Porn, Pot, and Parlays: Young Men, Loneliness, and the Rise of Addictive Content

Loneliness is the raw material. Porn, pot, and parlays are the finished product.

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Clinically reviewed by Ken Litwak, MS, LIAC, LCADC, ICGC-II and Timothy Fong, MD  |  9 min read

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It is 1:40 on a Tuesday morning, and a 24-year-old we’ll call Marcus is watching a backup center he has never met try to grab three rebounds in the last minutes of a blowout that was decided at halftime. He has $85 riding on that prop and $312 in his checking account. There’s a vaping device with a high concentration of THC on the nightstand and a tab open to a porn website behind the betting app. He hasn’t been on a date in eighteen months.

Marcus is a composite — assembled from clinical case descriptions and survey data, not one real person. But nothing about his night is unusual, and that is exactly the point. None of these three things is a villain on its own — plenty of people bet, use cannabis, or watch porn without harm. What’s worth paying attention to is the pattern: three ordinary products, all engineered for the same customer, all landing on the same vulnerability at once. Marcus is not a cautionary outlier. He is a demographic.

This guide takes an even-handed look at why young men have become the target market for sports betting, high-potency cannabis, and pornography; how they hook the brain’s reward system; the loneliness that ties them together; the warning signs worth taking seriously; and where to get confidential help. The goal isn’t to demonize a Saturday-afternoon bet or a legal dispensary — it’s to understand when ordinary use tips into a problem, and what helps.

Why young men became the target market

By almost every measure of connection — school, work, friendship, love — young men have been sliding for a quarter century. They earn 42% of bachelor’s degrees today, down from 57% in 1970. The share of men reporting no close friends has quintupled since 1990, to about 15%. Roughly a quarter of men under 30 report no sex in the past year. Men die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women, and the fastest-growing group is men 25 to 34.

That is a large population with unstructured time, thin margins, and a phone — and three industries built products precisely for it. These three activities feed off each other and work synergistically, driving a person to spend more time and more money. The common theme is seeking escape, seeking a sense of control, seeking action, and numbing feelings of emotional pain.

Is sports betting addictive?

For most people, no — the majority bet occasionally, recreationally, and within their means. But for a meaningful minority it can develop into a genuine gambling disorder, and the design of modern mobile betting makes that slide easier than it used to be. Legal single-game sports betting was largely confined to Nevada until a 2018 Supreme Court ruling. It is now legal in 39 states plus Washington, D.C., Americans wagered a record $167 billion with legal sportsbooks in 2025, and about half of men aged 18 to 49 hold an active sportsbook account. A casino now lives in every pocket, open around the clock — a shift Dr. Timothy Fong — Co-Director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program and President of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry — has spent two decades documenting.

The engine of the harm is product design. A parlay chains several bets into one ticket, and every leg must hit to pay. The math is brutal for the bettor: sportsbooks keep nearly 20 cents of every parlay dollar, versus about a nickel on a straight bet. Fong compares the same-game parlay to a slot-machine pull — near-miss after near-miss, delivered on the unpredictable schedule that is the most compulsion-forming pattern ever identified in a lab.

“Nobody chooses to have a gambling problem, to go wreck their lives financially and to lose the trust of their family members. Nobody willingly decides to go do that. There’s something else driving this behavior.”

— Dr. Jeremiah Weinstock, gambling-disorder specialist, Saint Louis University

The consequences are arriving on schedule. A UCLA–USC study of seven million credit files found bankruptcies rose 25–30% within a few years of online betting legalization, hitting young, low-income men hardest. And the clinical picture is accelerating: what once took seven or eight years to become a disorder, Fong says, can now happen in a matter of months.

How high-potency cannabis affects the young male brain

The cannabis older generations remember averaged about 4% THC. Today’s dispensary flower runs 20–30%, and the concentrates in vape pens run 70–90%-plus. This is a different drug, delivered through a discreet, odorless device. In 2022, for the first time in U.S. history, more Americans used cannabis daily than drank alcohol daily — a sign the drug has shifted from party favor to nightly maintenance.

Dr. Fong’s numbers are the ones he repeats in nearly every interview: roughly a 9% chance of becoming addicted, rising to about 20% for those who start before age 18. One point worth being precise about: cannabis dependence is a substance use disorder, not a behavioral addiction like gambling or compulsive pornography use — but it runs on the same reward circuitry, which is why it belongs in this story. Nearly nineteen million Americans meet criteria for cannabis use disorder in a given year, and the highest rate — about one in six — is among 18-to-25-year-olds. A large Danish study estimated that up to 30% of schizophrenia cases in men aged 21 to 30 might have been prevented without cannabis use disorder. That figure is associational, not proof of cause — but it lands on exactly this demographic, in the years the brain is still maturing.

Can you be addicted to pornography?

Pornography is the oldest of the three and reaches boys the earliest: 73% of teens have seen online porn, and the average age of first exposure is 12. Modern tube sites borrow every retention trick from social media — infinite scroll, autoplay, an algorithm that learns the user faster than he learns himself.

In one study, the behavioral-addiction neuroscientist Aviv Weinstein (of Ariel University — no relation to Weinstock above) found pornography use correlated with greater difficulty forming intimate relationships in men. Read that carefully, though: it’s a correlation, not proof that pornography causes relationship problems. Loneliness, social anxiety, and pre-existing difficulties likely feed both, the direction of cause is unclear, and the research here is genuinely unsettled. What’s less disputed is the design of the product — pornography, Weinstein and his colleagues wrote, sells a virtual world “in which women always get satisfied and never complain,” a frictionless simulation aimed at exactly the young men for whom real intimacy has grown scarce.

Is it technically an “addiction”? The science is genuinely mixed, and even Weinstein has published findings that don’t fit the model cleanly. But the World Health Organization now recognizes compulsive sexual behavior disorder, with problematic pornography use among its forms — and problematic, distressing, hard-to-control use is real regardless of the label.

The loop: how loneliness fuels addiction

Here is the trap, and it is the same trap three times. The lonely man has the most hours to feed the feed. The isolated man is the ideal audience for the simulation. The aimless man is the one for whom a six-leg parlay feels like a plan. Each product takes his money, his motivation, and his shot at the real thing — and the emptiness that made him a customer deepens, which makes him a better customer.

“When young men come in, they turn to gambling to soothe their emotional pain. And then on the flip side, the gambling just makes for more emotional pain, the crisis of loneliness, the crisis of isolation.”

— Dr. Timothy Fong, Co-Director, UCLA Gambling Studies Program; President, American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry

Swap in pornography. Swap in cannabis. The sentence still holds. That is not a coincidence; it is the business model. Which is why the answer is rarely willpower alone — it’s treating the loneliness and low mood underneath at the same time as the behavior on top.

How these problems are treated

The encouraging part: these problems respond to treatment, often faster than people expect — and the same core approaches help across betting, cannabis, and compulsive pornography use. Dr. Fong reports that roughly 40% of the gamblers who enter his program have stopped a year later. Evidence-based approaches include cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), motivational interviewing, and treating co-occurring anxiety and depression. Prevention comes down to friction — delaying and limiting access — which is the opposite of what every one of these products is engineered for.

You don’t have to hit rock bottom, and you don’t have to do it alone or in person. Confidential telehealth lets you start from home.

Michelle Hatfield, LMFT, ICGC-II, IGDC, is a licensed marriage and family therapist at Kindbridge specializing in gambling, gaming, and process addictions. Clinically reviewed by Ken Litwak, MS, LIAC, LCADC, ICGC-II (Licensed Clinical Alcohol & Drug Counselor and Internationally Certified Gambling Counselor) and Timothy Fong, MD (Co-Director, UCLA Gambling Studies Program; President, American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry). Read more about our clinical team →

Sources

American Gaming Association (2025 handle); Hollenbeck, Larsen & Proserpio, “The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling” (2024); Baker et al., NBER WP 33108 (2024); UCLA Health and SciLine interviews with Dr. Timothy Fong; St. Louis Magazine and Kindbridge Research Institute (Dr. Jeremiah Weinstock); Weinstein et al., Frontiers in Psychiatry (2015); NIDA Cannabis Potency Monitoring Program; Caulkins, Addiction (2024); Hjorthøj et al., Psychological Medicine (2023); Common Sense Media (2023); American Institute for Boys and Men; Survey Center on American Life. “Marcus” is a composite.