“Some addictions are considered dangerous.
Others are called ambition.” ▌

There’s something deeply amusing about society’s relationship with addiction.

Not funny “ha ha” amusing. More like watching a radroach crawl out of a toilet amusing.

People love to pretend addiction is only addiction when it becomes ugly.

If your coping mechanism looks productive, inspirational, or profitable enough, people will practically give you a standing ovation while you slowly destroy yourself.

Work seventy hours a week until your blood pressure resembles a lottery drawing? Dedicated.

Live entirely on caffeine and anxiety? Hustle culture.

Spend every waking moment at the gym because you can’t tolerate existing alone with your thoughts? Discipline.

Compulsively buy things you don’t need because opening Amazon boxes creates twelve seconds of dopamine? Self-care.

Wrap every waking second of your life in performative religiosity because the silence in your own head terrifies you? Spiritual.

But let someone start drinking too much, abusing prescription medications, gambling excessively, or using substances that society has decided are the “wrong” substances, and suddenly everyone becomes an expert on healthy coping mechanisms.

That’s the interesting thing about self-medication.

Almost everyone does it.

The only difference is whether the coping mechanism is socially acceptable.

Some addictions simply photograph better than others.

We romanticize exhaustion constantly. We praise burnout like it’s patriotism. We reward people for destroying themselves slowly as long as the destruction increases productivity or remains aesthetically pleasing.

Nobody panics when someone works themselves into cardiac disease because capitalism calls that ambition.

Nobody worries when someone starves themselves emotionally by pretending vulnerability is weakness because society calls that toughness.

Nobody blinks when someone spends every waking moment distracting themselves from unresolved trauma because distraction has become America’s national pastime.

But eventually all self-medication reaches the same ugly truth:

Relief is not healing.

That’s the part nobody wants to hear.

Because healing is slow. Healing is uncomfortable. Healing requires sitting quietly with things that would honestly be easier to sedate, suppress, spiritualize, intellectualize, gamble away, or drown in distraction.

The wasteland version of this is simple.

Everybody out there is addicted to something.

Jet. Psycho. Buffout. Gambling. Violence. Nostalgia. Rage. Religion. Caps. Attention. Validation.

Some addictions are just easier to market than others.

And if we’re being honest, modern society runs almost entirely on chemically enhanced distraction and unresolved grief pretending to be productivity.

That sounds cynical.

Unfortunately, cynical things can still be true. ▌