What Is Addiction?

Ideas are not the words that describe them, yet words are what most people seem by all appearances to fixate on.  The irrationality is compounded when people arbitrarily define concepts like addiction in clashing ways and still fail to look past words to objective truths and ideas.  This is not a mere differences of linguistic usages, for different concepts are being put into words when people define addiction in conflicting ways.  People could call addiction anything they want, but what really matters is if the concept being conveyed are logically possible, true, or verifiable.  That very random, incomplete, or contradictory ideas about what makes something an addiction are so culturally prevalent might even make it harder for some people to identify addictions in themselves or others and take the right steps to escape them.

What is addiction, though?  For starters, it does not entail a loss of autonomy intellectually or behaviorally.  It is not that a person could not stop themselves from doing something short of hypothetical mind control, but that they are so strongly compelled to continue either by a sense of pleasure they receive from the thing/act in question or by dread of withdrawal.  Yes, someone in the clutches of alcoholism could stop drinking without supportive friends or family members, as an extreme emotional or general craving for something does not mean they are literally incapable of choosing to stop.  It does not logically follow from being in the grip of an addiction that one will continue to stay there of one's own volition, however extraordinarily challenging it might be to change.  Free will of some form does exist as well [1].  We cannot control all of our thoughts, as involuntary desires and perceptions are logically possible even alongside free will, but beliefs and waking actions (unless literal metaphysical mind control or neurological issues was involved) are always within someone's full control.

If it is not that addiction is irresistible, what of a very strong, lasting longing for, say, a particular kind of food or drink?  Thoroughly enjoying something does not make a person addicted to it, nor does spending a large amount of time engaging with it.  Someone who loves apples to the point of eating one every day for non-health reasons is not necessarily addicted to apples.  Furthermore, even truly needing something does not mean addiction is present, for a person can need food without being addicted to a particular type of food or style of eating.  What, then, of withdrawals, commonly mentioned as the grand primary mark of addiction?  The nature of addiction is a far more complex issue than many people tend to acknowledge!  Either almost all activities involve smaller addictions of some kind, meaning some would even be consistent with rationality and moral correctness, or addiction is a far narrower thing than many realize.

There would be adverse effects (as long as the laws of physics one perceives remain static) from no longer breathing, with enough of a breathing deficit leading to death--but to call breathing an "addiction" in the same sense as repeatedly abusing alcohol or certain drugs would be to conflate two very different concepts in one sense, despite the very loose similarities.  Breathing would certainly be an addiction if this was true, and yet that is not at all what most people mean when they use the word.  Addiction is usually reserved for destructive or immoral things with a stranglehold on someone's life, the level of psychological dependence being so high that stopping the activity in question would motivate a person to collapse into great irrationality, selfishness, or desperation to prolong the addiction.

An immoral thing is evil, however, whether or not someone is addicted to it, but many people, as is typical of non-rationalists, tend to inconsistently or randomly think that some addictions are evil and some are amoral or permissible based on preference and social expectations.  For example, a caffeine addiction is one that would be very popular in contemporary America, a very socially accepted thing perhaps even in circles that would condemn merely playing video games or using the internet for an arbitrary number of hours as an addiction.  It is not that investing a specific amount of hours a day or week could even make someone addicted to entertainment.  That would depend on whether it is their top priority and if they would sacrifice more substantial things for its sake.

This is the real nature of addiction.  To be addicted to something, a person must pretend like it has a higher status than its nature really possesses, come to it for its familiarity, comfort, or pleasure (and yes, people could be addicted to very painful things by finding something appealing about them), and experience withdrawals of sorts without it.  Practically everyone has something they would be reluctant to yield the place of in their lives even if reason and morality demanded it.  At the same time, not everyone is necessarily addicted to anything at all, at least not in the sense that the word would often be reserved for.  Addiction can still take diverse forms, from physical addictions like drugs to the allure of emotionalism for certain non-rationalists.  As for very specific things like reason, rationality, and righteousness, there is no such thing as loving them too much or pursuing them with too much fixation, no matter how personally painful or relationally destructive this attachment is.  If being unwilling to turn away from these things was addiction, then some addiction would by necessity be rational or obligatory.  Again, addiction is a much more complex philosophical issues than it might initially seem.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/09/explaining-free-will.html