Addiction Affliction (Part 2)*

We Americans depend on our addiction to conspicuous consumerism and consumption to appease our addiction to instant gratification, which we finance with our addiction to credit. An addiction to television begets addictions to convenience food and a plethora of over-the-counter and prescription drugs, which give us the illusion of good health and energy enough to pursue mind-numbing jobs that earn us the money to pay for our other addictions. And it seems there's no end to our other addictions.

Television (junk food for the mind) is the mouthpiece for crass commercialism. It's no accident that many large corporations, and more than a few small ones, spend the bulk of their advertising budget on television ads. TV is a popular medium, and it guarantees maximum product exposure to an audience that numbers in the millions.

Natural companions, snack food and television create mutually reinforcing positive feedback loops that entice people of all ages to engage in addictive, self-destructive behavior. A high percentage of TV commercial ads feature snack foods or convenience foods, which encourage people to eat while they watch TV. Nothing stimulates the appetite quite like seeing your favorite junk food rendered in mouth-watering, larger-than-life images. With 1/3 of Americans currently defined as clinically obese and another third described as merely overweight, we should all be thankful that ubiquitous smellevision is not yet a reality.

Junk food, fast food and convenience food—not that there's any distinction between them—provide comfort, satisfaction and pleasure to minds and bodies that crave instant gratification. We like the idea that fast foods save us time and effort, but we also like to indulge our appetite for guilty pleasures.

TV commercials depict svelte young women gorging on candy, pastries and other "comfort" foods. But how realistic is this? Were these bits of hype grounded in reality, they would show people who are dangerously overweight and flirting with diabetes, heart attack, or stroke.

Mesmerized, we sit in front of our big screen TVs, too wired to sleep, too tired to do anything else but watch the mindless entertainment of various "reality" shows. Fear Factor? Disgust Factor is more like it. There's nothing like trying to choke down a TV dinner while some pathetic loser on TV is trying to choke down a bucket of worms. What most people don't realize, though, is that it's probably healthier to eat the worms than it is to eat the TV dinner.

However, should we end up with acute indigestion or chronic insomnia it's likely we'll find the remedy in the next commercial. Collectively, pharmaceutical companies make up another big block of TV advertisers. Prescription and over-the-counter drugs promise relief from all that ails us. We're addicted to medications that put us to sleep, wake us up, calm us down, increase our energy, steady our nerves, cure our colds, treat our allergies, stimulate our libidos, or alleviate our pain. There's a medication to treat just about everything except stupidity.

Face it! Americans are the most drug-addicted people on Earth. We show great tolerance for addictions to legal drugs, but zero tolerance for even the most casual use of illegal ones. How hypocritical is that?

American consumers spend many billions annually on legal drug purchases, a few billions more on illegal drugs, and upwards of $40 billion to fight the war on (some) drugs. Never mind that a lucrative market for illegal drugs can only maintain in a climate of prohibition. We're not only addicted to drugs, we're addicted to failed drug policies, too.

Disclaimers and warnings of serious side effects always accompany prescription drug ads:

Uncle Festus' Hangnail Remover has been shown to cause headache, nausea, vomiting, bleeding ulcers, hair loss, loose teeth, diarrhea, rectal hemorrhaging, and bad breath. Some people may be at increased risk for heart attack, stroke, liver or kidney failure, athlete's foot or dementia. Deaths have been known to occur. Use only as directed. If symptoms persist or become worse, contact your doctor.

Thanks, but when the known side effects of treatment exceed, in number and severity, the symptoms of the original ailment, a prudent person will either suffer through the original ailment or seek out treatment alternatives.

We humans are versatile creatures and we owe much of our versatility to television. Thanks to our addiction to TV and our susceptibility to the influence it has over our lives, we've become portable disposal units for the fast food industry and mobile toxic waste disposal sites for the pharmaceuticals industry. We should probably aspire to something better, but until we see a suggestion for it in a TV commercial, we probably won’t.

*This article originally appeared, in slightly different form, on March 20, 2006, in Issue #27 of Petey’s Pipeline E-zine.

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Addiction Affliction (Part 1)*

We Americans are habitual addicts. Indoctrinated into consumerism at an early age, most of us base every aspect of our lives on conspicuous consumption. Even when we work at producing something, it's all about being able to consume more. We're so enamored of self-indulgence that we've elevated addiction, per se, to a lifestyle.

Appetite, pleasure, well being, convenience and technology are the main ingredients of most addictions. Add varying amounts of greed, selfishness, indolence and flawed percepts and you have a winning formula for an addiction that's almost impossible to break.

In bygone eras, people worked hard, albeit at a slower pace, to grow, process, preserve and prepare their own food. The labors given over to such activities were part of making a living. Today, people work hard to earn money to buy inferior pre-packaged food that requires only a minimum of preparation. We no longer have the time or energy needed to make a home-cooked meal from scratch.

However, the object of the labor is the same. One must work in order to eat. The difference is that now our labor is co-opted by third parties to the betterment of third-party interests. In effect, we became the unwitting servants of a pervasive corporatocracy.

The same reasoning, the same logic, the same explanations can be applied to all of life's necessities. Houses, clothing, labor saving appliances—whatever it is we need—are all obtained in the same way. We exchange our labor for money, and then we exchange our money for that which we need or want.

Instead of working for a year or two to build a home out of materials that can be had at low cost or for free, we'll buy a pre-existing home and work for thirty years to pay off the mortgage. Credit becomes essential to our lives, and soon we're addicted to it.

Because the price of goods always rises faster than wages, we find ourselves in a classic dilemma. We work harder to increase our productivity, to make ourselves a more valuable commodity in the marketplace so we can earn more money. Often, we work more hours, further limiting the time and energy we have available to pursue personal goals. To free up more time and conserve more of our energy, we buy yet another labor saving device (on credit, of course), further increasing our indebtedness.

As the cost of living increases, we find ourselves lagging farther behind. At some point we discover that our life has become a racing, spinning, not so merry merry-go-round, and that the brass ring is always just beyond our reach. Each revolution of this vicious, whirling circle of insanity digs the rut a little deeper. Soon, the struggle to get ahead becomes a struggle to get caught up.

And so we become addicted to our job, addicted to the daily routine that having a job demands, addicted to the lifestyle we develop because of our job, addicted to our ability to accumulate possessions, addicted to our desire to keep up appearances. It's not just the job we're addicted to; every aspect of our job, everything that influences our job and everything that's influenced by it becomes a part of our addiction because it's a package deal.

Our job title, then, becomes an integral part of our identity. Whether doctor, lawyer, beggar, steelworker, stay-at-home mom, or blogger, we develop a behavior pattern specific to our identity, and we channel our thoughts and actions in ways that reinforce and protect our sense of self.

In essence, the identity we create for ourselves becomes an addiction, too.

*This article originally appeared, in slightly different form, on March 6, 2006, in Issue #26 of Petey’s Pipeline E-zine.

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