A stoner hitting the bong, a suburban child playing Xbox One, a card shark going all-in in a high stakes poker game, a mother breastfeeding and nurturing her child, a generous benefactor sharing a tiny fraction of their wealth with a homeless man posted on a freeway ramp exit…all of us…are addicted to life.
All of us crave meaning, a reason to believe, a reason to belong…a reason to get out of bed in the morning. We depend on that rush of dopamine to our brain’s pleasure centers to focus us on “what matters,” which becomes highly individualized as people encounter and learn actions that generate them the most possible pleasure in the real world in accordance with their capabilities and strengths. This human reality is analogous to the rat learning that when it completes a maze, it acquires cheese. We all strive for the cheese in our own lives. When we decide whether or not to act in a particular manner we look to our memories for how we felt when we did it last, or rather seek observation of and guidance from others for how an action could feel if it has never before been personally experienced. We continuously seek the intrinsic built-in reward of “feeling good” after making a difference, an impact, on one’s own life and the lives of others. The rush of increased power and ability to control one’s own situation and the situation of those close to our sense of self — who we are (e.g. family, friends, broader identity groups) is intoxicating. It floods and enslaves the psyche to whatever means tend to produce these dopamine-communicated ends. And the crazy part is that the means can be entirely illusory (digital, ethereal), substance-based (namely drugs), or simulated otherwise through various means of “tricking the brain” (sensory-based inputs affecting a brain’s internal communication/output). In any case, to live is to be addicted in varying degrees to different modes and patterns of behavior. We are naturally religious/ritual-trained creatures in a broader sense of these terms.
Think of all the possible behaviors you can engage in as being in one giant competition with one another. You could go to work and make money which can empower you to have a certain standard of living and to provide for others you care for. You could also just sit on the couch and snort crack-cocaine all day. Additionally, you could instead play video games, then take your dog for a walk, then go to work (few addictions are mutually exclusive). You could engorge yourself on your favorite foods until you can no longer stomach a single bite. The behavior that wins at any moment, the action you decide to take at every moment in time, has been learned as the single most optimum action for long-term, or short-term, dopamine-based reward. And even whether or not short-term or long-term rewards tend to win out in your psyche is learned from personal interactions with your particular environment(s). Dangerous environments, such as a war zone or a “ghetto,” as examples, tend to promote risky behavior in service of the short-term, as the long-term is stifled by immediate threats to one’s own mortality. Importantly, when any action or behavior becomes a pattern due to repeated pleasurable brain-based response, it can be said to become an addiction.
All of us have at least one addiction in our lives, and most probably tens or even hundreds to varying degrees. If you brush your teeth everyday, it can be said to produce a calming or pleasurable response…or at least avoids a negative feeling of emptiness or unfulfilled feeling that tends to accompany you when the ritual is not completed. It is an addiction. If you feel an incredible positive rush when you help others and even consistently subjugate and minimize your own needs for those of others, you probably have a potent addiction of engaging in altruistic actions. Of course, there are more popularly understood examples of addiction such as a gambling addiction, a drug addiction, a video game addiction (or more broadly an internet addiction), etc…etc. All of these more poignant examples have clinical, dysfunctional undertones. This does not necessarily have to be the case. Even the most functional consistent behavior patterns, such as caring for, nurturing, and teaching children can be said to be…addicting addictions…on a fundamental level. Think about what happens when a heroin addict loses access to his fix. Now think about what happens when a mother loses access to or loses her child in the absolute sense altogether. The only difference is in degrees and kind. The physiological, visceral response to being withdrawn from heroin after repeatedly injecting it over a period of time tends to be so severe as to that it can cause death. However, while a mother’s withdrawal symptoms as a result of losing her child may not cause such severe physiological impairment, they can just as easily cause a certain “death of the soul”. Uncontrollable sobbing, lack of ability to emotionally self-regulate, feelings of emptiness, feelings of hopelessness, impaired sense of universal fairness…the symptoms are always different, but they always seem to still sound like what you could find on the back of a pill bottle or as a disclaimer at the end of an infomercial. The mere threat of the psychological effects of withdrawal is potentially the greatest reason why any addiction and its associated habits are so hard to break no matter what they may be. Addictions become a near inseparable part of us overtime that we could not see ourselves living without; without our most powerful addictions we can even begin to lose grip on our addictive tie to life completely.
Addiction to life is literal. If one begins to lose all addictive ties, all reasons for being, all sense of purpose…one’s addiction to life begins to fade. As this occurs a new almost all-consuming and unfortunate addiction takes its place: addiction to death, or rather addiction to ending one’s own life. There are modes and patterns of behavior that pervade this addiction as well as all others. Not all “self-harm” type of activities however even fall under this classification. After all, many or even most people that harm themselves are still quite addicted to life. Self-harm is a type of addiction that can serve many purposes such as garnering the attention of, ensnaring the lives of people that they otherwise could not. It can also serve purposes of self-stimulation if there is lack of alternative stimulation (such as in a psych ward), supplant greater pain, and even produce a euphoric rush in response to the pain inflicted by the self-harm itself. However, when one truly loses their will to live, addiction to death becomes all-powerful and all-consuming. So even as one loses their addiction to life, they can be said to still be addicted so long as they are alive. The thought-processes associated with an addiction to death are promoted by the same pleasure garnered from every process associated with an addiction that promotes living. Addiction to death crowds out all other options for pleasure when all other options appear to be exhausted and have been learned to have been fruitless — when one’s death appears to exceed the value of one’s life for purposes of making an impact on the world.
