We’re all Addicts

We’re all Addicts

I am supply teaching at a local Ottawa High School today and have made an obvious observation about human beings: we’re all addicts. The addiction I am observing today is cell phones – it’s so hard for the students here to turn them off. It doesn’t help that this particular school’s “interpretation” of the new provincial rule that [mostly] bans cell phones in class rooms is pretty loosie-goosie. However, this issue is not what I want to share with you today; its the insight from some experts that ALL of us have the potential for the many, many types of addiction that exist.

Now, to be up front, I am a fan of Gabor Mate, a retired CDN Doctor from Vancouver who connects addiction to trauma – especially childhood trauma. The view that I am sharing today comes mostly from him. In his view addiction is “any behaviour which we know has short term pleasure in exchange for long term pain/damage/death/lying/destruction of relationships. That means almost ANYTHING has the potential to become addictive and thus destructive. That means that the state of addiction caused by drugs, alcohol, power, porn, on-line gambling, shopping, cell phones, etc. is all the same. In all cases we have become a slave to our addiction of “choice”.

Now today we take for granted that “weak” people will become addicts. We seem to think that it is “normal” that some people’s lives will be destroyed by addiction. We even see the increase in the number of people addicted to various new addictions – like on-line gambling – as a necessary price we as a society must pay for the great freedoms we now enjoy. Well, I disagree. Sure, addictive pleasures like alcohol have been a challenge since recorded history. But there is clearly a massive difference between the ancient Greeks sharing a bit of diluted wine as they chatted about philosophy and the gin houses created in England when the Industrial Revolution ripped the social fabric of communities that had given people support and respect. There is clearly a massive difference a long distance messenger in the Inca empire chewing a cocoa leaf while delivering a message and the cocaine addicted former student of mine who was in the suicide ward of our mental health hospital in Ottawa. There is clearly a massive difference between the Indigenous tribes of eastern North America smoking tobacco in a Peace Pipe for ceremonial purposes and the modern chain smoker who KNOWS smoking kills and still does it and eventually succumbs to that horrible inability to breath that accompanies COPD just before he dies. What is that difference?

You know what it is: culture. It’s not only history that tell us this – rat behaviour experiments tell us the same thing. When rats are exposed to addictive drugs when they are stressed and unhappy they become addicts; but when they are not stressed and happy they walk right by the drugs and do not become addicts. In other words, although we are all POTENTIAL addicts it is the culture we live in that is the trigger that turns that potential into the actual. This means all of us need to work on creating a healthy culture so that addiction loses its appeal, within ourselves and our communities.

Now for the hard part: what can you and I do with these insights that relate to our current ecological annihilation of life on Earth? Could it be that the way we live and think and feel is the way addicts are? It makes sense as our addiction to fossil fuels and travelling and… – that we all partake of -are destroying not only people within our human world but many species and ecosystems in the non-human world must stop. Sure sounds like this behaviour meets the definition of addiction below. If we don’t, we will end up like any other addicts: we become a slave to our addiction and eventually destroy life – life that could include myself, or the life of future generations or other lives that we impact without even knowing it. What are these addictions? Gabor Mate might say this: any addiction that you know creates short term pleasure/enjoyment at the price of long term pain/suffering. That might include driving your car a lot, eating meat a lot, flying often, burning natural gas to keep your house warm, living alone in a very large house, having 20 pairs of pants when 3 will do, voting for the lesser evil than what you actually believe in, seeing the obstacles to change/life rather than the opportunities, judging others as not doing enough instead of looking within…. the list of endless. You know in your heart what these addictions are. Now your opportunity is to be honest with yourself and work hard to stop being an addict. This is needed for another reason stated by Gabor Mate: addiction is connected with trauma. Our current way of life is accelerating the scope and degree of trauma that people are experiencing. Being a climate refugee is traumatic. Losing your town to fire is traumatic. Having drug addicted mother die of a fentanyl over-dose is traumatic. Working a dead end minimum wage job that cannot pay for an apartment and a bus pass is traumatic. Trauma in our current culture which is based upon exploitation of those – human or non-human – with the least power, is now endemic. Try reading the book We are all addicts to see what I mean.

Oh, one final point. When you work at stopping your addiction emphasize being JOYFUL and funny and savouring good food and being thrilled with a beautiful sunrise [like I saw this morning at 6:30 am] as you do so. Find out and focus on the best in people instead of seeing their flaws, etc. you get the idea. Another way of saying this is that stopping your addictions is not about saying NO to something; its actually about saying YES to a new activity, a new idea, a new way to live. Let the past go as you say “Thank you” to the past and then look forward, with other good people, to what is yet to come.

References

We Are All Addicts – The Soul’s Guide to Kicking Your Compulsions By Carder Stout, PhD · 2023