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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