The Paradox of Addiction

"Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me – to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other…"

Substance abuse aside, one could say that addiction generally pertains to some form of routine element, which an individual feels compelled to maintain. It is a repeated act, done today because it was done yesterday, in some sort of effort to preserve the comfortable norm. The object of addiction is irrelevant; replaced instead, in matters of importance, by the action surrounding it. Alcohol alone harms nothing, save bacteria…but the act of consuming it, regularly and relentlessly, is where the problem most often lies….but as I mentioned, substance abuse is only a minute fraction of human addiction, as a whole. It can, and does, involve any conceivable act a person can commit– be it spending time with a particular individual, raping young girls, or even enjoying a cup of tea before bed. It’s completely relative to the individual, and as such, encompasses almost every possible activity imaginable.

Addictions opposite, of course, is aversion…but in all important aspects regarding the nature of such, there is little to no distinction between addiction and aversion. The latter could simply be re-worded as an addiction to not committing a particular act, in order to preserve the comfortable norm, and in this sense the argument could be made that aversion can be vastly more harmful than addiction. A man could be averse to sunlight and dwell continually in darkness, eventually discovering that he has been shunned by the rest of the world as some sort of outcasted stranger. Or he could be averse to taking other people’s advice, only to find that his own instincts and impulses have done nothing but lead him astray.

In terms of combating addiction, the most common approach is to simply turn the object of such into an object of aversion…but as I just mentioned above, this is not an escape from the core of the problem that drives the individual, as inverting an addiction does little to rid one’s self of it’s obsessive constraints. There is, in fact, only one escape from the plague of contentment that lies at the heart of addiction and aversion, and that is the human ability to defy logic, and act in ways that seem to contradict our immediate self interest…if comfort and serenity be that interest. To step, without reason or provocation, off of the trail, and descend through the brush with our swords at the ready. To embrace a diet of experience evenly balanced between the reassuring, and the unsettling…and to do so, always, while leaving our preconceptions in our wake…

Cursed are the helpless, but equally cursed are the controlled.