Addictions – You Have Them. Now Laugh At Them.

“His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.” – Fight Club

Every day is the wrong day to give up Wilder.

It was the first day of third grade.  I was new to the class, and was nervous.  As I walked through the rows of desks, I felt very shy, apprehensive.  One third grader approached me.  He pointed at a girl sitting in the desk next to his.

“That’s my girlfriend.”

So many emotions.  There was a fierce determination, an aggression in his eyes.  I felt threatened, and I’ll admit, I panicked.  I balled up my fist and hit him.

The rest was a whirlwind.  I can’t remember anything after that until I looked at the face of the school nurse, who stared back at me with a shocked expression on her face.

“What did you do?  His jaw is broken!”

I guess I’ll never teach at that school again.

Okay.  That never happened, except on 4chan.

But I was involved with an elite paramilitary organization mentioned in Red Dawn where we went camping on a regular basis.  One rule of the Troop was that no cell phones went on the trip – in a tent full of boys there is NOTHING GOOD that happens with a cell phone on a campout.  So we left them home.

Pictured working on their merit badge in Escape and Evasion.

Little kids didn’t care.  But eighth graders?  Cell phones had become a part of their lives.  I saw one particular scout become despondent for a whole campout, all from missing the connections he normally got from his phone.

He was addicted to it.  After a day, he was better.  But he was also very happy to get back to his phone.

There are many things in life that we can become addicted to.  There are the obvious ones that everyone thinks about when they use the term:  Alcohol.  Drugs.  Gambling.  Tobacco.  PEZ®.

The prime addiction from the Boy Scout’s phone was social media.  Much has been written about social media and its addictive effects.  All of social media is designed to be addictive and features are tested on a regular basis to make sure that it engages us, that it maximizes user interaction.  That maximizing user action breeds addiction.  But how it is addictive isn’t the point – the fact that it is as addictive as Mel Gibson movies is.

So, what do I mean by addiction?  Everyone thinks of a junkie shooting marijuana in his eye, but that’s overly simplistic, not to mention probably not what junkies do.  By addiction, I have a broader definition:  the psychological need for a substance of set of conditions that aren’t required for life.

You’re not really addicted to oxygen.  It’s required.  The Mrs. is a type one diabetic, which means that without insulin injections, she will die.  I used to kid with her, “Honey, when are you gonna realize it’s a problem?  You’ve got to kick that stuff.  Just say no.”

While I thought it was clever, The Mrs. was less than amused.  So I punched her and broke her jaw.

Again, I kid – The Mrs. has reflexes like a cat.  She also has a deceptively low center of gravity – very hard to push over.  But are there things that are beyond what we normally think about when we think about addiction?

Certainly.

How about . . . air conditioning.  I lived in Houston, and it was easily the most awful climatological experience in my life.  It was heat plus humidity – and when the wind hit you, it felt like the devil was breathing on me.  Plus I wilt like lettuce in the heat.

Having moved to Houston from Alaska, we paid roughly $422,721 a month in bills for electricity to cool our house.  Was it required?  Well, probably not.  People live, have lived, and do live in places much hotter than Houston without air conditioning.  I have no idea what kind of people, but people.

Dare I say it?  We were addicted to air conditioning.  We could have kept the house far hotter, and saved roughly the total cost of an aircraft carrier plus escort vessels during the two years we were there, but not enough to also get the extended warranty, which is really overrated with aircraft carriers.

Likewise, when we moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, we kept the house about 55-60°F (239°C) in winter when we moved there.  Since Alaskans build without regards to things like, oh, building codes, our home inspection found substantial work that needed to be done to prevent our garage from collapsing.  Really.  The seller had a local contractor doing the work after we had moved in.

“Where you folks from?”

We told him.

“No wonder you keep the house so hot.”  Yes.  He considered 55-60°F hot.

