Nasty Addictions

And how to fight them.

Imagine there is a heavy drug.

Trying it for just a couple days straight makes one badly addicted. The damage it deals to one’s brain and body is unrecoverable after just a few weeks.

Furthermore, this drug does not require material substance. Think of it as a form of meditation. An innocent “I feel great and you can feel that too if you try this and that” is, deeply unfortunately, a good enough pitch to spread this terrible disease.

How can a healthy society fight massive obsession of such a drug?

I am neither a doctor, nor a politician, nor a psychologist, nor a sociologist. But high-level action items are very apparent:

• Increase awareness.
• Identify people in the risk group.
• Isolate terminally ill patients from the rest of the society.

The first step would make sure less people are inclined to try and get lost. The second finds those few who can be helped and makes sure they are helped. The third makes sure that people who are non-recoverable and badly contagious are treated accordingly.

Today, we live in the society where at least three of those drugs not only exist, but are already spread all over.

Skipping laziness, lack of responsibility, and the absence of one’s desire to obtain and sharpen common knowledge, let me outline two major forms of those deadly substances.

Entitlement

Entitlement is the attitude that if something does not go the way one wants, instead of trying harder and in different ways, they go out and scream about how unfair the world is as loudly as possible.

Spreading the word about an imperfection of the world does help. But only in addition to making sure one has done all they could from their own end; not instead of pushing further.

It’s easy to tell if someone is infested with entitlement. Just ask what makes them think they have done enough to deserve certain outcome. The healthy mindset is to respond along the lines of “the world doesn’t have a concept of ‘deserve’ at all”, while responses of terminally sick patients are very emotional, and unusually rich on the words “should”, “must”, and “have to”.

Likability

Likability is the mindset that makes humans favor leaving a good impression above anything else. Often, it co-exists with sociability, which makes people mistakenly assume their value increases as their social circles begin to include certain people.

The first thing humans suffering from likability lose is the ability to take commitments. “I will take this task” gently fades away, and is being replaced by “What a great conversation we had”.

When a day or a week passes in friendly conversations, with no deliverables hit and no decisions made, humans infested with likability fail to experience the healthy “what a waste, it’s time to get some shit done!” mental self-disciplining feedback, but instead observe it gradually replaced by a peaceful acknowledgement of their “self-worth”.

On early stages, it helps treating the disease to eliminate one from school, or get them fired from the job.

Unfortunately, as time goes by, the power of these historically efficient mechanisms proves to decline rapidly, and modern shifts in political paradigms diminish the chances of the above trend reserving back from slim to none.

If we want our cozy civilization to keep moving forward and not become an Idiocracy, now would be a really good time to at least go past the “acceptance” phase in recognizing the above.