Escape Artists: The True Face of Addiction

how igor ticks

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

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

The silly things I have watched on Vertical Short Form (TikTok, Reels, Shorts)

VSF is the worst because it has such low starting energy, and such high stopping energy. Here are some of the silly things i’ve gotten sucked into

Lifting Videos

I do a fair bit of kettlebells, I got lots of people doing lifts, first it was educational and inspirational, and then I started getting pretty women, pretty easy to understand - inspirational. But theN I started getting senior citizens, doing their 80 year old PRs. Very odd.

Lifting Videos - Antonly

This guy that is small and super ripped who dresses up like a custodian then surprises everyone by how good he is.

Retirement Videos

Like Advice from retired people

PEople who are retired telling their stories - I like some of these

Financial Advice

When can you retire, you have too much, you have too little, you should pay attention to retired mandatory distributions

People living in their cars

I think my favorite is someone says I’m not doing this to enjoy the outdoors, I’m doing this to save money. Hers is like the most authentic.

Truckers

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 I 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

I didn’t really have a hard time stopping this. It’s empty calroiess, but even worse it messes up my will power and my sleep. Pretty bad.

“Zero proof” drinks

I accidentally discovered these, which really came out of nowhere in the min 2020s? At first I was thrilled, felt so good, but then I pondered, sis this just a pavolian response where I imagine I’m gonna get a hit of mild euphoria and thus I’m really enjoying it? Turns out, yes, I was waiting for that. After a few days of this I found out that since I don’t get my euphoric hit, I am no longer inrestered in this.

Thinking about work while at home

This comes and goes depending on how well/poorly work is going. But I used to be really bad at it, and am now much better at it.

Loading (/mind-at-work)

Work Addiction and Success Addiction

See midlife notes on from strength to strength.

Loading (/midlife)
  • Success => Having more than 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 satisfaction 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.