Some habits may appear in both addictive and nonaddictive (normal) forms. Some habits may seem addictive, such as physical exercise or practicing a musical instrument, or doing some other labor of love, yet we may consider them to be positive and beneficial. There is a fine line between the pathological and the creative, between addiction and practice. What actually is the vital difference between "I'll just have one more drink" and "I'll just try that Bach fugue one more time"?
Addiction consumes energy and leads to slavery. Practice generates energy and leads to freedom. In practice, or in creative reading or listening, we obsess in order to find out more and more, as in the Twenty Questions game. In addiction, we obsess in order to avoid finding out something, or in order to avoid facing something unpleasant. In practice the act becomes more and more expansive; we are unwinding a thread outward and building more and more implications and connections. In addiction we are folding inward, into more sameness, more dullness.
Habits are addictive if that mysterious acceleration factor is present, when enough is never enough, and what was enough yesterday is not enough today. Habits are addictive if the reward and the work are inverted. Samuel Butler joked that if the alcoholic's hangover preceded the intoxication, there would be mystical schools teaching it as a discipline for self-realization. So practice is the reciprocal of addiction. Practice is an ever-fresh, challenging flow of work and play in which we continually test and demolish our own delusions; therefore it is sometimes painful.
Addiction is what computer programmers call a "do-loop." Self-regulating beings, whether animals, people, or ecosystems, spend much of their time performing repetitive routines. Built into the structure of such routines are end-conditions or exits. We keep performing the routine until the end-condition indicates that the job is done. Pouring tea, we monitor for the condition "Is the cup full?" That condition turns off the act of pouring. Eating, we continue until certain autonomic signs (stomach bulk, blood sugar, and so on) feed back the message that we are full. Normally, we then stop. But it is possible for the end-condition to be omitted, misplaced, or for the signals to be switched, so that the routine is carried out indefinitely, compulsively, until all sorts of disorders, explosions, or breakdowns bring the whole system to a halt.
If addiction is a form of do-loop, from which there is no exit, procrastination is a don't-loop, which consists of nothing but exit. In a circle of addictive feedback, we believe "The more the merrier." Under stress, such a belief can accelerate into a do-loop, which drives us into an explosive runaway, such as an eating or drinking binge, a population explosion, an arms race. In procrastination we believe "The less the safer." This, under stress, drives us into a don't-loop, a cycle of compression or blockage, like a muscle spasm, writer's block, sexual impotence, depression, anomie, or catatonia. In this kind of vicious circle the exit condition fires off continuously, never allowing us to maintain the activity. This state gives rise to procrastination, and all the other inverse addictions, the addictions to not-doing, the blocks, the allergies.
Procrastination is the mirror image of addiction; both are disorders of self-regulation. We are stuck in these cycles unless and until we can find the crossed signal and switch it back again.
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| Goya, Figures dancing from Los Disparates |
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I like typing out passages from books that I want to study. With my fingers moving, constantly checking up on whether I'm accurately transcribing a given sentence, I am forced to pay closer attention.
Also, Wood Mouse, if you ever do read this, here... I love you even more for your having loved and dog-earred that page long ago. :-)
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