We’re All Born Addicts
Letting Everyone off the Hook
I am an addict in more ways than one, but I can’t help thinking, so is everyone.
I have literally gotten into arguments about this next sentence you will read, I’m acknowledging that it is apparently controversial, but it doesn’t seem that way to me. Everyone has to eat — on a continual and regular basis. You are addicted to food. Of course many of you will object that I am using the term addiction wrong. I am not being clinical enough. Addiction is substance abuse — but we all need substance.
In no uncertain terms you are “addicted” to eating.
As far as my point goes the article could ostensibly end here; though this would be unsatisfying. But the point really is that simple. A turn of phrase just a tiny percent of a degree off normal which might help you let other people off the hook.
You are going to be addicted to something. The degree to which said addiction is going to be harmful to your life’s fate or your designed trajectory is variable. Live long enough and you may find that some of your addictions, if you care to inspect them, are habits by a different name.
One of my friends once told me he began smoking cigarettes seriously just to feel what it felt like to be addicted to something. He didn’t need to do so because he was absolutely, before he began, already a workaholic. How else to turn a thing like smoking tobacco into its own type of “task”.
There’s no way of avoiding it. Whether it comes from the action of drowning trauma or procrastinating one’s own confusion I think it is very helpful to remind yourself that it was inevitable. You were born a creature addicted to the gathering of nutrients from your environment and all kinds of tertiary psychological consequences accompany that.
Everyone’s a born addict — whether or not that’s okay or not okay or harmful — whatever — one might as well accept that it’s a part of being alive and there’s no one to blame. Especially yourself, who is the hardest person to let off the hook.
