<p>The current era has been referred to as the age of addiction. This paper takes a bird’s eye view of this condition, examining how contemporary capitalism systematically produces and exploits addictive consumerism with profound consequences for ecological sustainability. Drawing on a critical-institutional lens, it advances a dual thesis: that addiction is simultaneously a structurally emergent outcome of capitalist modernization — through the erosion of kinship networks, communal institutions, and shared meaning systems — and a strategically amplified mechanism, deliberately engineered by corporations through the manipulation of neurobiological vulnerabilities. Tracing these dynamics across six industries — ultra-processed food, digital platforms, fast fashion, tourism, automobiles, and e-commerce — the paper demonstrates how addiction-driven overconsumption constitutes a significant and underexamined driver of ecological degradation. It further examines how indigenous communities and diverse religious and cultural traditions embodying principles of sufficiency and moral formation offer empirically grounded institutional alternatives that simultaneously reduce addictive consumption and ecological harm. The paper reconceptualizes sustainability beyond techno-economic solutions, calling for institutional innovations grounded in moral economies, ecological embeddedness, and post-growth social contracts as pathways for resisting the exploitative dynamics of limbic capitalism.</p>