We frequently bump into a type of people that wishes for endless money, in hopes of living a life bereft of sadness and angst. The same people may paradoxically realize that the ones possessing the money live miserable lives and the ones who don’t, seem satisfied with little to no worry. They may seem naive to you, saying things like “I was always excited to buy this car; but when I did, the happiness I felt didn’t last long” and that “girls nowadays always choose to date bad boys” or “I’m good looking and polite... but no one likes to hang out or date me”, even though they’re judgement is pathetically true. They may endlessly gab about how “unfair” their life is, and start turning more and more religious because they become sure that “God won’t leave them alone”. Some of them may tread interesting paths, finding console in posting suggestive photos of themselves, or overwhelm our platforms with their “accept me” quotes until they find likeminded people to herd up with– or the desired bad boy.

If you ever listened to the elderly, they always go off coaching the young that life is “hard” and we should learn to adapt. But if life is constitutionally hard, why should we keep proving to ourselves that it’s not easy? Meaning, why are we even allocating adjectives to obviousness? It’s objectively as trivial as verbalizing that salt tastes salty and sugar, sugary. In fact, humans, unlike animals, have a tendency to tolerate states of satisfaction after some time, urging us to start other missions –big or small– in the search for another feel of pleasure but this time, more intense, even if it was challenging or life threatening. If you realized, this is textbook definition of addiction. And yes, it’s completely physiological.

Humans aren’t humans without addiction. It’s the reason we’re always on the search for better living standards, which gave birth to the word “progress”: this makes life look “hard”, because we perpetually have to work. Intriguingly, Nature, by adding a ‘ruthless motor’, i.e addiction, at the center of our brain –a highly connected web– within the Limbic System, and giving it access to our Prefrontal Cortex, made us animals that incessantly “ruminate thoughts” (=thinking) ending up powerfully memorizing them, until they come in handy as pleasure later on (=invention). Moreover, because our memory is nearly permanent, we are able connect ideas in various ways (=analysis/creativity), the quality that permitted us to reach the present level of easy lives.

To make sense of the examples, the more the pleasurable act was intense, the more we sought to repeat it to benefit more; but if it was complex, the burden increases, demotivating you to invest, favoring easy tasks: it’s therefore simple for a creepy man to exploit demure women to reach orgasm, and simply gratifying for girls to date f*ck boys, notoriously powerful, giving them fake authority and the allusion that their “mission” ended successfully. Additionally, because progress is favored in the same environment, intrusive ideologies may threaten people’s work to attain their longed for pleasure. That’s why doing controversial activities (e.g LGBTQ pride marches, provocative clothes) may enrage disapproving people which, conversely, satisfies the doer, retaliating due to lifelong oppression.

Ultimately, drugs, extremely simple to use with ecstatic effects, excites the addiction motor... But for literally nothing, easily exhausting our brains until death, resulting in the tragic ‘addiction’ we know today. This makes addiction both good and bad, meriting the oxymoron “good bad”.