But if everyone is addicted to something, anything, all the the time as long as they live, then of course comes the question of when an addiction is actually “harmful”. An associated inquiry is when does having an “addictive personality” become a “bad” thing. Most of the cultural norms and lore even involving the term “addiction” tend to focus on its negative aspects. How, for example, a video game addiction may crowd out all motivation for other possible behaviors, or rather more socially acceptable addictions such as involvement in sports or academia. Or how a drug addiction may completely overshadow one’s life to the point of all meaningful enterprises being suspended or compromised in service of pure stimulus-based pleasure. Or how a gambling addiction may make of someone a drain on everyone else around them — slowly leeching away their own social capital in pursuit of financially maintaining the addiction.
There is no easy answer to the question of harmful addiction. In a moderately free and individualistic society, it could be said that an individual must be the one to decide when a certain addiction is “taking over their life” to an extent that it could be considered harmful — that an addiction is no longer serving perhaps some goal(s) or measure(s) of personal impact that some other addiction(s) could serve better. When and if this is the case, people often employ significant others and even strangers whom can best empathize with their addiction to motivate and pry them from the said harmful addiction’s entrapping qualities; entrapping qualities such as when pursuit of alcohol or any psychoactive drug can lead someone to engage in violent or immoral acts. Escaping an addiction’s related qualities and stimuli usually requires disassociation from all of its triggers. This is easier said than done, however, as a highly addictive behavior often enlists the assistance of subordinate addictions for its own ends. And those behavior patterns typically come with their own trappings, their own associated stimuli, and their own triggers. Addiction is often a complicated web that we ourselves weave in tangent with our experiences. Like with a spider and its web, a powerful, pleasure flooding addiction is easy to become trapped in…as one slowly becomes drained and devoured by it. But not all powerful, entrapping addictions may even necessarily be considered harmful by and large, further complicating how an addiction and addiction in general is conceptualized.
How society views a particular addiction by and large appears to be related to how many people are engaged with that pattern of behavior (do a majority of people drink alcohol or play video games?), and how that set of actions tends to interact or compete with other patterns of behavior. Is an addiction so all-consuming that it requires the totality of all of one’s life and behaviors to serve? Does the addiction play well with other addictions and allow for a greater diversity of behavior patterns in one’s life? Sometimes a job might require 90 hours a week. The term “workaholic” exists to attach a negative social stigma to extreme working addiction in which one’s work crowds out all other possible activities. Media addiction could be construed as negative if it leads one to become unreasonably fearful of the world, as media tends to skew information in favor of extreme human experiences for purposes of grabbing attention. The addictions of money, fame, and power lust power the media addiction turbine which in turn powers addiction to behaviors revolving around fear, restlessness, and information-seeking in general. Addictions are all interconnected feeding off one another and vying for dominance in a space populated by near infinite potential draws on people’s time — the currency of a lifespan. In seeking to make the most of our lifespan, we are drawn to what addictions appear to psychologically provide the most sustenance in whatever dose may be best for serving this purpose. In addition to an addiction’s typical nature, it could also be the temporal or physiological “dose” and role in conjunction with other addictions that makes an addiction harmful or worthwhile.
“Addiction” may be a negative term applied to certain behavior patterns to stamp upon them the “Scarlet Letter” of bad reputation and to be avoided if all possible. However, alas, we are all addicted to life. Some may be more likely to become totally consumed by one addiction at a time (hence your addictive personalities), but we all fall into an endless tapestry of performative rituals. Some of us enjoy vicariously indulging in violence in entertainment media in the form of TV shows, movies, video games, and through other mediums. Many of us go to church on Sunday. Most of us take a shower at least once every two days in the developed world. Nearly all of us love sex if we can experience it regularly with someone who is just addicted to us as we are to them. The extent and extremity of these rituals, these patterns of addiction, differs among all of us. Remember that if you accuse, with the archetypal accusatory tone, someone as having a drug addiction, you yourself could be addicted to video games, sex, work, personal hygiene, cleaning, or literally an infinite number of other things. If you seek to intervene and help someone overcome what may be a harmful addiction, remember to consider whether or not the other party considers it harmful themselves, the extent to which they are engaging in the addiction, and the extent to which it is or may be impacting their ability to function in society and enjoy a more diverse range of possible behaviors. With the “addicted to life” mindset, it must be said that the best and most sure way to overcome one addiction(s) is to replace it with an addiction or addictions that are just as potent. Sometimes trading drugs for video games could do wonders for one’s overall sense of well-being. Trading a group of friends along with popular physical locations for alternative sets of both could be the key to liberation. It could be said that a person that engages in a thousand disparate, mild addictions is more “well-rounded” than someone who engages in but a few highly associated ones. But even being “well-rounded” is not an absolute virtue. The Beethoven-like obsessed musician or the Picasso-like obsessed artist could very well impart more influence, more impact on the world, than someone who merely dabs in either among a host of addictive modes. Just a single addiction and its associated behaviors may be all one needs to feel happy and complete. In essence, the nature of addiction is myriad and subjective, and everyone alive is an addict.
- LB
