mind-muffins: Addiction

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Addiction

I had a conversation recently with a friend about "addiction".

What images does that word conjure up in your head?

In my mind, addiction is a state of physical / psychological dependency on something which creates a state of pain/discomfort/ dis-ease with that something is removed.

Is it possible to develop a positive addiction?

If indeed I can make any activity, relationship or substance a REQUIREMENT for my comfort and peace of mind, is that not addiction?

What if I were to become addicted to learning, to seeking peace, to creating passion in the world...

When a CHOICE becomes patterned by repetition to the point that it becomes automatic we consider it a HABIT. When that HABIT becomes so much a part of our nature we feel great discomfort without the pattern it moves into the realm of ADDICTION - then what? Does adding the element of mandate demolish the positive force previously achieved by the same behavior when it was merely by choice?

Is MINDFULNESS inherently superior when assessing our actions...or can a rational justification be made for deliberately creating first habits and then positive addictions rather than staying in a position of choice with every act?

HMMMMM...... Things I wonder about.

1 comment:

Unknown said...: I've always been interested in narrative addiction, an idea which I think offers many insights - in religion, politics, the nature of the self and reality...

We are addicted to stories - the narrative flow carries us along, turning pages as fast as we can; we pass someone telling a story and pause to hear the end. Whether a joke, a single sentence or a story.

Part of this is the fact we consume language in chunks - we hear groups of words which we process into meaning, once we have enough, once we reach the end of a sentence (by definition, able to hold meaning).

And the stories, once known by enough people, become exemplars. Like the Bible, they explain our place in the world, how we should behave, what we desire...

Other cultures had pantheons of gods representing various values and attributes - we still have old school religion, but we also have new stories from a new arena - Batman, Superman, the Terminator etc, all representing ideals and values.

And capapable of overlowng into our political and religious life. As Arnie the governator demonstrated. Conan the Republican.

And sales, and by extension the media and politics, is all about selling us stories - stories about the product that explain, disguise, decieve, illuminate.

I digress, what I meant was that it's that urge to consume more story, the compulsion to see what's next, the desire for completion, to see the end, the whole story - that is an addiction, one that defines us as thinking animals.

Also, the deferral of these endings, of meaning, is another key element, but another time....; 2:57 AM