[492] Life on Mars?

By way of analogy, I feel addiction is powerful. You have to admit you're sick before you can get better.

This is perhaps the ground floor statement for attempting to help an addict. There's no hope and nothing changes without the admission of a problem. That problem is under layers. It's now a habit or incorporated into your personality or social group. It's got a book’s length worth of excuses. It makes you feel good, or at least, nothing at all. It seems to be people who also don't have a solid handle on their own lives calling you out and what you are as the problem. You still have to admit it.

An addiction or disorder can sneak up on you. You start innocently or you ignore little signs until you find yourself in a dramatic scene wondering how you got there. We tend to think of addiction as something on a different level. You can be addicted to drugs or alcohol maybe, but if someone said you were a “workaholic” or addicted to drama and heartache, while the latter still meant to be damming, they don't think of it as requiring a 12-step program.

I tend to think the mind is an addict by nature. The mad scramble for collecting resources, learning things, abusing pleasures, and seeking out novel experiences. It's an addict for validation. Whether you get it from your peers or the story you tell yourself about your place in the world. You want to feel like you belong somewhere, nearly anywhere.

Of course, it acts on a gradient. According to everything I've ever read about alcohol, nearly every time I've gone out with friends, we're alcoholics. Then there's “a few too many every night” crowd, and then there's waking up the gutter and destroying your life. Realistically, there's as many kinds of addicts as there are people, but there's no way to talk about everyone. Bottom is different for each person.

I suppose I want to think about what happens next. When you put a voice to something you might be addicted to. Say I said I was addicted to reading. The next step would involve planned time off. It might be scheduling better sleep or more outdoor activities. But for something like that, it's not tied terribly close to my emotional well-being let alone physical health. It matters towards my sense of self-respect, but in reality, that's probably evaporated years ago. You might think of the news as at least putting a voice to things we consider problems, from general misconduct to terrorism. But it’s never enough to just talk about it either.

What if we consider the family of an addict? How do you live with someone in recovery? A lot of tentative trust, patience, checks and balances, and communication. Inevitably some claims about love keeping you together. You're my family or like a brother to me and so forth. But it can get too much. People can get cut off. One of the highest predictors for recidivism of any kind is the environment you plug into in order to recover. The Biggest Loser people almost always put the weight back on. Do the producers feel guilty or take the blame for the profitable, and ridiculously false, narrative? Of course not.

What if we’re perhaps generally blind and ignorant of what a proper definition of addiction would look like? Maybe it’s more of a philosophical constant to incorporate into our storytelling and cultural lore. Maybe it’s naive to think there’s a strong science for “generally curing” what keeps people hooked.

I’m tired of professions of “adulting.” Look at me, I’m stressed out, have no time, am taking my few days off to veg out or buy a lawn mower. So adult. I think we’re addicted to a narrative. I think the narrative repeats and exaggerates the mistakes we’ve been bred from. It’s an idealistic upper-middle class conception of what’s valuable and worth spending your time on. Stuff. Perfectly framed pictures. Countless hours at the office. The most loveable pet you’ve ever seen.

When every day I think about how hollowed-out my relationships have become, because of how “busy” people are, and then see home appliances and backlogged emails forwarded as the tortured point of empathy we’re supposed to “like” or “cry” about, I feel the hole in my chest grow ever larger. I think of the career bulimic looking for a pat on the back for keeping down a whole banana. Are they really healthy? In that moment, are you going to make some stupid comment about how good fruit is for you?

In truth, the more I admit to myself, sometimes the more problems it imposes. I do feel like that old and/or obese person who’s borderline without shame at the thought of dying soon enough. Once that sinks in, you have to structure new rules for governing the kind of hyena-esc sensibility as it gets louder. It took a while to feel comfortable doing studies semi-consistently because the realities of middle-management, minimum wage, academia, and the military are even less what I’m about than being a guinea pig. I’ve written about the precarious nature of entrepreneurship and how inflated and rare that title applies in hoping to avoid faux-pride.

I’ve been overusing the term “cliche.” I feel it’s because while I’m constantly searching for new inspiration for “fixes” or ways to approach a cultural conversation, most people are addicted to the narrative. They have the same habits and excuses. They have the same hopelessness or debt. They’re simply rolling along “their” particular path because without the time or spirit to contemplate change, it doesn’t feel possible. It doesn’t feel real.

It seems like a “hate the sin, not the sinner” situation in my head. I don’t hate you for taking pride or deriving happiness from something I might personally think is kinda stupid. I hate that I don’t believe you have more than that. I think it’s a sin that social media defines us. I think it crept in and amplified an already toxic narrative of self-worth. I don’t want you kicking pebbles, pretending you moved mountains, when you hoped to conquer the moon. Suicide can take much longer than you think.