We’re All Addicted
We live in a Western world with a baseline of subtle, often “functional”, but ultimately disempowering, addiction.
All around us are the temptations of technology and pleasure at the push of a button: social media, dramatized mainstream media, provocative movies and tv, delicious food, retail therapy, normalized alcohol and marijuana use, coffee, coffee, coffee etc. These all pull on our dopaminergic strings, and whats resulting right now, I believe, is a population with a socially accepted norm of addictive, and often subtly destructive, behavior.
To clarify, I speak here not to the opioid crisis, alcoholism, or any of the more extreme, dysfunctional forms of addiction, but to the often overlooked addictive behaviors we are ALL engaged in. There is no shame here. This is mostly a product of our rapidly advancing times, but a conversation I believe we need to have. A radical responsibility we need to adopt.
Growing up in a home of opioid addiction and emotional abuse, I learned early on to cope with food - I’ve had to keep at bay the tendency to emotionally binge eat my whole life - its still a work-in-progress. Because food is one of the most challenging addictions to overcome (just looks at the numbers, about 40% of adults in the US are obese, according to the NIH) because we HAVE to eat. We HAVE to face this temptation regularly to function. Abstinence is not an option. And the human brain did not evolve to effectively manage the extreme pulls of high fructose corn syrup and fried food.
My own experience with healing and managing addiction, work in the health and wellness/weight loss space, and committed path of mindfulness, has made me uniquely aware of the bass-ackwards state of our consumptive habits.
At its core, we struggle to hold the complexity and the nuance of these behaviors with enough self-awareness. Similar to why many people struggle with food addiction, we cannot categorize many of these potentially addictive behaviors as inherently BAD. While most of us believe with conviction that heroin is BAD, which deters us sufficiently to avoid it altogether, we struggle to see clearly the detriment caused by more subtle forms of pleasure-seeking.
An abundance of tasty foods, infinite tv and movie options, bars around every corner - these pleasures are delivered right to our doorsteps, as if socially accepted no matter how, and how much, we use them. Binge watching two seasons of a tv show over the course of a couple days, for example, may be laughed about with friends, but it doesn’t mean its healthy for you, your brain, or your overall well-being.
And it’s the ease of access, the constancy, the deliciousness and our own normalization that makes it so hard to recognize. These pleasures of life can become unfettered, subtle addictions which disempower us, consuming our inner resources.
Ask yourself, how many responsibilities, to others, to your own well-being and to the greater good have you avoided or delayed in exchange for instant gratification? We are letting ourselves be trained to expect pleasure at the push of a button, and our muscles for long-term thinking and self-actualization are atrophying.
We really have to call a spade a spade and be honest about our tendencies, how they may pull us in an addictive way, what we avoid with them, and how much more prosperous our lives could be with greater restraint and balance.
I’m not necessarily encouraging total abstinence, certainly not when it comes to food, though thats the best course of action for some of us, for certain behaviors. I personally chose that route with alcohol (though admittedly I sneak sips form my partner’s beers to satisfy the urge without getting in too deep). For streaming services, however, I intentionally chose movies over long-form, cliff-hanger based TV shows to avoid getting sucked into binging behaviors. These choices make sense for me based on my own self-awareness, but are unique to each individual. Granted my trauma and brain chemistry pre-disposes me to addictive behavior, I see all around us a normalization of overuse that indicates our succumbing to “just one more drink” and “just one more episode”.
On the flip side of this, we live in an infuckingcredible time in human history. The technology at our fingertips is unprecedented. The tastes we can taste and the experiences we have access to are worth immense appreciation. We ought to enjoy the finer things in life! And while I do take a critical tone here, in finding better balance I sense and believe we can find ACTUAL appreciation for these worlds upgrades, rather than wearing our reward systems thin.
And in many ways these sensual pleasures represent a beautiful and budding prosperity for human kind, not just in the first world but all over. Yet its alarming the obesity rates that skyrocket in developing countries where fast food companies pay a visit, and how many people are stuck staring at a smart phone on public transport in impoverished regions. Its especially sad because these people are more vulnerable, as there is more misery to avoid in poverty, and less resources for mental-emotional health empowerment.
And in the upper class, we get completely lost in our revelries. It’s much easier to press the pleasure button over and over than to face the harsh truths of our own problems, generational trauma and conditioning, or to put to use our capacities to improve the quality of our lives, or the lives of others.
But are we destined to obesely ride the spaceship, jacked into the Matrix, consumed by our consumption, as depicted in Wall-E?!
I think too many of us are misusing our prosperity. We’ve become the used.
And as the Greeks called it, drug and medicine converge on a single term, pharmakon, existing along a spectrum of dosage and intention, function and dysfunction. Their understanding reflected the true gradience of our relationship to substances.
Because while it can be easy to simplify things as “good” and “bad” to guide our decisions (i.e. Netflix good, Heroin bad) theres really a spectrum requiring much more inquiry, mindfulness and subtlety to properly understand what’s going on here.
