People jeopardize their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. Nothing sways them — not illness, not the sacrifice of love and relationship, not the loss of all earthly goods, not the crushing of their dignity, not the fear of dying. What a wonderful world it would be if the simplistic view were accurate: that human beings need only negative consequences to teach them hard lessons.
“I’m not afraid of dying. Sometimes I’m more afraid of living.”
Simple Picture
ELI5: a child is hungry and no one feeds him. He learns to feed himself from whatever is available — sugar, attention, adrenaline. As an adult, the hunger is still there, but now he feeds it with substances, work, sex, or danger. The feeding never satisfies because the hunger was never for the thing he is consuming. It was for the presence that was supposed to be there and wasn’t.
The Fundamental Addiction
The fundamental addiction is to the fleeting experience of not being addicted. The addict craves the absence of the craving state. For a brief moment he is liberated from emptiness, from boredom, from lack of meaning, from yearning, from being driven or from pain. He is free. His enslavement to the external consists of the impossibility, in his mind, of finding within himself the freedom from longing.
Addiction is passion’s dark simulacrum. It resembles passion in its urgency and in the promise of fulfillment, but its gifts are illusory. Unlike passion, its alchemy does not create new elements from old. It only degrades what it touches and turns it into something less, something cheaper.
This is desire-vs-love at the biochemical level: the wound does not want love — it wants intensity. The dopamine system fires for anticipated relief, not for the relief itself. The addiction is to the anticipation, the ritual, the environmental cues — not to the substance. Compulsive gambling is a form of addiction without anyone arguing it is caused by a deck of cards.
The Emptiness Is Cultural
A sense of emptiness pervades our entire culture. The drug addict is more painfully conscious of this void than most people and has limited means of escaping it. The rest of us have other ways of suppressing our fear of emptiness or of distracting ourselves from it.
The wondrous power of a drug is to offer protection from pain while enabling engagement with the world. The drug restores to the addict the childhood vivacity she suppressed long ago. Adults envy the openhearted explorations of children; seeing their joy and curiosity, we pine for our own lost capacity for wide-eyed wonder. Boredom, rooted in fundamental discomfort with the self, is one of the least tolerable mental states.
This is running-on-empty at the population level: a generation stressed and starved of nurturing adult relationships. The Machine provides the delivery mechanism — infinite stimulation, zero presence. The absence of adults removes the demonstration that fullness is possible without substances.
The Parent’s Brain Programs the Infant’s
In a very real sense, the parent’s brain programs the infant’s. Stressed parents will rear children whose stress apparatus runs in high gear, no matter how much they love their child and no matter that they strive to do their best. The infants of stressed or depressed parents are likely to encode negative emotional patterns.
Babies who are never picked up simply die. They stress themselves to death. Premature babies who are stroked for just ten minutes a day have faster brain growth. The opiate system — the system that governs love — releases endorphins in response to attentive presence. Without that presence, the child is left to inadequate coping mechanisms: rocking, thumb-sucking, tuning out.
Children who have not received the attentive presence of the parent are at greater risk for seeking chemical satisfaction from external sources later in life. The body keeps the score: the absence is encoded neurologically, not just psychologically. Whatever we do not deal with in our lives, we pass on to our children.
Dislocation as Precursor
The precursor to addiction is dislocation — the loss of psychological, social, and economic integration into family and culture. A sense of exclusion, isolation, and powerlessness. This is Arendt’s loneliness applied to addiction: when you cannot keep yourself company, when the internal world is too painful to inhabit, you seek external means to make the moment livable.
Rats in a natural social environment who are physically dependent avoid drugs. Caged rats consume twenty times more. Subordinate males who are stressed and relatively isolated are the ones who self-administer cocaine. Among American soldiers in Vietnam, half who used heroin developed addiction — but once the stress of war ended, so did the addiction for most. The ones who persisted were those with histories of unstable childhoods.
“It’s all in the genes” is an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy in the freest and most prosperous nation? It can’t be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring. But epigenetics shows the environment affects genetic expression — there is no addiction gene, only propensity shaped by environment, beginning in pregnancy.
Functionality of Addiction
Dismissing addictions as “bad habits” or “self-destructive behavior” comfortably hides their functionality. Carol’s perspective: drug use helped her escape an abusive home, survive years of street living, and connect with a community of shared experience.
This is locally-optimal at the survival level — and IFS in its rawest form. The firefighter part that reaches for the substance is solving a real problem: the exile’s pain is unbearable and must be stopped. Going to war against the firefighter (punishment, shame, forced withdrawal) makes it stronger. We readily feel for a suffering child but cannot see the child in the adult.
Neglect and abuse during early life may compromise capacity for rewarding interpersonal relationships. Other means of stimulating reward pathways — drugs, sex, aggression, intimidating others — become relatively more attractive and less constrained by concern about violating trusting relationships.
When we are preoccupied with serving our own false needs, we cannot endure seeing the genuine needs of other people — least of all those of our children. The cycle repeats.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “addicts are weak people making bad choices.”
The midwit take is “addiction is a brain disease — it’s all neurochemistry.”
The better take is that addiction is a relationship problem wearing a substance costume. The substance is the delivery mechanism, not the cause. The cause is dislocation — from self, from others, from the attentive presence that was supposed to program the brain for connection. The caged rat drinks because it is caged, not because morphine is irresistible. Change the cage and the drinking stops.
Main Payoff
It is impossible to be fully present when you are putting up walls to keep from being seen. Intimacy and spontaneity are sacrificed. The addict’s greatest anguish is not the abuse they suffered but their own abandonment of their children — the knowledge that the cycle is repeating through them.
A warmly nurtured child is much more likely to develop emotional freedom. Not because nurturing eliminates risk, but because it builds the internal reward system that makes external substitutes unnecessary. The drug of being wanted is far too powerful to refuse — and the person who was never adequately wanted will spend their life chasing that drug in whatever form they can find it.
References:
- Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction