Escape Artists: The True Face of Addiction

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Addiction is not about drugs or alcohol - it is about escape. Quoting “Do the Work”: When we can’t stand the fear, the shame, and the self-reproach that we feel, we obliterate it with an addiction. The addiction becomes the shadow version, the evil twin of our calling to service or to art. That’s why addicts are so interesting and so boring at the same time. They’re interesting because they’re called to something — something new, something unique, something that we, watching, can’t wait to see them bring forth into manifestation. At the same time, they’re boring because they never do the work. The addiction becomes his purpose, his novel, his adventure, his great love. The work of art or service that might have been produced is replaced by the drama, conflict, and suffering of the addict’s crazy, haunted, shattered life.

Current Addictions

Crisis Porn - Covid 19

Yeah, hard to skip that.

Hypo Addictions

Social Media Analytics

Hard to help myself, when I post something on LinkedIn, I have to check and check and check. Same goes for YouTube, and LinkedIn, and Google Analytics. There’s some celebration that should be had, but it should be minor.

LinkedIn friend count

There’s a proxy from LinkedIn friend count to hiring, but checking your friend count frequently just doesn’t help.

Stock market price

Well, it’s only an addiction when it goes up.

Beaten addictions (for now)

Pokemon Go

I was pretty depressed, and needed an escape from reality. Pokemon Go was great, I could just get out and do it. Then one day at Legoland I realized I just wanted to zone out and play Pokemon Go, and I was like, OK this is crazy and stopped cold turkey.

TikTok

This platform sucked me in before I realized how much of my time I’d spent sucked in.

Covid 19 News

I was taking a break from working, and Covid 19 happened, before I knew it I was sucked into the news, I think learned the word crisis porn, and realized I was wasting slews of my life on things outside of my Circle of Concern, so I let that go. Tough, but totally worth it.

Alcohol

Thinking about work while at home

Loading (/mind-at-work)

Work Addicition and Success Addicition

See midlife notes on from strength to strength.

Loading (/midlife)
  • Success => Having more then others
  • Failure => Having Less

A few problems of course: 1. You change your definition of others 1. It gets hard and harder as you get into midlife

Far better is to define satifiscation as

  1. What you want / what you have

Getting Rid of ‘em

My personality is a double-edged sword, I’ve got an addictive personality, and I bore easily. This means I can get addicted quickly, be addicted for a while, and then drop it cold turkey.

Other thoughts on addiction

An alternative definition of addiction is someone who always prioritizes his feelings over his values.

Perhaps, boredom is the pain of lack of connection, and addiction is a great way to stamp that out.

Addiction to flow/production/productivity

Being addicted to flow and production sounds like a perfect hack. After all, isn’t that the goal? Being productive? Close, I think addiction has this element of “out of control”, and escape. Meaning you’re skipping the thing you should be doing to do your addiction, so by definition it’s bad. Certainly less bad than it can be, but still bad

Other Resources

Do the Work by Steven Pressfield.