Pretas or Hungry Ghosts are mythical creatures described by many Eastern religions as being trapped in various states of existence, afflicted by Insatiable Desire because they have lived greedy, self-centered lives while alive. They are usually characterized by huge eyes and distended stomachs to symbolize blind desire while the tiny mouth and skinny neck show their inability to ingest all that they covet. 

Our neural reward systems powered by dopamine have evolved over millions of years and many species to reward overconsumption in times of plenty to offset frequent scarcity. We seek out the dopamine rush to satisfy our needs but also to gain motivation for finding more. 

It used to take humans all day to find enough food to subsist. Nowadays, we can stop by a supermarket to find fairly inexpensive food from all around the earth. 

We have never seen this many powerful drugs such as cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, tobacco of such extreme potency and staggering supply widely available at any time in world history. But our modern society has taken normally healthy things like food, sex, and social intimacy and "drugified" them through quantity, access, potency and novelty. 

Our brains change. Smartphones make everything accessible immediately and bombard us with a constant stream of digital content programmed to provide a pleasurable rush at the click of a button and we start thinking of the next click before finishing the current screen creating an addiction to that flow. We are put in a trance. Compulsive overconsumption creates a plague of depression and anxiety because our pleasure - pain seesaw never achieves homeostasis (balance).

We can easily become hungry ghosts to many habits. Addictions, both physical (tobacco, sugar and opiates) and behavioral (social media, TV, and sex), affect almost everyone in our modern world.