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Addiction Culture & The Repetition Compulsion
It is the curse of being human that many of us are addicts — to something or another. Granted, this is certainly not a feature of us that we are willing to admit to — for who wants to confront their own unattractive dependency — but is not denial knitted up with addiction? As it is, the societal landscape we are witnessing currently has been profoundly shaped by a culture of addiction (and not in the best way) and by the whole motley assortment of them — both those life-threatening and those seemingly trivial and everyday in nature.
Addiction can hide in the sloshing contents of the bottle of alcohol just as much as it can be found cloaked in the digital, pixelated sheen of the ever-expansive Internet. In the news we hear of opioid epidemics wracking the country, quite-literally choking off life in various pockets of the nation at the same time that the journalistic murmurs of increasingly depressed youth are drifting through the air. With nauseating routine predictability, headlines pronounce that Americans variously eat too much, spend too much, “use” too much, consume too much. Stack that up against national trends that suggest people are profoundly unhappy, lonely, and anxious, to name a few.
It’s remiss to advance doomsday sentiment about our current society just for the sake of it, but if data tells us anything, modernity hasn’t…
