This topic is a huge question we may all ask ourselves. From love to shopping, gambling, spiritual pursuits and guru hopping, to yoga workshops one after another, jogging, alcohol, drugs, etc., these days everyone seems to have some dependency or other.

What are the causes of this increase of addictions within humanity and our society with said addictions running amoke and destroying so many lives, families and friendships, loss of employment, etc. Everyone seems to be looking for something to kill and ease their pain and suffering, yet never finding the relief that they are seeking.

May the God of love give us His peace and joy once again without any dependency on earthly things. So many have gone astray and need to find their way back into the sheepfold with the good Shepherd Jesus Christ.

I think the addictive process is alive and well because we're born into a fallen world -- i.e., a developmental environment wherein we feel loved conditionally and/or rejected, at times.

See http://shalomplace.com/res/orgfss.html
and http://shalomplace.com/res/addictions.html

That's what we mean by Original Sin.

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What are the causes of this increase of addictions within humanity and our society with said addictions running amoke and destroying so many lives, families and friendships, loss of employment, etc. Everyone seems to be looking for something to kill and ease their pain and suffering, yet never finding the relief that they are seeking.

It's expectation colliding with opportunity. Addictive substances abound and are cheap. And we live in a world where there is pressure on our esteem and self-concept like never before. We are barraged with reminders (aka "advertisements") from every direction in our culture that we're not good enough. And the solution to improving our lacking lives is always to acquire some thing. Never will you see an advertisement that says "Hey, just look inside yourself. You're great just as you are." No, it's always some physical object, not some philosophical or metaphysical insight, that we need to add on in order to make ourselves better. Only in the world of Mr. Rogers are you likely to find an affirmative-style message in the media. Think about that. Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood is the only place in all of our mass media culture that comes to mind that consistently and exclusively has an uplifting, positive, life-enhancing message. The rest of the stuff out there is all about how are lives can be improved if we buy, have, or do such-and-such. But behind this seemingly positive message about adding something is the implicit message that we are not good enough as we are, that we can't possibly have right now what we need in order to be happy and fulfilled. We need to add something. Some product. Some bit of excitement. From the outside. External. Not from inside us.

And on and on and on this goes, non-stop. We're bombarded every step of the way with messages that, if accepted (and it's hard not to accept them, at least unconsciously) tend to undermined us. They undermine our being even while professing to enhance our being. But all these products ever do is enhance our costume, our mask, our persona. And once we don them, they are bloody hard to remove. They become a part of us, or so we think. And then we're trapped. It's is really a wonder that many more people aren't addicted, not that there are so many now.

And be aware of how this message of not having enough, or being enough, filters down to human-to-human communication and relationships. Hang around the water cooler sometime and see if much, if not most, of the talk is of the self-validating type, of people telling, however subtly they do it, what they have, what they did, and what a good time they, of course, had. Ever listened to one of those conversations? Did you ever notice how often such conversations sound like people trying to justify their lives rather than sharing their joys? We want everyone to know what a great time we had on some vacation, not so much because we had a great time, but so that we can be known to have had a great time. Everybody is comparing their "stuff" with everybody else's to see how they match up. Everybody feels under enormous pressure to measure up. And on and on. The measure of us is seemingly what we have, own, or can do, not what (or that) we are. I'm half-convinced that the reason we see so many people using cell phones is because people want to be seen using cell phones. The cell phone in hand screams "I'm busy. I'm important. I have friends. I exist! I'm not alone!" And god, we're more afraid of being alone than ever these days.

I firmly believe that addiction is not only a way to escape such angst but it is a way to have a peak experience, and we all have it in our heads these days that unless we have some kind of peak experience, we're nothing. And goodness, if we have to run away from the present moment, if we find the present moment so un-dramatic and boring as to be intolerable, then we are doomed to addiction of some kind.

From "The Path of Waiting" by Henri Nouwen:

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A waiting person is a patient person. The word "patience" implies the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there. Impatient people expect the real thing to happen somewhere else, and therefore they want to get away from the present situation and go elsewhere. For them the moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Waiting, then, is not passive. It involves nurturing the growth of something growing within�One of the reasons we have such a hard time waiting is that we want to do the things that will make the desired events take place and thus satisfy our wishes.

