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We’re all addicted!

September 22, 2017   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Is it my imagination or are there more things than ever to which to be addicted? Look around us: the technological revolution that we are living in at the moment seems to me to be fraught with addictiveness. We are addicted to it – the technology and the revolution.

Back to basics.

Sean McCann (see this issue’s Arts & Entertainment) quit drinking once he admitted to himself that his life was falling apart because of it. Other friends of mine in the music business suffered from alcohol addiction and quit drinking.

Smoking – that oh so deadly addiction – holds a person in its hideous grasp and to escape, so I understand, like quitting drinking, can be a life-altering experience. A life altered, cleaned up, free of the slavery.

The country – the world – is staggering under the weight of drug addictions. Drug addiction is nothing new; it is as historical as alcohol, maybe older. However, this current day and age has seen such huge numbers of sufferers and more insidious drugs, ones that doctors prescribe to relieve pain. So, why are so many more people looking for help to deal with their pain?

Tattoos are addictive – bet you can’t just have one! And, of course, scientists are learning or finally admitting that, aside from the predictable risk of infection or negative reaction to the process on the part of a person’s body, the ink in tattoos – inevitably! – contains a micro-something that enters the blood and is harmful.

The junk in our junk food is addictive – all those yummy salts and fats and sugars. Fresh fruit and veg are no competition for those intense, tongue tingling flavours – but there is nothing nutritious in them and we do ourselves no favours when we chow down on them.

Not to mention all the salt and crummy meats we put on our dinner table; the big gooey desserts; the over-cooked veggies.

Worst of all, is our addiction to our cell phones, iPads, tablets – whatever- carry them with us all the time – bring them to the dinner table – can’t have a conversation without the damned things being in everyone’s face, constantly referring to them, as though any nonsense it spews out is of more interest and importance than what is being said by the other people in the room.

The whitewash of addiction that these little electronics have achieved; the mind-numbing grip on our attention; our near-terror of not having it on us or by us or as part of  our bodies is a epidemic.

As with smoking in the ’50s, scientists and doctors know this addiction is really bad for us. The research sneaks out into the public domaine but without the thunder that approaches other addictions. This is, of course, because there would a mighty crisis if we came face to face with the harm and potential harm technology – so young in its formation, such a recent part of our industrial history – is doing to us all. Here’s the kicker: this means, essentially, everybody is addicted.

Parents are so careless as to allow their tiny children to use computers. Advertising photos of babies putting their dear little fingers on the keyboard!

At last, doctors are raising flags against this, warning parents to prevent their tiny children from using technology at all up the age of three (only three!) and to restrict, with real attention, toddlers, youngsters from overuse.

Neurologists are concerned about the almost epidemic rise in epilepsy in people between the ages of 20 to 40. They fear to understand the reasons but their instincts are clear: there is more to the invisible waves that connect us so tightly to each other than we care to acknowledge.

The cancer medics and scientists know the risks of constant contact with the equipment: the risk of testicular cancer if a man keeps his lap top literally on his lap all the time while using it. And so forth.

It is not true that we need to know and to care about what people online think about everything. We do not actually have to know and care what every person we ever knew is having for dinner. The fact is that our lives would be better if we stopped pretending the things we live to check on our little boxes; that they do not really matter so much to us that we should be devoting the kind of time and concentration to them that we do.

What we need to care about is the well being of our own psyches; we need not to be slaves of anything – substance, indulgence or gossip.

This is an age of slavery in the most unexpected way. Who could have guessed such a short time ago that we would come to this?

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