Built to Break: Addiction, Identity, and the Digital Self in Young Adults

Why are young adults breaking down at record rates — and why do substances become the solution? Drawing from the groundbreaking book The Unseen Architecture by Richard Landis, this episode reframes addiction not as a moral failure but as a structural emergency — an attempt to stabilize an identity that was never built to withstand the pressures of modern life and social media. Integrating original research on Constructive Interactionism, masculine anxiety, and the latest SAMHSA data, this episode reveals how rigid boundaries in young men and permeable boundaries in young women create different but equally devastating pathways to substance use — and how the 12 Steps may work precisely because they rebuild the architecture from the inside out.

Get the book: The Unseen Architecture on Amazon

In this culminating volume, the series brings all the core concepts together to reveal the path toward becoming the conscious architect of your own inner world. It begins with the grand finale on restoring movement and coherence, then transitions into a series of powerful deep-dives applying the "Unseen Architecture" model to today's most pressing challenges: the impact of social media on childhood, addiction as a form of system regulation, the structural nature of panic attacks, and the ultimate goal of temporal repair. This episode is a masterclass in applying deep psychological theory to the practical art of living a more integrated and meaningful life.

Why do some of us break while others bend? This volume explores the biological and structural underpinnings of resilience, anchored in Polyvagal Theory and our innate search for meaning. It dissects the powerful forces of cognitive dissonance and the "ideal self," revealing why the same life can impact us so differently at various ages. Listeners will discover how the architecture of our relationships and our connection to a deeper purpose act as the ultimate stabilizers for our internal world.

Volume Two delves into the mechanics of how we move through the world, introducing the two critical axes of navigation: Attention/Intention and Intension/Extension. It explores the profound and often-unseen ways we construct our sense of time and how the relentless pace of the modern world can lead to "temporal collapse." This episode provides a powerful framework for understanding how to maintain our internal compass in an age of distraction and restore our natural, flexible movement through life.