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In medicine the word “addiction” usually indicates a physical dependence on a chemical substance or behavior that messes with your dopamine system. But, as Wikipedia admits, the word is now used much more broadly to mean any old gratifying dependency you have a tough time ending without tears. That’s the definition I’m taking home. So, while occasionally here in “Dream On,” we’ll look at the roles that mind and brain play in the predictable dopaminergic addictions like huffing glue (substance abuse), compulsive Purex use (OCD) and designer purse collecting (shopoholia), most often we’ll focus on the addictiveness of ideas, concepts, and fantasies -- from skewed self-images and the myth of “the American dream,” to the need to pretend that your sex partner is Angelina Jolie, a black stallion or Samuel Beckett. Read More
ADDICTION
Having been an addict once in my life I know it takes a struggle in the mind , not just thinking about addictions. It is not the mind alone be the will to bend the mind to the purpose...
ADDICTION
Having been an addict once in my life I know it takes a struggle in the mind , not just thinking about addictions. It is not the mind alone be the will to bend the mind to the purpose...
Addiction
The description "choosing your poisons is less a standard option than a rare privilege" suggests not so much that our habits are fixed than that changing one's habits (admittedly a very rare event) is limited to some special group, an addiction elite if you will (see how quickly I adopt and appropriate your addiction metaphor habit?). This view reinforces the sad notion that we are "victims" of addiction, or that addiction "takes hold" of us. And yet, is not the belief that we can change our habits the foundation of the optimism and determination you cite as good survival traits?
addiction
Well, optimism and determination are great survival aids. Alas, depressives are more often right about themselves and world events, or so say statistics (and Lincoln biographer Joshua Wolf Shenk in "Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness.")
It often makes sense to struggle against whatever features of life you deem destructive, as Lincoln struggled against his own painful brain chemistry. If you do, you can often reduce harm and increase happiness, at least in the span of time you're able to perceive. But many self-medicating alcoholics and drug addicts become substance dependent in optimistic efforts to counter depression and pain. The cure turns tyrant.
The brain -- on or off drugs -- is a tricky instrument, and it is vanity to think that you can always control it. Very often the autopilots we need in order to survive take us places we prefer not to go. And often, too, strategies we devise to help ourselves live better -- ideas, habits, social arrangements, chemical supplements, fatty foods -- become our masters.
Addictive pathways evolved to create time-saving and survival-friendly habits. Profitable drugs evolved as a way of exploiting those mechanisms. But behavioral addictions, quasi-addictions, mini addictions, all sorts of pleasure and habit-driven patterns form in response to environmental conditions, both within the brain and without, including our addiction to having strong opinions, no matter how unhappy they make make us and everyone around us.
I wouldn't say we're all victims of addiction. I'd say that we live in a mostly productive, but very difficult and often dangerous symbiosis with it.
To think of those who can break one paltry habit as an "elite" makes no sense to me. What I'm saying -- or quoting James as having said -- is that we're made of habits -- that culture and civilization and social life are all compound habit collections
whose limits are as rigorous as their possibilities are vast.
I think we're all slaves of our evolved minds -- rebel slaves, but far from free to choose who we are or what we do most of the time. There are some kinds of emancipation none of us are destined to experience. And I think Lincoln knew that quite well, and was able to because he was temperamentally melancholic.
It's impossible to kick an addiction if you think you can't. But thinking you can isn't always accurate.
Addiction: where does it begin and end?
Cool article
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