Dreams and Passages

Addiction is the Enemy

Posted by David on Dec 06 2009

One of the greatest things in life is the act of learning and in doing so improving yourself. It is so important and can be so appealing that it replaces the existence of God in people’s hearts, and it seems as though the experience of gaining wisdom and acting on it is to people the only real meaning in life. They say, “The meaning of life is to find happiness and improve yourself.” While I see this as an evasion of the truth, it’s perfectly understandable and not what this blog is about.

This blog is about acting on wisdom we gain. It’s the problem I have and I’m becoming convinced it’s the problem most people have. It does not take a great deal of wisdom to realise that smoking is foolish and does not lead to happiness, but it takes something far more than wisdom to act on it and quit. While I’ve never smoked, I’ve come to realise that even my life is filled with things that are there not because I genuinely desire them to be, but because I am addicted to those things.

The most obvious of these is eating. It seems like watching TV is somehow not the same unless accompanied by a bar of chocolate or some other sugary thing, and while afterwards I feel like I’ve committed a terrible sin as I watch my stomach expand, the wisdom of it being a temporary and detrimental high is not enough to combat it.

Another is going to church. While I know it will benefit me as a person and in my relationship with God, while I know I’ll be happier overall if I do, I find excuse after excuse to not attend as regularly as I should and fool myself into thinking I’m too busy.

Another is television. While I honestly do believe I have a genuine desire to watch quite a few of the programmes I watch, it becomes a routine to the point that I do it even if perhaps there would be something more fulfilling I could do. I don’t think watching TV in and of itself is a big problem with me, but the fact of my not moving, the lethargy and the lack of motivation that comes with it… I know that will be a problem sometimes, and yet I still do it. I still watch two 45 minute programmes one after another even though I’ll not feel like moving for the rest of the day if I do.

Another is pride in my own opinions. How many times have I argued about something for no reason? How many times have I chosen war over peace when I knew nothing good would come of it? Your own opinions and your high regard for them can be an addiction in itself, something you can’t let go of unless you’re presented with a truly unavoidable argument.

There are others, and it starts to strike you after a while how much of our lives are spent doing things that do not really fulfil us or achieve something important. Our lives seem long, but they are still finite; 70 or 80 years will not seem like a long time once you reach sixty, just as 20 years no longer seems anything like as big a stretch of time as it did when I was ten. We spend so much of ourselves finding distractions centred on society’s current favourite addictions, so much time distracting ourselves from our own existence and mortality, that we can easily forget to actually make good use of the time we have.

We often have jobs that don’t really fulfil us, and while money can be needed to do fulfilling things, these jobs can be distractions from our own desires and goals in themselves. We can consider how to make x amount of money, when if our jobs fulfilled us in the first place, perhaps we wouldn’t need quite so much money to feel that we are happy.

Our entire society is built on delusions. Just look at the flawed capitalist concept of continuous economic growth: In the western world we currently live in such a way that should the whole population do it, we would need three or four planet Earths to sustain us. Sooner or later we’ll simply run out of resources, but we delude ourselves into thinking our economic growth is somehow genuinely sustainable… as if NASA/ESA will find us some new Earths just in time, despite having nothing close to the level of funding required to solve that kind of problem. The whole of Earth cannot live like this, and so we will always live our lives at the expense of the poor. Very few people really face up to that truth.

The problem is that if we take all the delusions out of our lives, all the addictions and falsehoods, it’s quite possible that we’ll have nothing left. What if everything we do is there purely out of routine and addiction? That’s a very scary thought.

We can spend our whole lives searching for wisdom, and we all reach different levels of understanding at different ages depending on how sharp our minds are and how helpful our experiences have been, but what good is it if we ignore what we learn?

I’ve come to realise that learning more than I already know could well be pointless until I start to act on what I already know. Getting around the addictions that fill my life will be difficult. I think I know what to do, but I’m not entirely sure how.