it would sit awkwardly with equality policies, is not child centred policy.

There is a related point about ethnicity. Some agencies still weigh racial and cultural matching as one factor among many, particularly for older children with a developed sense of identity. The reasoning is not, for example, that a black child cannot thrive with white adoptive parents. Many do. The reasoning is that the child’s own experience of fitting into the family they are placed into matters, and the placement should reflect that where it can. The same logic applies to mothers and fathers, and pretending it is no factor at all does not survive scrutiny.

What may be needed is not a ban on gay and lesbian adoption or on single adopters but more honesty in the assessment process by acknowledging that the felt experience of the child, including what was lost and what is offered in its place, is a legitimate input, and that two parents are, all else equal, better than one.

Suggested reading:

• The International Bar Association’s review of the international legal framework of LGBTQI+ adoption rights notes that joint adoption by gay and lesbian couples is explicitly legal in 39 countries and territories. ibanet.org/the-international-legal-framework-of-LGBTQI-adoption-rights

• Heather Barwick’s open letter in The Federalist, 17 March 2015, titled Dear Gay Community, Your Kids Are Hurting, describes aching every day for a dad and her mother’s partner being unable to replace the father she had lost. thefederalist.com/2015/03/17/dear-gay-community-your-kids-are-hurting

• The UK longitudinal study by McConnachie, Golombok and colleagues, Adoptive Gay Father Families: A Longitudinal Study of Children’s Adjustment at Early Adolescence, published in Child Development in 2020, followed 33 gay father, 35 lesbian mother and 43 heterosexual parent adoptive families and found few differences between family types. srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.13442

• Mark Regnerus’s paper, How Different Are the Adult Children of Parents Who Have Same Sex Relationships, published in Social Science Research in 2012, found worse outcomes among adults whose parents had had a same sex relationship. The study has been heavily criticised, most notably in an amicus brief by the American Sociological Association. A summary is available at theconversation.com/factcheck-are-children-better-off-with-a-mother-and-father-than-with-same-sex-parents-82313

• Department for Education data summarised by CoramBAAF shows that 20 percent of looked after children adopted in the year ending March 2024 were placed with same sex couples. corambaaf.org.uk/resources/statistics/statistics-england

• Community Care, reporting on Coram-i figures commissioned by the Department for Education, found that 2,940 children with a placement order were waiting to be placed in mid 2025, against 1,420 approved adopters waiting to be matched. communitycare.co.uk/2025/10/28/45-rise-in-number-of-children-waiting-for-adoption-since-2022-as-adopter-numbers-plummet

• Government data reported by South West Londoner in January 2024 showed that children for whom an adoption decision had been made waited an average of two years and five months between entering care and being placed with a family. swlondoner.co.uk/news/10012024-children-in-care-waiting-longer-to-be-adopted