Psychorner : Addictions

Of man and things.

                What are ‘addictions’? Well I suppose I’d say they seem like rather nasty things. Why? Well because they are ‘a dick’. Haha, get it? I’m sorry, please lower your gun.

                Speaking seriously, what are addictions? Well, I’m sure you’re familiar with the basic idea of what an addiction is supposed to be so I’m not going to beautifully introduce things with a beautiful definition from a beautiful dictionary. In a nutshell, addictions are things/activities that you come to be dependent upon to a ridiculous degree and you generally can’t help but indulge in them. I’m now going to spend the rest of this piece rambling on regarding my views on addictions, which is more centred around the existence of this overwhelmingly overbearing thing in our lives called ‘purpose’.

                Yes, I am aware that there are many far more unhealthy and dangerous and ludicrous addictions in this world, but for the purposes of rambling on here I’m going to be sticking to my guns and legality by focusing on things like diet Pepsi, Dota and so on, and exclude more scandalous things like my addiction to sniffing space equipment.

                One of the most poignant things I’ve realised with regards to my addictions is that they gave me a raw sense of purpose, they helped fulfil that itch to ‘do something’ in life without me even realising it and did indeed help me delude myself further into believing I’m doing things in life. Addictions become an itch to regularly scratch, a regular commitment not entirely unlike going to classes or going for work. You see, this goes candidly hand-in-hand with my theory of life in general – that it is a journey wherein the twist is that the place you start and the end destination are the same place, which really makes it all about the journey along the way, and means that fatalistic people waiting for the end would perhaps have been happier to not exist – and thus you want your journey to have meaning, which is why we work and strive for betterment instead of sipping chianti till Madame Death presents herself, and addictions help temporarily (oh so temporarily) give us a raw sense of fulfilment – a tickling of this subconscious desire to be purposeful.

Measure out my life in Diet Pepsi bottles.

                 Let’s use an example – Diet Pepsi (because ISRO and NASA will start hunting me down otherwise). Now, what did these little bottles of black death give me? A whole lot, admittedly and I’m not talking about eroded intestines, upcoming cancer and so on. But the act of drinking a bottle gave me a sense of purpose, and when the deed is underway, a sense of fulfilment. In what ways did it manage to do so? When I examine the answer to this question I realised how multi-layered and subconsciously embedded an addiction can become.

                Forget the drinking part, just the act of buying a bottle gives a sense of satisfaction because this entire act of buying becomes a process, a part of life, something to do, perhaps a break from other things – the walk to the little shop around the corner from my house became an integral part of my life for a long time, something to look forward to when I sat down to study, something to use as a brief break from work, an opportunity to listen to some music and walk for a little while… it fulfilled a part of my need for a process, and process is a steady way to fulfil your sense of purpose. Ergo, just the act of buying a bottle of Diet Pepsi scratched my existential itch.

                Then, of course, the act of drinking did the same for me as well. For example, one of the things I realised at the peak of my addiction is that I took every commute as an opportunity to have a bottle and I realised that a major reason for this was to make the commute feel more purposeful, more fulfilling and less of a chore. This is a pattern that repeated itself all over the aspects of this addiction – I’d drink a bottle with a meal to make it for fulfilling – if possible, I’d have it during class/work and so on. Then, the most important part: Diet Pepsi was there for me when I was stuck in a rut and didn’t know what to do or had nothing to do, which made the addiction ascend to this state of evergreen fulfilment, punctuated by the knowledge that I ‘knew’ I could just have one and feel better if the need arises. The beautiful thing about Diet Pepsi in this context is that you can replace it with any other addiction similar to it and see the same pattern, be it cigarettes or something more… ‘nefarious’ (wherein ‘nefarious’ refers to something you cannot do in public… like sniff the Mars Rover).

                Now, let’s change tracks and go to a very different ‘kind’ of addiction which affected me in a wildly different way. Now, Diet Pepsi was far more impactful in the health and sanitation departments (oh, the horrors it does to your teeth) but this is one more impactful in the time and ‘I should be doing something else right now’ departments: and I talk of my former addiction to Dota.

               

I can't quit loving you.

Let me take a moment to say that I absolutely love Dota and still play it regularly (or irregularly over the past month) – but there was a point of my life where I was thoroughly addicted to it (and videogames in general, admittedly, but Dota was the apple of my eye then and thus took most of time) (also, I say ‘Dota’ because this was a while back when Dota 2 was in closed beta, and because I also played a fair bit of League of Legends back then).

                Now, how did this addiction serve me? The same as Diet Pepsi, but it served more to the ‘purpose’ side of things than the ‘this feels good’ side of things – just sitting down to play a match or four was something I liked to do, at any time of the day, any day of the week, any waking moment and, this admittedly speaks about one of the strengths of Dota-style games, each match was like an individual task that I had been given, like a project I had to do with four other people – something to work on and pour my efforts into. Now these are aspects of a good game, but for the addicted me they became a replacement for doing something more productive, let alone something I HAD TO DO. It went from a passion e-sport to something all-consuming and exhausting, and I nurtured it with false dreams and hopes of making it big in the e-sports scene (yes, I’d still love to break into complete competitive Dota (my previous stint there was an incomplete one) but there comes a point where you realise you can’t actively put in as much time as you’d like to and sort of have to let a wilted dream go – though serious competitive Dota is still my favourite form of Dota and something I’ve been wanting to get back into in whatever way and quantity possible *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*).

               

Here's a picture to break up the text. Say 'Hi!'

Then there’s always the question of ‘when are we most addicted?’, which led to me creating my ‘Seraphic Emotion-Addiction Paradox’. In a nutshell, we are ‘most addicted’ (and by that I mean when we are most likely to feed our addictions or have the most desire to feed our addictions (damn there’s a lot of brackets in this piece)) when we are feeling our worst and when we are feeling our best. The latter part of that statement can be a bit surprising, considering that we consider the indulging of our addictions with being in a blue mood; going through a rough patch when the line “I need a cigarette so bad” is standard fare. But this desire is also at its highest when we are feeling great, went through something incredible and feel prepared to break into song. Why? Because we humans are greedy little bastards, we subconsciously end up desiring even more happiness and fulfilment when we feel good. We often justify it using phrases along the lines of ‘earned it’ and so on – because, what felt great after a great day of work? What felt great with an earned meal of indulgence? What felt great after an awesome evening out? The answer, of course, is Diet Pepsi.

               

Some addictions are delicious. 

Then how exactly do we overcome the addictions? What, you think this is some kind of self-help column? Visiting random blogs by strange people is not a recommended course of action for anything in life… but I can speak about myself. ‘Manning up’ is what I’d say, but since I am aware that another gender exists in this word and that ‘womanning up’ does not roll off the tongue easily I’d say that the term ‘buckling up’ perhaps fits better. Now, there are ways to pave your way toward being more determined and steadfast – things like thinking in terms of pleasure principle i.e. ‘will I gain more pleasure out of having this thing, or resisting it?’ or guilt principle ‘am I going to betray myself like I betrayed that stray kitten on the footpath’ or, as awareness ads like to put it, ‘YOU’RE KILLING YOUR DAUGHTER DUDE!’

                Oh dear, I just wrote advice on the internet… give me a moment while go sniff Curiosity.