Squid Game hits like a slap. On the surface, it’s grotesque, thrilling TV: desperate people play deadly kids’ games for a giant cash prize. But the show is more than violence dressed in pink tracksuits. It’s a moral mirror. And behind the obvious critique of late-stage capitalism sits another, quieter accusation: addiction. Not just to drugs or alcohol, but to risk, to consumption, to the next fix of feeling good. Read it that way and the series turns into a concise parable: consumerism and addiction are the same beast with different skins.
TL;DR
- Squid Game uses deadly games as a powerful allegory for the addictive nature of late-stage capitalism.
- The show draws direct parallels between gambling addiction and consumerism, showing how both systems promise a “fix” and profit from repetition.
- Character arcs, particularly Gi-hun’s, represent the progression of addiction from small, manageable risks to an all-or-nothing spiral.
- The series highlights the hypocrisy of the system: the poor gamble to survive, while the rich gamble for sport.
- The author critiques the show’s own commercialization, noting the irony of an anti-consumerist story becoming a consumer product.
First, the obvious: money. Squid Game shows how cash reshapes people. It corrodes choices. It makes people betray their friends. It makes the poor play a game where winning costs a thousand things you can’t get back. But look closer. The mechanics of the show—betting, highs, comedowns, craving—mirror addiction. The competitors are not just poor; they are hooked. The VIPs aren’t just rich; they’re players in a beguiling gamble.
Gambling is the clearest addiction Squid Game uses. Early on, we meet Seong Gi-hun (call him Gi-hun). He’s a small-stakes gambler. He bets on horses. He misses his daughter’s birthday. He wins, then loses it to pay an old debt. He steals money from his mother. He’s not some caricature; he’s average, grimy, and quietly unraveling. That makes him relatable. Most gambling problems don’t explode overnight. They creep up.
Then the games arrive, and Gi-hun moves to the big table. The show stages this as the next stage of addiction: the all-or-nothing move. If you’re familiar with addiction, you recognize that feeling — the idea that one insane risk will reset everything. For Gi-hun, the stakes are literal. He risks life and limb for a chance to fix everything. That’s the pivot where gambling becomes a life-defining compulsion.
But Squid Game refuses to pretend this is a level playing field. The VIPs watch contestants like they’d watch horses. They bet on flesh. The message is blunt: the poor gamble to survive; the rich gamble for sport. Both groups are chasing a rush. Both are hooked. Only the consequences differ. The poor lose lives. The rich lose… dignity, maybe. Or they lose the cheap thrill of watching someone else’s collapse.
That contrast is deliberate. The show equates the structure of capitalism with a casino. Everyone is technically free to leave, but the system pulls you back. The poor are kept desperate. The rich are insulated. The house always wins. And the industry that profits off risk? It’s funded disproportionately by those who can’t afford it. That’s not accidental social commentary. That’s the point.
The subplot with Il-nam (Old Man) and Sang-woo and Young-hee and others layers the addiction metaphor with family drama. Maybe the most painful example is Young-sik and his mother. He’s in deep. She enables him, in a way that almost looks like love. But the show makes us ask the brutal question: when do attempts to protect someone become part of the problem? In the end, the mother commits the final act to stop the spiral. Symbolic or horrifying, it dramatizes a real question families of addicts face: when does protecting hurt more than it helps?
Gi-hun’s arc also says something about recovery, or the lack of it. He “wins.” Yet the win isn’t cleansing. He’s hollow, haunted, numb. The prize doesn’t fix what’s broken. If anything, winning confirms the sickness: the system is rigged, and to play is to consent. He realizes that winning means becoming complicit in the ugliness. So he chooses a type of death — figurative — to refuse the cycle. That’s the show’s moral knot: some escapes require ruin. Or a rebirth. Either way, it’s messy and costly.
Drugs show up later in the series and they’re kept intentionally vague. That’s smart. Squid Game doesn’t want viewers to debate chemical specifics. Instead, it uses drugs as shorthand for any quick fix promising power or escape. The pills reward you with focus, courage, even grace. The low is brutal. The withdrawal is violent, messy, and humiliating. Players crash, panic, and hallucinate.