Including the hat.  Our contractor looked exactly like Red Green.  I learned later that Fairbanks hosted a summer event called the Red Green River Regatta, sadly now discontinued.

So, in his eyes, we were addicted to hot homes.

But let’s swap to food:

What today is considered the bare minimum level for life today is, in reality, a greater degree of luxury than we’ve seen in nearly the entire history of mankind for a greater number of people.  Ever.  Are there crappy places to live?  Yes.  But the scene of the “refugee” in Tijuana saying that the beans and tortillas given to her by local people trying to provide help to her was “food for pigs” and that she might starve to death.

Given her size, that might take, oh, a decade or so.  The bad news is that she’s been deported from the United States and is, “very thankful to be back in Honduras.”  It’s sad – we really need more people who will assault other people with deadly weapons like Frijoles Lady did.  She’ll do the attempted murders Americans won’t.

I guess she’s a lot like that alien, E.T.  She finally went home.

But the fact remains – we have people going across international borders because of . . . comfort.

What was it like in the past?

I did some research for a post once, and tried to figure out what medieval French peasants (called villeins, which translates from metric French to “Dave”) did in the wintertime in the year 1315.  The links that I was able to find described them as living in their mom’s basement eating pizza rolls and playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on Playstation®.  Just kidding!  The winter as a time of great poverty, and the families would essentially huddle under blankets in bed most of the winter to reduce food consumption, conserve warmth, and not die.

When you view today’s world through medieval eyes, nearly every person in the world has better winters than that, at least outside of the Democratic People’s Republics of Korea and California.  The example of the French also shows that we’re addicted to eating regularly.

Fasting was easy in the U.S.S.R.  Comrade Stalin was concerned about your health.

No.  You don’t need breakfast.  You don’t really need lunch.  The fact is, unless they have an unusual medical condition, lots of people voluntarily go for days without food with zero negative health consequences outside of a slightly looser waistband.  And the desire to tell everyone about it.

Are people who are fasting hungry?  Absolutely.  Is there a payoff?  Yes.  From personal experience, the first food you eat after four days without eating anything will be the best burger you had all year.

But the bigger point is this:  we live in a world of unparalleled luxury.

• In the United States, we have the distinction of having our poorest people having access to so many calories that there seems to be a correlation (in some studies) that shows that poorer people are fatter. Whereas those French peasants had all the time in the world, and none of the food, poor in the United States have all of the time, and all of the food.  And Playstations®.
• Virtually no one freezes to death, or dies from the heat. In fact, Pugsley sometimes walks around in workout shorts and a t-shirt (no socks!) and complain that the house is too cold.  He does this in winter and summer.  We keep our house ludicrously cold, like our hearts.
• Most movies made in the last 40 years are available to you after a quick Internet search and a nominal fee. Nearly every book, ever (that we still have copies of), can be had instantly electronically.  Those in paper?  Might take two days.  I have a lot of books, and they’re everywhere around the house.  I guess you could say I have no shelf control.

I won’t say these things are dangerous luxuries.  But they are luxuries, luxuries that we often take for granted.  How long has it been since your power has been out?  How long since you huddled in a cold tent on a freezing winter’s night or sweating on a hot day with an endless noon Sun?

But it’s okay, his butler will go get it.

How long since you went a single day without food?  How long since you went two days without it?

Our ancestors did all of these things, and more.  They called it “Tuesday.”  Well, not “Tuesday” since their language was a series of unintelligible grunts that sounded like tubas played by jabbering twits.

When we become addicted to and accustomed to luxury, it weakens us.  Constant luxury may weaken us physically, but addiction to it weakens us mentally.  Mental weakness screams that when we’re in a cold or dark house that it’s intolerable, even if it’s only mildly uncomfortable.

When we can meet adversity and understand that what won’t kill us, that being away from the Twitter®, Instagram™, and Facebook© might actually be good for us, and that sweating all day in a hot house without air conditioning is just tolerable discomfort?

Then we win.