I started talking drugs when I was 13, ended up addicted to heroin, living on the streets, I'm not even going to try to describe the amount of death & violence that was in my life almost every day and that feeling of hoping the next hit sends you over so you don't have to wake up again. A while after I got clean I picked up a mobile game, I was lonely (having had to cut off all my friends from before I got clean) and bored (having gone from the 24/7 work of making money to score, scoring, using, then repeating as quickly as possible to having no idea how to pass the time) so I installed a few mobile games. I got into one, it wasn't even all that play to win, it was still fairly heavily skill & dedication based ("grind" I guess) but as soon as these sort of tricks like limited-time reduced price deals popped up my addict brain - which literally has developed from a young age with addiction to dopamine-spikes and a feeling of emptiness or being down without them - went to work and it took me a while to realise I was actually an addict again because it was a game. It was when I was asking people to borrow money for food cos I "hadn't budgeted well this month" again that I thought, dam I'm actually not even clean anymore. Luckily it wasn't that far down the line and I hadn't really screwed my finances & rent up by the time I stopped, but the biggest hit to me was feeling like I was back to square one and was still an addict, not clean, again. That really destroyed my belief in all the progress I'd made. I'm well aware some of you are going to say "just don't do it" but try swapping brains with mine for a day and being biologically conditioned to be weak against these kind of manipulations - if I saw a limited-time package on that game and was sensible & didn't spend the money, it would be ALL I could think about for days, it'd literally keep me up at night. Fortunately I'm one of the people who made it through to the other side. I collect Warhammer now, which is still a lot of money for something, but I feel like I've got tangible things to show for it, I'm always increasing in skill (in painting & playing), I meet people through it and paint with mates and it's far far easier to not overspend on. I'm pretty happy with the queue of models I have to paint and although there's loads more I want to buy, paint and add to my army I know there's only so many models I can paint so I don't want to just build a huge queue & not finish anything. But nowdays people are growing up with more and more of and better and better designed behavioural-psychology and dopamine-feedback loop based systems bombarding them throughout SO much of the day. And I think even if it's not drugs we're still raising generations of kids to have brains like mine that have to be careful about so so many things that other people can have healthy relationships with incase of potentially destroying our life, stability and future. And all for something they don't even enjoy that much but they just can't stop from doing it, so much so they will know they don't have the money for this but will rationalize it to disturbing levels.