It occurs to me that many alternatives you mention are also superstimuli:
Reading a book
Pretty unlikely or rare to encounter stories or ideas with this much information content or entertainment value in the ancestral environment.
Some people do get addicted to books, e.g., romance novels.
Extroversion / talking to attractive people
We have access to more people, including more attractive people, but talking to anyone is less likely to lead to anything consequential because of birth control and because they also have way more choices.
Sex addiction. People who party all the time.
Creativity
We have the time and opportunity to do a lot more things that feel “creative” or “meaningful” to us, but these activities have less real-world significance than such feelings might suggest because other people have way more creative products/personalities to choose from.
Struggling artists/entertainers who refuse to give up their passions. Obscure hobbies.
Not sure if there are exceptions or not, but it seems like everything we could do for fun these days is some kind of supernormal stimulus, or the “fun” isn’t much related to the original evolutionary purpose anymore. This includes e.g. forum participation. So far I haven’t tried to make great efforts to quit anything, and instead have just eventually gotten bored of certain things I used to be “addicted” to (e.g., CRPGs, micro-optimizing crypto code). (This is not meant to be advice for other people. Also the overall issue of superstimuli/addiction is perhaps more worrying to me than this comment might suggest.)
It occurs to me that many alternatives you mention are also superstimuli:
Reading a book
Pretty unlikely or rare to encounter stories or ideas with this much information content or entertainment value in the ancestral environment.
Some people do get addicted to books, e.g., romance novels.
Extroversion / talking to attractive people
We have access to more people, including more attractive people, but talking to anyone is less likely to lead to anything consequential because of birth control and because they also have way more choices.
Sex addiction. People who party all the time.
Creativity
We have the time and opportunity to do a lot more things that feel “creative” or “meaningful” to us, but these activities have less real-world significance than such feelings might suggest because other people have way more creative products/personalities to choose from.
Struggling artists/entertainers who refuse to give up their passions. Obscure hobbies.
Not sure if there are exceptions or not, but it seems like everything we could do for fun these days is some kind of supernormal stimulus, or the “fun” isn’t much related to the original evolutionary purpose anymore. This includes e.g. forum participation. So far I haven’t tried to make great efforts to quit anything, and instead have just eventually gotten bored of certain things I used to be “addicted” to (e.g., CRPGs, micro-optimizing crypto code). (This is not meant to be advice for other people. Also the overall issue of superstimuli/addiction is perhaps more worrying to me than this comment might suggest.)