559: The Silky Smooth Seduction of Addiction
I decided to avoid putting screens on while I ate for a month. I expected to enjoy my food more, to find the euphoria I often feel from fresh, healthy food. I was surprised to find more the feeling of wanting to open a screen: a silky, seductive feeling that said, “It’s good to turn on the screen. It’s bad not to watch. You’ll waste time if you don’t put the screen on.” The feeling came from inside.
I’ve felt that feeling before, but I felt more conscious of it this time. I wasn’t selling-family-heirlooms-to-fuel-the-habit level addicted, but I felt the feelings enough to explore them. I share them in this episode, and how we’ve built our society and culture around profiting from creating those feelings in doof, social media, travel, online shopping, and increasing parts of modern life. It’s sickening.
The challenge arose in training Conrad Ruiz, the newest host of the This Sustainable Life podcast family. He hasn’t posted his first episode yet. I’ll announce it on my blog. He led me through the Spodek Method as part of his training. Normally the first time someone practices, we don’t record, but this experience affected me to where I wanted to share my experience. Regular blog readers know my interest in understanding addiction since I see most of our continuing behaviors that pollute, that we know are killing others, is addiction most people would consciously say they aren’t but they are.
It’s hard enough to stop someone addicted from their habit when they don’t want to or if they don’t think they’re addicted. How about 330 million people, or 7.9 billion, who don’t even realize they’re doing anything in the realm of addiction? Few people think their watching TV or flying is an addiction. Few see using the cell phone as something worth avoiding, even as they use it five hours or more a day.