Changing Addiction: A brief essay.

The ability to change habits is the human superpower that the birds and lizard brains of the animal kingdom envy. While the power to re-program our brain at will gives us dominion over them, and all other life as we know it, on Earth, it is much more useful insofar as it enables us to survive a world where we, despite all our gifts, are still subservient to the changes of fortune that nature and randomness bring about. We can never hope to predict the end result of a trillion daily human interactions: to foresee when the next Hurricane Katrina will strike New Orleans, to pinpoint when or even if Eyjafjallajokull will subside, or to say for certain why solar winds can shift the Earth’s electromagnetic field. What happens to us in the world is guided by uncertainty and to navigate our lives successfully, change and adapt we must.

Nevertheless, habits are important. They train the mind and shape the way that the individual or the group responds in a time of crisis. Indeed, I have come to believe that habits define people. Show me what you eat and where your friends hang out, and I’ll tell you all about yourself. I concede that there are some people whose intellect is unique enough that it is hard to say what they are like based on mere observation of habit. But, these folks are few and far between. Certainly, I’ve only met a few in my lifetime.

Addiction is the cancer of habits: a habit that’s run amok, and grown to something much bigger and more dangerous than the mind has intended. Drugs, alcohol, sure, those are the best known addictions. But, there is also sex, video games, violence, and then a whole list of obsessive compulsive disorders that find their roots in small, silly habits like tying one’s shoe three times, or wearing only the smelliest of socks when going to run a race.

So it is that habits must be guarded and shaped, so that they are neither negative nor obsessive. It is harder said than done, but certainly worth shooting for.

In the US, high rates of infidelity and divorce, have long been part of societal reality. In my opinion, the trend is fueled, in no small part, by a cultural mythology that emphasizes individual happiness over that of the child, and a fake piousness that values appearance over frankness: an addiction to the self. Arranged marriages are constructed on the basis of whether or not two people will successfully be able to hold a family together. Putting the debate of how important love is to a strong marriage aside, it is no accident that the rate of successful arranged marriages is high, and that the achievement of their children, too, is higher than that of children who’s parents freely chose their life partner.

So, as I read about how Chinese attitudes towards one-night stands are changing, and how 30% of men in Beijing who get paternity tests for their children are finding out that they are not the father, I wonder whether or not this has always been the case, in China, or if the country’s new wealth is creating a new type of addiction in Chinese society.