Dare to be boring, small, insignificant, pale, bland, humble, little, grey, noiseless, and invisible. It's okay. It's not only okay, it's holy. Better than that, it takes far less energy to do than the alternative. Next time you see your spouse say, "Honey, you bore the hell out of me. Thank you." And then give him or her a big, wet kiss.

Learn to recognize the stage play that is going on around you in the world all the time. Be sympathetic, for sure, but recognize the desperation and angst that is a large part of nearly everyone's existence these days. And recognize how quickly and completely you can put someone at easy when you yourself exude acceptance. That�s the last thing most people expect, but they are damned glad and relieved to find it, if only for a moment. Some won't trust it, of course, but most will be only too happy to be able to drop their mask, to stop the play, and to get out from under the suffocation of conditional love. But this is difficult. It is difficult to drop our many social masks because the agreement amongst people to wear them in the first place seems to be binding and tight, and it's an unspoken agreement�the worst kind of agreement because then it becomes much more difficult to talk about and expose this agreement (no one is comfortable with the fact that most of us are de facto phonies much of the time, even if we soften this reality by calling it a social "mask"). Instead we live in fear of committing some social faux pas and thus being put at some kind of disadvantage in this highly competitive game of life. Everything becomes a game of chicken. Who will show weakness first? And anything short of conforming to the myriad of social conventions is showing weakness.

When the water is full of sharks, it's best not to bleed. And after spending day after 9-to-5 day in this infested pool, we go home and we self-medicate. And it's no wonder. It seems a conundrum. Conformity and competition is stressful, but breaking convention is not without stress either. When we don't conform, when we don�t agree to comply with the many unspoken conventions, we risk not only exposing our truer selves but exposing the game-at-large as being a bit of a fraud. And even if it is stressful (but possible) to point out to others that this commercialized, materialized culture is a bit of a sham, it may be too much for us to acknowledge. We likely have whole mortgages, businesses, or careers invested in this play in which we are the actors. So we self-medicate to escape or to feel something grand and non-blah�and probably most of all to feel something real or something free.

We are bombarded in this culture with precise molds for how a worthwhile male or female life is to be lived. And there is very little room for flaw. There is very little room for error. An unnamed theologian from a book I'm reading says: "Fear mercilessly grips the human throat. It fills the psychiatrists' consulting rooms, populates the psychiatric hospitals, increases the suicide figures, lays blast-bombs, sets off cold wars and hot wars. We try to root it out of our souls like weeds, anesthetizing ourselves with optimism, trying to persuade ourselves with a forced philosophy of hope; we make all possible stimulants available�we invite people to engage in every form of self-alienation." I love that phrase "anesthetizing with optimism" for that reveals another expectation of the culture: We must be happy, and not just happy, but happy all the time.

Unconditional love may seem like a sucker's bet, that by doing so we will be at a disadvantage, that we will be exposing ourselves for scorn and abuse, that people will take advantage of us. But this is a religious site, and if anyone here doesn't really believe that love is the point of it all, then what is our belief worth? Should we switch it off when we go to work? Should we switch it off when dealing with spouses and children? Should we switch it off when dealing with friends? Do we turn on the unconditional love only when somebody else does so too?

The only way that I see that we can permanently and completely avoid addiction is to accept that the point of life is other than accumulating stock options. The point is to love. And that's not to say that the point is to be loved, but to love another by making ourselves into a gift to others in the same way that life itself is a gift to us. And one need not be a great, large, fantastic and impressive gift. A humble, flawed, imperfect one will do quite nicely.

At the end of "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi", Luke Skywalker removes Darth Vader's mask. (I'm paraphrasing Joseph Campbell here.) Underneath that mask is little more than a worm of a man, seemingly having been decimated by the technology and power that he was both master of and a slave to. How much are we like Darth Vader, withering under some dark mask that we think we must put on in order to survive? And when we take that mask off, will what we find underneath still look human? One of the few things that can instantly penetrate these masks is drugs and alcohol. They can do us the great pleasure of making us feel human again, like ourselves again, free from the smothering masks we think we must wear in order to get by. But they do so at a price. Any many people accept that as the price to pay for having all the other "stuff", for achieving all that they've achieved, which indeed could be enormous.

