I'd love to stop believing in it but it's destroyed a large part of my life.

The issue with defining it as an addiction is more of a question of separating from other compulsive issues than not recognising the compulsive issues of the thing itself.

Yes, I understand there's a difference between compulsion and addiction but I'd expect the users of Hacker News to understand enough about how the dopamine system works to see the relationship between the two.