Letter 122: On Choosing Your Addictions
This is water, this is all water...
Last month I wrote about my dopamine addiction and how taking time away from screens and sources of cheap dopamine started to heal my brain. Today I want to talk a bit about how I have been spending my time since then, and what I have learned about myself throughout this whole process.
I spoke about being an addict, and about being addicted to cheap dopamine. What I maybe didn’t quite realize at the time is that I am the type of person who basically HAS to be addicted to something. It has been this way my whole life, and every single time I have tried to find that so-called “balance” in life, I have failed.
I don’t know if this is something a lot of other people can relate to, but I suspect it might be. While there are plenty of people who don’t fit this mold, and who can find “balance”, the majority of people I know have a small number of things that they centre their personalities around. They might not be addictions in the full and true sense of the word, but they’re obsessions, or devout hobbies, or pillars of personality. It could be video games, or running marathons, or traveling the world, or making money, or gardening, or playing a sport, or politics, or whatever. But most people have something, or somethings, that define them — and that they let themselves be defined by.
There’s a YouTube clip that I watch roughly once a year. It changed my life and the way I viewed the world the first time I watched it, and whenever I re-watch it, it is a wonderful reminder of how the world works, how our brains work, and how we have the power to choose how to view the world and our own reality.
The clip is titled This is Water by the late, great, David Foster Wallace, and I encourage everyone reading to give it a watch/listen if you haven’t before:
The whole thing is gold, but the part I really want to focus on is the thing he mentions towards the end about choosing what to worship:
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships.
The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth.
Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
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Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
What I got out of this was not necessarily to start worshipping a religion. I am a non-religious person myself. But rather, the realization that I would always be worshipping, or focusing, on something. If that was the case, I might as well try and choose things that are going to result in a better life for me and my family.
Video games, instagram, youtube, netflix, etc, are not great things to worship (for me). After cutting all of these things and many other screen related things from my life, I had a lot of time to fill, and have replaced it primarily with two things: golf, and reading. I was playing a good amount of golf before, but now I am playing more. I was barely reading before, and now I am reading for 3+ hours a day.
Most of my down time, my non-work time, my pleasure time, is spent on these two activities. Am I spending “too much” time on them? Probably. Am I “addicted” to them? In many senses of the word, probably. Do I think my life would be better off if I could find a way to have balance and spend a little less time on these two things and a bit more time on a few other things? Probably.
But I don’t know how to do that. It’s not how my brain is wired. I have always had addictions, and obsessions, and things that defined me.
Rather than fighting it, I am now choosing to embrace it. I am choosing to choose my addictions. I don’t imagine that I will stick with these two forever — there will be a point where I get over reading, or golf, and start looking for something else. The challenge to myself is to replace one relatively healthy addiction with another one.
It’s about constantly choosing the lesser of evils. I’m not saying it’s GREAT to be addicted to anything; it’s not GREAT to be addicted to reading, or golf, or exercising, or gardening, or anything. There are real downsides to getting addicted and obsessed and hyperfixating on things. But it is a hell of a lot better to be addicted to these things rather than being addicted to drinking, drugs, gambling, video games, watching TV, and so on and so forth.
Again, I don’t know how much of this is relatable to others. On the one hand, I know many people who are able to have that elusive “balance” and seem to be able to not get uber obsessed and hyper fixated on anything in particular. Good for them, I am envious. On the other hand however, I also know many people with addictive personalities, and maybe if that’s you, reading this will give you some food for thought.
My life, like everyone’s, is always in a constant state of flux. I try to improve it, learn from my mistakes, learn from others, and strive to better myself year after year. I don’t always succeed, but it’s in running experiments like my dopamine fast that help me understand myself better and discover ways to improve my life.
By writing about my experiences, I help myself work through things, and, hopefully, I help others relate to me and help them come to similar conclusions on their own. I know I get a lot out of reading the words of others, and that’s all I can hope for for anyone reading this now.
Cheers, and we should be back with some more crypto-focused content next week. I don’t want to jinx it, but it feels like we are getting closer and closer to a bottom and to the start of something bullish, so it’s probably a good time for all involved to be paying a bit more attention out there.
Disclaimer: The content covered in this newsletter is not to be considered as investment advice. I’m not a financial adviser. These are only my own opinions and ideas. You should always consult with a professional/licensed financial adviser before trading or investing in any cryptocurrency related product. Some of the links shared may be referral links.