To avoid addiction one has to be willing to spit into the wind somewhat. One must be willing to accept one's OWN conception of who you should be and to take everyone else's with a grain of salt � maybe even chuckle at a bit at their conceptions when you see just how ridiculous and impossible those compulsive ideals are that they flash across the TV screen. One can not fail at being oneself unless one tries to be more than oneself, because there is no logical way to be more than we are. We need be only what we are. If we need to impress or feel important then we're trying to be more than we are�and are primed for addiction, among other unwelcome things.

Dare to be boring, small, insignificant, pale, bland, humble, little, grey, noiseless, and invisible. It's okay. It's not only okay, it's holy. Better than that, it takes far less energy to do than the alternative. Better than that, it will bring you peace. No matter how we look, no matter the limitations of our bodies or minds, no matter our abilities or lack of, the true magic of life is in being. Do not bother to notice and compare what everyone else has�unless, of course, out of sympathy and love, you notice their desperate mask that they try so hard to wear with such finesse. Give them your unconditional love as best you can. You may help with someone's hidden addiction as well.

One of the grand mistakes I have made was to secretly try to boost my esteem and sense of worth via my religious ideas. Bad idea. Very bad idea. But what's taking better root now is the idea that there is a place beyond comparing, contrasting, owning, having, bragging, boasting, and besting. It's a real place, and it is not a place that is "added on" in order to increase one's worth. Once one is there, questions of worth no longer apply. The temptation, however, is to always stay in the cycle that one is in now and simply do things better. But the real trick is to get out of that cycle, not simply do it better. And that requires honest insight and honest intentions. It is so easy too fool ourselves, to tell ourselves that we are on some spiritual quest when deep-down we're still doing what we're doing out of a desire to be more, out of a desire to feed the ego. I think it's very easy to take god and religion and put them secretly into service of our egos and our desire to bolster our sense of worth.

I think addiction is ultimately a direct and immediate response to us finding the present moment (and thus ourselves) lacking. And it is our expectations (heavily influence by the media and culture) that make the moment we are in now seem dull, incomplete, and hollow. We expect more bells and whistles. We expect our life to be so jazzy and cool that it has its own soundtrack. But the truth is that we're likely to simply bleed off a lot of time and energy into bolstering and supporting an image of ourselves as the MTV-ish man- or woman-about-town who is showered with friends, lovers, and good looks. And once that image is started it takes an enormous amount of mental energy to maintain. And a few gallons or drugs or alcohol to boot. But if we can pierce through this BS parade of image-making, we can find a humble love, and an acceptance of ourselves as we are, in all our flaws. The secret that the marketers won't tell you is that it is our weaknesses that make us lovable and relatable. Especially when our weaknesses are visible and plain, they are not something we can BS around so these weaknesses and flaws are potentially things that can make us real, that can allow us to escape the masks that society so readily tempts us to put on. They can be our calling card that lets us know that there is far more to life than the superficial. We can love not despite who we are but because who we are. There's no need to self-medicate because there's nothing to escape.

Hi Brad I sure enjoyed your post. May we all have the courage to remove our masks and be who we are with all our frailities and weaknesses, to love and be loved and drop all BS of image-making. In doing so we become free and allow others this freedom and gift to be real.

Thanks, Freebird. And I think I left out probably the real issue in terms of addiction, or at least the cause that I think we�ll find when we go back of the hierarchy of symptoms and causes. I think addiction is ultimately about a lack of faith or hope. It can be a lack of faith in ourselves, of ever being enough. It can be a lack of hope that we can ever really make much of a difference or expect more out of life. So why not grab a little easy pleasure? If I can do no better, why not take this? At least it feels good. And if I�m going to die anyway, and there is no point to anything, then what�s the harm? I just die a little sooner, but at least I will have had some pleasure and will have had some control.

