Which is your most costly or harmful addiction?

Addicted

I'm addicted.

I confess it.

I'm addicted to computers and the internet. I was reminded that it was an addiction when my Internet Service Provider (ISP) had a problem recently, and I couldn't get through to any web sites. Of course, I had lots I could have done off line, but there was a breaking news story and I'd have preferred to be on line for that. News can be another addiction, of course. It's hard to tell when my addiction started. True, I've been working with computers since the 1970s, but back in those days they were huge machines at the office and you couldn't do much with them and you couldn't do anything at home. The addiction must have gradually crept up on me as it became possible to buy personal computers to use at home, and the number of fun things you could do with them increased, and the Internet was born and grew.

The amazing thing is that I am part of the first ever generation to experience this addiction. None of my ancestors, whether you trace them back to Adam and Eve or to one of the women who crossed over to Europe from Africa, were ever exposed to this phenomenon. They managed to live their whole lives without computers or the internet, and managed just fine. And yet, as I have upped sticks time and time again in search of work, leaving friends behind, I have become more and more dependent on the internet for more constant friendship as well as information and entertainment. I find it hard to imagine life without it.

Another thoroughly modern addiction, though one which I fortunately do not share, is television. Many of us sit ourselves down in front of the television for hours at a time, oblivious to the world. What's worse; we do it to our children too, using it as a surrogate nanny, so that they will grow up addicted too. Again, all but our most recent ancestors, for millions of years, did not share this addiction.

Alcohol and drugs are addictions that have probably been with us since the beginning of the species, though enough people managed to avoid them or keep them under enough control to survive. There are differences now, though. In the old days, if you tried to get home under the influence, perhaps the worst thing that could happen to you would be that you might fall off your horse, possibly to die, but more likely to just lie there until you woke up. These days, you can kill not just yourself but many others in a car accident. Drug taking can be more dangerous too, particularly from the relatively new phenomenon of injecting the drugs directly, which can cause problems in itself and through the spread of diseases such as AIDS through sharing needles. We have invented new synthetic drugs too.

Perhaps the most dangerous addiction for the race as a whole is the motor vehicle. I have to admit, I would find it extremely difficult to give up my car, although I have cut down on my mileage enormously in recent years; I would have to completely reorganize my life to do without one, moving to somewhere where everything I needed was within reach by cycling or by public transport. And yet, only a hundred or two years ago, most people lived like that. Few traveled beyond the nearest market town, and many did not even travel beyond the next village. Traders and some artisans and the very rich could travel much farther, of course. Rich young people would go on their tour of Europe, just as some of our students go traveling on their gap year. Trips were mostly intended to be profitable or educational or spiritual; there was no equivalent to the package tour to a foreign beach to which many of us have become addicted, to "get away from it all". What do we need to get away from? Aren't our lives so much better than those of previous generations? Addiction to the motor car has given rise to pollution which harms our health, and to pollution which threatens the health of the planet for decades if not centuries to come, in the form of global warming. Air travel is also harmful.

Another addiction which has mutated during recent times is the addiction to food. Of course, there have always been people who wanted to eat as much as they could, and people who wanted the best that money could buy. These days, however, we think nothing of having food flown in from all over the world, often disdaining perfectly good food grown locally, adding enormously to the amount of pollution due to transportation and refrigeration. I buy locally grown produce whenever possible, but I doubt if I will ever shake off my addiction to chocolate which, so far as I know, is not grown commercially here. We have become very fussy about our food, which leads to waste and to the use of harmful pesticides and fertilizers.

A more subtle addiction is the addiction to comfort. The Inuit learnt how to live in freezing temperatures, African tribes learnt to live in hot climates, and our ancestors, even back to the pelt-wearing cavemen, coped with lesser variations in temperatures by adding or taking off layers of clothing and sitting around fires. And yet, many of us nowadays would not do without our central heating and/or air conditioning; we're addicted to being able to get comfortable at the flick of a switch. I'm not saying that we should endure discomfort as the poor of every generation may have done, but we could choose our clothes with more care. It is possible to design houses with thick walls, passive solar power and well-planned ventilation which rarely if ever need power to keep them warm in winter or cool in summer. Native people have evolved buildings which are far better suited to comfort and safety in their local environments than many modern western buildings.

We spend a lot of our lives at work to earn the money to afford our cars, central heating, air conditioning, and holidays, etc., and arrive home too tired to look after our kids or do anything but grab a TV dinner and sit down in front of the TV. If the electricity fails or we cannot afford it, or there is a fuel crisis and the necessities of life disappear from the shelves, we often have great difficulty coping with life. For example, there are homeless and elderly poor who are dying due to the heat wave in Arizona this summer and others die in freezing weather each winter. One day the electricity could run out, as we run out of fossil fuels. Most of us don't know how to live independently; if push came to shove, we could not grow or hunt our own food, make our own clothes and buildings. We've become dependent on our modern complicated, power-hungry "civilization".

So, we have become addicted to many things that are demonstratively not necessary for life, or even comfort, since our ancestors did fine without them, and yet we tend to think of ourselves as being more free and better off than they were.

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