038 为什么我们都是瘾君子 Why we are all addicts

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We operate with some stock images of the addict: a person with a heroin needle in a park, or, who nurses a bottle of gin in a paper bag at nine in the morning, or who sneaks off at every opportunity, to light up another cylinder of marijuana.

However dramatic and tragic such cases of addiction might be, they are simultaneously hugely reassuring to most of usbecause they locate the addict far from ordinary experience, somewhere off-stage, in the land of semi-criminality and outright breakdown.

Such examples are dangerously flattering, categorising addiction in a sentimental way that lets most of us off the hookand at the same time, cuts us off from identification with, and therefore sympathy for, the most wretched victims of addiction.

There are, in truth, far more addicts than we think.

Indeed, if we look at the matter squarely: we are pretty much all addicts.

The official statistics on the consumption of hard drugs or alcohol, don't begin to give a fair representation of the issue.

We need to define addiction in a new way: addiction is the manic reliance on something, anything, in order to keep our dark or unsettling thoughts at bay.

What properly indicates addiction, is not what someone is addicted to, for we can get addicted to pretty much anything.

It is the motives behind their reliance on itand, in particular, their desire to avoid encountering the contents of their own mind.

Being inside our minds is, for most of us, and very understandably, a deeply anxiety-inducing prospect.

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