Addiction

I've long remembered from my childhood in Philadelphia a story appearing in the paper about a family where the son was doing cocaine and the parents in denial. I remember it because my mom knew the family. Also because it was a big story about cocaine, which was less common in the news, let alone about a well-to-do family. I've thought about it recently because of the parallels with people's denials and suppression of widespread addiction to what pollution brings---things like social media, fast fashion, flying, and such. I remembered in the story that the car and silver went missing, but the parents kept feeling like he was a good kid. We keep telling ourselves we're good people even while the rain forests and aquifers…

People keep asking me my predictions on ChatGPT. Here are some so far. Top level: An unintended side-effect will end up being the dominant effect. Applications will addict people. It will lead to people becoming more isolated. The most addicting, isolating applications will have been introduced as ways to combat isolation and addiction, like as a way for lonely people to have conversations. People will be surprised to find that in the physical world the program pollutes and depletes far more than most people expected. Companies will use it to motivate people to share their interests and passions at first to sell them things, but will graduate to changing their lifestyles. People will enjoy the conversations. They will feel natural buying things it recommends. It…

When a culture doesn't live within its means, looks beyond its borders to fill the gap, and starts figuring out how to take others' resources, it's likely to become imperialist. Our so-called clean, green, renewable energy sources like wind and solar (that aren't renewable) require materials most countries lack. They have to obtain them elsewhere. Before a few decades ago, no place with cobalt was mining cobalt in large amounts to export. We look to those places and covet their cobalt. You can just see Europe salivating at the Sahara Desert, wanting to figure out how to fill it with solar panels and take the power for themselves. If you're taking their land, not just resources, then you're colonial too, and a short jump to…

How many times have you heard people describe a trip they took "the trip of a lifetime"? . . . or one they were considering? I hear it not daily but fairly often, including from the same people repeatedly, but a trip of a lifetime can't happen more than once. It sounds to me like the concept common in addiction of tolerance, where the effect of what you are addicted to decreases and you need more to get the effect you used to get. Many people who fly a lot sound like they need trips just to return to normal. They sound addicted.

My friend brings addicts to rehab centers in California. He knows hotels where they hole up together doing heroin and such in modern-day equivalents of opium dens. They know him and that he doesn’t pressure them. He knocks on the door. They open it. He asks, “is anybody ready?” Usually they all pass, but sometimes one says, “I am,” and he drives them to rehab. He says that nearly every one, as the car starts moving, suggests one last hit in the bathroom of the doof restaurant down the road. He tells them from experience that if they do, they won’t continue the trip so they keep going. He described the hotels rooms as other worldly. Pizza boxes and doof wrappers are everywhere. Uneaten pizza…

On my volunteering run, I saw this person shooting up on Waverly, just off Sixth Avenue. Don't look if you're squeamish, because the needle is in the person's arm. Normally I don't take pictures of someone in the act if they or their comrades would see me, but this person was alone with nothing identifying to indict or take away their dignity beyond what our addictive culture has already stomped out of them. Every day I walk south on Sixth and turn that corner, I always have to brace myself for what I'll see: an encampment, huge piles of garbage, a few police officers, . . . it changes, but it's never pleasant. Why take and show these pictures? A friend who thought I focused…