We’re all addicted. It’s just a matter of noticing. But what are we addicted to?
Here, I’ll break it down for you.
Sugar
First and perhaps most obvious, sugar and carbs aren’t required as any part of a diet. It is, however, in almost every food we eat, if not as sugar, then as high fructose corn syrup.
In the year 1965, there was a research project done on coronary heart disease, which singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of coronary heart disease. But get this: the research project was sponsored by the Sugar Research Foundation, and the role of sugar in coronary heart disease was heavily downplayed. Here’s my source: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2548255
There are many other articles out there, and studies have been done to prove this point. But it was too late. The food industry has been pushing low-fat foods since then.
Low-fat foods taste bad, though. Fatty foods are delicious, and are what make food taste good. In order to counteract the quality of food dropping, manufacturers began to add sugar in place of the fats.
Coincidentally, the enzyme used to create high-fructose corn syrup was discovered in the same year, 1965, and started being marketed in the 1970s. It was known as being cheaper to produce and much easier to work with than cane sugar, and now you’ll find it in everything.
YOU DON’T NEED IT.
Pleasure
Why do you keep your phone with you at all times?
Why do you keep going back to those same shows, movies, or songs?
You’re addicted to that feeling of being rewarded. Rewarded for making the right decisions or having the right connections, even if they don’t manifest in that way.
Checking your phone is like playing slots. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. And if you win, you get a notification in red. The color red is good for grabbing your attention, for reasons that are frankly beyond the scope of this post.
We live in an age of overwhelming pleasure, and we’re addicted to it. Try putting your phone away for twelve hours and see how much you struggle without it. If you want to challenge yourself further, go for a full dopamine detox.
A dopamine detox means no social media, no video games, no TV, no unproductive Youtube (which is basically TV, let’s be honest here) etc. for a week. It’ll break you out of harmful addictions and re-incentivize you to focus on the better things in life.
Control and Power
This one is much more difficult to see and understand in a practical sense.
Most people will pass this off, saying, “I’m the bottom rung in my company. I don’t have any power.”
It’s not true.
You have control when you decide what to eat for lunch. You have control when you drive your car. You have control when you browse Youtube, or move your character around in a game, or when you have conversations.
The general overarching goal in life is to gain more control over your life. You work to make money to buy things that give you power, in hopes to one day retire when you don’t have to do anything you don’t have to.
You have power over your children, and to some degree, your significant other. You have control over your pets. I don’t think I need to make my point any more clear.
Even the people who willingly give up control are somewhat doing it of their own accord. They’re told that relinquishing their control will free them. I don’t know whether they’ve found what they were searching for, so I won’t make any judgments.
Whether or not the words “control” and “power” are interchangeable can be debated. I say they can, and control is more yearned and more destructive.
That separator looks pretty cool. I should use it more often.