That arc — hit, high, comedown, craving — is textbook addiction. But the show ties it to consumerism. The drug is a supercharged product. You buy. You feel better for a minute. You want more. When supply is limited, people become desperate. When it’s free and rampant, the social cost piles up. Squid Game compresses this into a fast timeline so we can see the pattern clearly. In real life, it takes years. On screen, it takes scenes.
Here’s the thesis: consumerism behaves like addiction. Think about it. A shiny device gives you a dopamine spike. Then it ages. The next device promises the same spike. You buy again. You never quite replicate the first high. So you chase a stronger or newer stimulus. That’s not a metaphor; it’s a pattern. Squid Game dramatizes this pattern by turning “buying” into “betting your life.” The stakes are higher, but the psychology is the same.
The show also shows how the system encourages repeat play. Advertising, product launches, “limited” releases — all of that creates a loop. You crave, you spend, you crash, you crave again. Squid Game’s masked guards and corporate overlords are just a cartoonish version of the algorithms and marketplaces that nudge us to consume. Both models rely on keeping people insecure and hungry.
Alcohol is everywhere in Squid Game, though it’s mostly symbolic. The VIPs sip whiskey while watching carnage. For them, alcohol is decadence. For the players, it’s an escape or a sign of failure. The show uses booze to draw a line between two kinds of consumption. One is a lifestyle choice with taste. The other is rough, used to dull pain. Yet either way, alcohol here signals decline. It’s another tool the show uses to highlight how pleasure and self-destruction can look indistinguishable from the outside.
One of the more frustrating ironies is that a show that skewers consumerism has itself become a smash consumer product. Merch, brand tie-ins, and collaborations crop up. That’s not the show’s fault alone; it’s the world. But it matters. There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance when an anti-consumerist story becomes its own mini economy. It’s like reading a scathing article about social media addiction on your phone while an app pings you with “buy now.” The signal and the noise are tangled.
Still, the show’s parable works even under commercialization. The fact that we can monetize outrage doesn’t erase the truth the story is telling. It just proves how effective the system is at absorbing critique and turning it into profit.
Squid Game is not subtle. The metaphors are smacked across your face. Sometimes that bluntness irritates. But it also makes the point stick. The series compresses complex social critique into visceral scenes. It forces us to watch what happens when systems predicated on scarcity and spectacle meet human desperation. It forces us to ask uncomfortable questions about responsibility, family, and how much we’ll risk for a little bit of relief.
Are the depictions of addiction realistic? Not really. They’re exaggerated. That’s fine. This is an allegory. The point isn’t to be clinical. The point is to make you feel the trajectory: desire, engagement, escalation, crash. The show succeeds there.
I love the show for how it refuses to be neutral. It nails the basic truth that capitalism and addiction are cousins: both promise escape, both profit from repetition, and both punish those with the least buffer. That said, I’m irritated by the performative contradictions around the series: the merch, the brand tie-ins, the way we have to consume a critique of consumption. It’s exactly the loop the show rails against.
Also, I wish the series had paused longer on recovery. We get trauma and aftermath, but we don’t get slow, boring rehab. Maybe that’s deliberate. Healing is messy and slow. It’s not cinematic. But it’s real. I’d like to see more attention given to how people rebuild after a system chewed them up.
Finally, Squid Game shines when it resists easy answers. There’s no neat moral. There’s only consequences. Sometimes the only humane choice is to stop playing. But stopping can ruin you anyway. That ambiguity is the show’s best gift.
If you walk away from Squid Game thinking only about the games, you missed half the point. The other half is about how everyday habits can be addiction in disguise. Want to check yourself? Ask: what do I reach for when I’m bored, lonely, or scared? Is it a product, a bet, a drink, or a scroll? Does it comfort or hollow you out? If the answer is the latter, you might be playing a different kind of game.
We are not horses. We are messy, complicated people who sometimes make terrible choices. The show is harsh, but it’s also an invitation. It asks us to be honest about what we chase. It asks us to choose — even when the choice is costly.
