Addictions

of the third kind*

The word addiction comes loaded with strong negative implications. Addicts are looked down on as deviants and criminals. The addict is considered sick, weak-willed, and fully at fault for succumbing to the addiction.

I take exception to most of those attitudes. They fail to recognize one important factor.

Addiction is normal. If you already understand this, you can skip over the grayed out blah-blah-yada-yada.

We are chemically hardwired for becoming addicted to many substances. And, as we know, addictions can be psychological, not just chemical. We talk about sugar addiction, gambling addiction, sex addiction. It’s not limited to only some people, we are all potential addicts. I’d even go so far as to say, we are all addicts of one form or another. But let’s not go down that road, it would only be a distraction. The point here is, we need to stop blaming the addict for something that’s part of our nature, and start blaming ourselves for not acknowledging when our, and I do literally mean you & me & everyone, adverse addictive behaviors become evident. Take good hard look at the consequences, then restructure our behavior before the addiction becomes abusive, injurious, pernicious, undesirable, and self-destructive.

There are other problems to certain addictions not often recognized. The harmful effects are sometimes subtle, frequently delayed, often adapted to or compensated for. Less than acute, slowly building harm blocks a clear view of the addiction and its deleterious effects. Sometimes blocking it to the point that we don’t even realize the addiction in ourselves or others. At other times an addiction can be so ubiquitous that it seems acceptable. This everyday acceptability is particularly dangerous. If, for instance, everyone were an alcoholic, we would find the behavior more tolerable.

Habitual behaviors are complicated by their mix of positive reward and negative consequences. Alcoholics drink until they get sick or knowing there’s a hangover in store for the next day. Despite the punishment for the excessive consumption, the behavior gets repeated. Tobacco is a perplexing example. The reward is short-lived and barely felt by a regular smoker, the withdrawals are mild, but the drive to satiate nicotine receptors is powerful despite apparently weak feedbacks. This demonstrates how the rewards can be feeble while the drawbacks are delayed and hidden by time. The unhealthy habit persists because we’re blindsided to the negatives making it easy to deny that there’s big trouble down the road.

The personal and social ills caused by chemical addictions are fairly well known. The remedies are less agreed upon. The first step unanimously accepted is to admit there is a problem. Following admission is the big challenge : changing the lifestyle patterns that allowed the behavior to get out of hand. More challenging still are psychological addictions. These are more insidious because they are harder to define or quantify.

The modern world has brought us a slew of new technologies that have revolutionized civilization. These advances have many unintended side effects that negate much of their positive aspects. As we adopt them, they become an integral part of our lives—on some we develop a complete dependency. The most damaging, unfortunately, are unrecognized, unacknowledged, and not only an everyday part of modern life, but thought of as absolutely necessary; the ones we believe we can’t live without.

There is one technology that singlehandedly has devastated the entire globe. It rips through our cities, scars are countryside, raises our stress level, threatens our environment, endangers our health, puts our lives in jeopardy, and lowers our quality of life. There is little in the contemporary world that has caused cumulatively as much damage. It has insinuated itself gradually into our lives to the point that we are, have been for generations, thoroughly addicted and don’t even know it.

If you haven’t noticed this global addiction, it’s not surprising. Everyone alive today has grown up with it, depended on it, even fallen in love with it. It’s accepted as a natural, ordinary activity that is here to stay. Like most addictions, it has gotten worse year by year. Like most addictions, we are oblivious to the glaring downsides. And like most of our problems, we believe we can remedy the symptoms without dealing with the cause. Every remedy is guaranteed to fail. We’ve been attempting for decades, but because the cause has not been met head on, the problem continues to grow. Read this link, but beware, denial is the first response of an addict : A Global Review.

Why do we put ourselves through this?

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*note : There are generally recognized two types of addiction : chemical and behavioral. There a third less recognized type—societal. See this link.