It’s really our relationship to the behavior/substance that we have to examine, rather than the socially derived consensus, which often conflicts with the latest science and with the actual experience of how it feels in our body, hearts and minds. Take being hungover as an example of a socially accepted feeling of misery, even championed by some. Why do so many of us excessively poison ourselves with alcohol, even at the clear expense of our health? Because everyone else is doing it.
We have to use better information, of science and of our own self-awareness, to guide our choices. Because relying solely on pre-supposed collective narratives, often delivered with underlying incentive and unknown context that we miss, may make it easy to make choices as a consumer, but not always in our best interest.
For example, the legalization of marijuana, reflecting greater tolerance to a relatively benign substance when it comes our public health and safety, has a lot of positives. But because legally, and socially, we can now can categorize pot as “good”, instead of the “Devil’s Lettuce”, our simplification may serve some of us to greenlight [rationalize] a continuation of abuse.
Relying on external information, in this case the legality of smoking weed, on its own is troublesome, and it’s part of why so many people still smoke themselves into oblivion and remain unaware of its effect on their overall well-being. I’m not arguing against legalization, I’m arguing for more personal discernment and balance, as we bring substances like these out into the open.
Personally, I’ve found, through my own experimentation and self-regulation (which included plenty of bong rips/strikes outs in college and an addiction to tobacco-filled spliffs in my twenties), that getting high more than three times a week desensitizes me and makes me slower and sleepier. The effects are overall negative to my health and motivation. But when I keep it to 2-3 times a week, and stick with low-dose edibles, which I now do, I find it supports my embodiment, helps me gain clarity where I am stuck, allows me to relax and have some fun, while seeing things in a fresh, creative light.
Its taken years to develop this healthy, balanced relationship, but I’m wayyyy happier with where I stand now as a result. Marijuana now truly ADDS to my life, having been radically honest with my habits and put in the effort to subdue the addictive aspects of getting high.
At the end of the day, its not about “good” or “bad”. Drug or medicine. It all exists on a spectrum that requires a connection to self to understand. Its about personal responsibility and developing the discipline, curiosity and mindfulness to be honest about our behaviors and their affect on us, as well as our loved ones. Does this bring out the best in me? Or is it hindering my potential?
And while we absolutely need better top-down regulation, incentives and just straight up care and compassion from the organizations that create our easy and addictive access to all these pleasures, whats often missed in this conversation is our own personal choice to engage or not engage.
It is absolutely tough. It’s truly overwhelming. The options at our fingertips are abundant.
But I also believe its a HUGE OPPORTUNITY for humans to evolve.
Okay, so how do we do this? Awareness is the first step. Meditation. Journaling. Therapy or coaching. Letting this article land and reflecting inwardly - answering the questions posed in this article HONESTLY. Having vulnerable conversations with loved ones and as a society. Leading with curiosity will gain you & us the truth from which we can move forward potently.
Secondly, learning to trust your own judgment and self-awareness by getting comfortable getting uncomfortable. Do hard things that build the muscles of self-trust and discipline. Take cold showers and get active. Watch one less episode and journal instead. Have one less drink, take a few deep breaths and drink a glass of water. Buy one less thing impulsively and create something instead. Replace addictive behaviors with empowering ones. Reflect on the energy of an action. Is the driving force of this behavior an intense PULL, from external sources? Or am I intrinsically choosing to move in this direction, even if I have to push through some resistance?
As we become increasingly clear on how addictive behavior actually disempowers us, and build in replacements that bring us more energy, joy, creativity, connection, and a true and total sense of agency in our lives, the slope gets slippery, in a positive direction. Our patterns of habit start to shift holistically in a healthier, more internally free direction. Because thats what this conversation is all about. Personal freedom. The freedom to TRULY make aligned choices that dictate our fate, rather than being puppeteered by our unconsciously manipulated reward systems.
If all of this sounds foreign to you, or you don’t know where to start - be willing to LEARN and put in the effort to make it happen. Use your resources. You can learn to meditate from any number of amazing apps out there. Better understand the immense value of taking cold showers from a youtube video. Get supportive journal prompts from a quick Google search. Or hire a coach like myself to personally show you the way.
In summary, our current relationship with prosperity is blocking more prosperity. We are stuck in a holding pattern, drooling in front of the tv, forgetting that the magnificence of the human mind created this incredible tool in the first place, but not recognizing that it won’t grow to build more important ones if so many of us are stalled here “smelling the roses” indefinitely.
How much more potent would humankind be if more of us got off the couch and spent a little more time cultivating and authentically expressing our unique gifts? Addiction stymies our imagination and innovation.
So we’ve got to own it, and overcome it, especially these subtle but quite nefarious versions of it that are dragging us down as a society. We’ve got to get our asses up and take our power back. Exercise restraint. Exercise in general. Move from the stuckness. Rise above the reptile brain. Build more prosperity, but also build more of the consciousness able to hold it.
*Credit to Michael Pollen for key inspiration in the ideas expressed here. His journalism incredibly outlines the complexity of our relationships with various substances. If you are interested in this topic, I’d recommend his book This Is Your Mind On Plants, a comparison of three substances and their narratives: opium, caffeine and mescaline.