There are always other sideline issues, of course. People get hooked on addictive substances because of peer pressure. Once on, it�s tough to get off. That�s the nature of addiction. Some are trying to kill themselves, but are just doing it slowly and in a way that they don�t have to admit this to themselves. Some others just literally do it because they like to. They approach it as a thing to be enjoyed just like anything else. And most things in this world have a price that we must pay for them, so an addiction is hardly that far out of the mainstream in many respects. Look at what any athlete does to his or her body. They may accomplish something really beautiful (such as in figure skating or winning Wimbledon), but in later years their body is likely to pay for such heavy use and abuse, especially in the higher contact sports and activities. But we�re all going to die some day, and there�s not much living to be had if we just live in safe inside a plastic bubble. Everything is a bit of a trade-off.

I�ve been addicted. And I have to admit that I�m healthier not being addicted, but I wouldn�t say life is really a heck of a lot better. One of the powers of addiction is that, yeah, there is some fun and enjoyment to these addiction, and if it wasn�t for the pain and deterioration that they cause in other areas, who would want to leave them? Addiction brings us some pleasure in a world where pleasure can be hard to find. Addiction gives us something to do with our time. Addiction gives us a sense of control. Addiction can make us really feel alive. One can take away addiction tomorrow, and I suggest that people do, but doing so is no magic elixir for our lives, not by any means. One must still put back in something. For everything we take out, something else needs to go back in.

So we get down to the real issue: Our human inability to put things into our lives for a sufficient feeling of aliveness and to facilitate real growth. And, of course, if our expectation for what "aliveness" is supposed to be is ratcheted up by our culture, and we buy into this image (we don�t have to, but it�s an image that admittedly is difficult to ignore), we immediately start from a place of imbalance.

Stopping addictions doesn�t necessarily lead to real human growth, but it certainly paves the way for such a thing. But the growth is still a separate issue and it�s likely an issue that leads to our addiction in the first place. It�s a maddening cycle, for sure. Surely one reason we stay in, or prolong, addictions is because deep-down we are afraid to face our deep sense of inner worthlessness and shame. We know that we have some real shortcomings, and indeed they can be serious ones. We shouldn�t wallpaper over this fact. Ending addiction is not a panacea. There are still our original problems to face and if doing so we easy we wouldn�t have so much violence, despair, and hatred in the world. Fixing ourselves is not easy, and in a great many cases I don�t think we can really "fix" many of the things that drove us to addiction in the first place. We just have to learn to live with them. We have to learn to find those little cracks of light between the dark spaces of our lives. That�s pretty much the human condition. But for some those cracks of light are narrower and harder to find, and the dark spots are wider and darker.

In many ways I think of addiction as a completely rational and sane response to life. We do indeed have traits or characteristics about ourselves (physical and/or mental) that are broken, imperfect, and/or seriously debilitating. Some of these things just can�t be changed. And so we put two and two together and come up with a shot of whiskey or perhaps a little crack. Yes, with patience, hope, faith, and perseverance we might be persuaded that we are over-reacting, that things aren�t all that bad, that we can work around our weaknesses. And we can indeed, at least to some extent. But this culture (if not the normal competitiveness of life itself) sets the bar so high on who and what we must be, that we may have a very hard time taking such ideas seriously, the idea that we have enough going for us that we can work around or major shortcomings.

I have great sympathy for addicts (except those who make a living by getting others hooked). Life itself sort of puts us in an addictive situation. There is pressure to succeed and survive, and because of our amazingly clever human brains we are always looking for an edge, and we�ll usually find something. There is a lot of pain and injustice in this world. None of us chose the bodies and minds that we have before we were born, so many (if not most) of us are facing some real challenges.

Ultimately one has to have a bit of faith and hope to kick an addiction. I know I did, although I can�t specifically say faith in whom or hope for what. The logical thing people say to have faith in, of course, is God. But addictions are powerful things. God may be all-powerful, but She does not seem nearly as present and effective as a bottle or pill that is placed right in front of you. I think there must always be a string or serious of smaller faiths and hopes along the way. Not waking up in the morning feeling like sh*t can be a hope. Believing that more than bitterness and anger can reside in our hearts may be an effective faith.