Those Other Addictions

     A lot of thoughts coursing through my head at the moment, it feels like I have to many things to write at once...  So the possibilities: descriptions and my thoughts of major cities I have lived in; a collection of some of the paradoxes of life and things you only learn through direct experience of them; and, my most recent thought about the mind and body connection and how that connection leads to different types of addictions. I have thought about the latter a fair bit over the years so I’m going to try to expand upon it more now.  I see addiction as an individual compulsively trying to return to a previous feeling, or body state, through some form of ritualized behavior. The paradox of this attempt is that trying to replicate a body state from a previous moment is impossible, which ironically makes the person try more, not less, using the same tactic...   

    I remember being intrigued a few years ago by the film: “The Hurt Locker.” The premise of the film was a man addicted to the adrenaline he receives from war and risking his life to defuse bombs. His addiction is to the extent that he constantly asks to be reassigned to combat zones despite having a wife and kids. Crazy right? Well here's some perspective on it. When I was 12 years old I use to fantasize about living forever. Back then everything had the golden hue of newness; possibility was everywhere and I thought it would be that way forever... such is youth. Adulthood, and the brain alterations of the teenage years, leads to a superior ability of pattern recognition but a loss of much of that youthful, magical thinking and the awe it inspires of life. Vice, and the addiction that springs from it, comes from a person trying in vain to return to those child like feelings they held once of excitement. The lead character in “The Hurt Locker”, in a rather brazen way, was doing just that; he was reaching out for his own variety of pure excitement and the sense of REALLY being alive it gave him.  Now society throws out the term addiction rather loosely mainly just using it for perceived negative vices like drink, gambling, sex.... etc. I see a wider application for the term. I think it stretches much further and actually is a central dynamic of personality. People become addicted to specific ritualized action for the alteration they perceive it to generate in their environment, in people around them, and most importantly inside their own body. Finding and creating opportunities to act out these ritualized actions consistently will become a central tenant  of their personality.

      Over the years a lot of people have told me the things they were addicted to: drugs, alcohol, travel, being nice, power, sex, extreme sports, physical pain, cleaning, being sick, positive affirmation, self defacement, altruism, victimization, approval, superiority, reading, timidness... the list stretches into infinity. The central dynamic is that routinized actions are fallen back to as a method of changing ones present mental state. People covet certain chemical states in their brain as alterations of chemical mental states are what generate physical memory. Those memories are more definite than verbal memories. As an example, think of that feeling when you scored a big goal, or fell in love... it was not the event itself, it was the physical reaction in your body to the event that makes those memories so salient.  Addiction comes into play when people act and think in specific ways in order to try to recreate those same feelings again artificially.

     So stepping back to the “Hurt Locker” the feeling of adrenaline and the clarity it produced in his mind was what he loved most. He loved it more than safety, more than his wife and child, and maybe even more than his life. What I couldn’t realize when I was 12 years old is that life is remembered in terms of major moments that illict strong sensations and feelings... not the hours of placidity. Of course, contentment in the absence of excitement is the sign of mental health, but how many people really know that contentment? How many people aren’t in some way or another tying to shake things up in their world for a return to whatever that feeling when they really felt alive was? My perspective is skewed like everyone else, but my answer to my own question would be – not many.