Why We Are All Addicts

We operate with some stock images of the addict: a person with a heroin needle in a park, or

who nurses a bottle of gin in a paper bag at nine in the morning or who sneaks off at

every opportunity to light up another cylinder of marijuana. However dramatic and tragic

such cases of addiction might be, they are simultaneously hugely reassuring to most of

us – because they locate the addict far from ordinary experience, somewhere off-stage,

in the land of semi-criminality and outright breakdown. Such examples are dangerously flattering,

categorising addiction in a sentimental way that lets most of us off the hook – and

at the same time, cuts us off from identification with, and therefore sympathy for, the most

wretched victims of addiction. There are, in truth, far more addicts than we think.

Indeed, if we look at the matter squarely: we are pretty much all addicts. The official

statistics on the consumption of hard drugs or alcohol don't begin to give a fair representation

of the issue. We need to define addiction in a new way: addiction is the manic reliance

on something, anything, in order to keep our dark or unsettling thoughts at bay. What properly

indicates addiction is not what someone is addicted to, for we can get addicted to pretty

much anything. It is the motives behind their reliance on it – and, in particular, their

desire to avoid encountering the contents of their own mind. Being inside our own minds

is, for most of us, and very understandably, a deeply anxiety-inducing prospect. We are

filled with thoughts we don't want properly to entertain and feelings we are desperate

not to feel. There is an infinite amount we are angry and sad about that it would take

an uncommon degree of courage to face. We experience a host of fantasies and desires

that we have a huge incentive to disavow, because of the extent to which they violate

our self-image and our more normative commitments. We shouldn't pride ourselves because we

aren't injecting something into our veins. Almost certainly, we are doing something with

equal commitment. We are checking the news at four minute intervals, to keep the news

from ourselves at bay. We're doing sport, exhausting our bodies in the hope of not having

to hear from our minds. We're using work to get away from the true internal work we're

shirking. The most compelling addictions sound very righteous to the world. To get a measure

of our levels of addiction, we need only consider when the last time might have been that we

were able to sit alone in a room with our own thoughts, without distraction, free associating,

daring to wander into the past and the future, allowing ourselves to feel pain, desire, regret

and excitement. We may start to see how much we have in common with the traditional addict.

When we come face to face with them, we're not meeting anything especially foreign, just

a part of ourselves in a less respectable form – opening up new opportunities for

kindness, towards them, and us. We could start to think, too, of how we might wean ourselves

off our chosen addictive pursuit. We need to lose our fear of our minds. We need a collective

sense of safety around confronting loss, humiliation, sexual desire and sadness – knowing that

we will have to keep running so long as we do not rehabilitate our feelings. On the other

side of addiction is, in a sense, philosophy – understood as the patient, unfrightened,

compassionate examination of the contents of our own minds.

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