You don't have anything to feel guilty about. Every company is out there to make money. None of us, individually, are as cruel as a group of people making a consensus decision.
My first job was writing code for a company that took advantage of poor and desperate people. I didn't see that for a few years. But, it was a good veneer -- help people who wanted to go to school to improve their lot in life. I genuinely thought I was doing something good.
But these for-profit schools ended up abusing government regulations and guarantees around student loans, which has largely led to the student loan crisis. However, I thought that I was buying stuff in my community, it bought my family a house and a reliable car, and we were paying a lot of taxes.
Every company has some variation on this. Starbucks has been great for coffee growers around the world and has exposed many people to boutique/single-origin coffee, but like you said, it's built on addiction. But any restaurant is doing the same -- they're doing whatever they can to bring you in and have you pay money for food. I mean, you have to eat, right? And restaurants are all about flavor and presentation and unique ingredients -- they're triggering your dopamine, which they hope will entice the diner to spend more money. Car salesmen are the same way -- everybody kinda needs a car, but they try to take advantage of our lack of information, and try to cover it with dopamine-based ideas: smooth leather, new car smell, perfect paintjob, fast car, get a bunch of chicks, people will really know you've done well in life, etc.
Everything in live is built on dopamine though -- it's why we do anything. To reduce it to dopamine trigger = bad for humanity is not fair.
My first job was writing code for a company that took advantage of poor and desperate people. I didn't see that for a few years. But, it was a good veneer -- help people who wanted to go to school to improve their lot in life. I genuinely thought I was doing something good.
But these for-profit schools ended up abusing government regulations and guarantees around student loans, which has largely led to the student loan crisis. However, I thought that I was buying stuff in my community, it bought my family a house and a reliable car, and we were paying a lot of taxes.
Every company has some variation on this. Starbucks has been great for coffee growers around the world and has exposed many people to boutique/single-origin coffee, but like you said, it's built on addiction. But any restaurant is doing the same -- they're doing whatever they can to bring you in and have you pay money for food. I mean, you have to eat, right? And restaurants are all about flavor and presentation and unique ingredients -- they're triggering your dopamine, which they hope will entice the diner to spend more money. Car salesmen are the same way -- everybody kinda needs a car, but they try to take advantage of our lack of information, and try to cover it with dopamine-based ideas: smooth leather, new car smell, perfect paintjob, fast car, get a bunch of chicks, people will really know you've done well in life, etc.
Everything in live is built on dopamine though -- it's why we do anything. To reduce it to dopamine trigger = bad for humanity is not fair.