What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits

Friday, October 24, 2025

The headline here is an homage to one of the beloved albums of my younger days by the Doobie Brothers – back when albums were albums, on vinyl.  I wish I could herein wax eloquent about the days sitting in a room, queueing up records, spinning them and enjoying music with friends – which is precisely how I discovered this particular album.  But we live in a different age now – an age where that album title seems prophetic and our vices are no longer viewed as they were when I was young, when vices are now just “innocent” past times, and I am forced to wonder if we are the better for it.

Yesterday while I was looking at the notable downsides of the legalization of weed, the FBI was announcing arrests for illegal gambling practices involving professional athletes.  The host had his weekly discussion with Ben Domenech and focused on the gambling scandal, but within was revealed a big problem with drinking among young people that developed the vice during the isolation of covid.  Which ties in with the rise of nitrous oxide as an intoxicant.

Vices it seems are always with us.  Tobacco, once widely used, has been heavily stigmatized while we have loosened or given up altogether on controls on gambling and intoxication.  There has been a shift in our vices, but it would seem no lessening of them.  We could quote statistics and argue for the rest of our lives about which vice set is preferable, the one of my youth or the current day.  A study comparing deaths related to the new intoxicants versus smoking related deaths would be fascinating.  Other vices are not so widely discussed – the rise in pornography consumption for example.

Believe it or not, television was once a vice, access to it carefully limited by parents. But nowadays:

The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average, modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

The article just linked declares this a “postliterate society,” and notes:

It’s worth noting that print alone cannot usher in peace and democracy, or abolish the innate human tendencies toward partisanship and violence. And it is certainly not immune to fake news and conspiracy theories. But you do not have to believe print is a perfect and incorruptible system of communication to accept it is also almost certainly a necessary precondition of democracy.

Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print, with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity, and dispassionate engagement. In this environment, ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticize them and, perhaps, to change them.

By contrast, politics in the age of short-form video favors heightened emotion, ignorance, and un-evidenced assertions. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the postliterate world.

Therein lies a major hint as to why I still blog as opposed to tweet, video, or other far more popular forms of internet communication.  But back to the point – here we see another vice liberalized with huge downsides.

I am not herein proposing a return to the vices of my youth – smoke filled rooms with the booze flowing while money moved under the table as the bridge club carried on.  Different vices with different downsides are not an improvement, just a shift.  Rather I propose we examine what it is about ourselves that demands vices to begin with – any vice.

What if rather than pouring so much energy into discovering the best set of vices with minimal downsides, we figured out how to do away with the need for them at all.  What might our society look like then?