(cw: addiction, but not from me) Yesterday I chanced upon a reddit thread documenting a guy’s experience of using heroin and how it destroyed his life (but he did get clean later on). I came across this insightful comment in response:
Life is all about novelty. It’s the novelty of our experiences that make life worth living. You’ll remember your whole life who your first crush was, how exciting it was to drive a car the first time, or getting drunk, or getting lucky with that beautiful girl.
But the novelty of any experience will wear out after it’s been repeated too much. I wish driving my car each day to work could be as exciting as the first time I got behind the wheel, but it’s not. The toys from when I was a kid can’t keep my attention any more. The songs I have on my iPod have played themselves too many times.
But, and listen, because this is important, there are other songs out there I can load on my iPod; ones I haven’t heard before. There’s a girl at a house party that can tell you a joke you’ve never heard before, and make you feel something different. You can get her number and take her to a movie the two of you have never seen and you’ll enjoy it a lot. You can get drunk off alcohol you’ve never tried before, take her back to your place, and the both of you can try things on one another that haven’t been tried before. And you’ll have a great story to tell all your friends the next day.
Heroin will be the greatest thing you’ll ever experience. That’s a striking blow to novelty. Like that old toy in the corner, getting laid doesn’t get your attention any more. Who gives a fuck what band is popular this week? They’re all the same. So are all those god damn movies they show at the theater. What’s the point? And that beautiful girl? Forget the shallow 2-dimensional bitch. There’s nothing in it for you. But there’s a lot in it in shooting up H. Man that feels great doesn’t it? But those come downs sure suck don’t they? As your tolerance for H goes up, your tolerance for loneliness goes down. But self-esteem is negligible, isn’t it mother fucker?
You’re fucked. Sorry to say it. I’m merely using this comment and exploiting your story to tell other people what’s worth living for. Will you be able to get off H? Possibly. But will life have any novelty left after you do? I wouldn’t bet on it. You’ve played your own song too many times.
Below this comment there was another comment in response:
I’m Buddhist, and this is what suffering in Buddhism is actually all about.
Getting tired of shit that once seemed awesome and wanting more. Thus the cycle continues.
It is interesting as a third party to learn how and why drugs are so addictive and devastating. We often talk about the destructiveness of the addiction itself but I never saw it through the lens of using up one’s entire allocation of novelty meant for a lifetime, all in one shot. And then spending the rest of their lives trying to chase that experience again in futility.
I guess I can relate to it even in a non-drug addiction sense. We experience certain highs in our lives, and some of us spend too much energy trying to experience those highs again, missing what is there waiting for us in the present.
The more of life I’ve lived, the more I get the gist that happiness is not concentrated in the highs, but it is how we encounter the mundane moments that makes the real difference. We mistake dopamine-derived pleasure for happiness.
I am meditating on this myself at this moment, because my adhd brain craves dopamine hits. I feel chronically low without novelty. But I do know subconsciously that chasing novelty is not sustainable.
Zen likes to teach us: every incoming moment is a fresh moment. But it is not easy to have that mindset and perspective to see each moment as fresh when we are riddled with routines and baggage. It takes a kind of spiritual stamina and strength to have the capacity to notice time and space that way – which the zen monastics insist can be practiced.
I crave stimulation, so when I don’t feel so I feel like there is something wrong (I guess this is typical with adhd brains), but I should cultivate the ability to appreciate what I have in the present instead. Sounds really cliché and seemingly impossible at the same time.
Sometimes I feel like a parent who keeps wanting to shape a child (my self) the way I aspire my child to be, but the right thing to do is to accept and appreciate the child for who they are. A lot of suffering comes from parent-child relationships where the parent keeps being disappointed by the child, and the child keeps feeling traumatised by the disappointment and emotional abandonment from the parent. I am both the parent and child in this analogy, so I feel the suffering from both sides as well as the suffering that comes from being sandwiched between the two.
I set out writing a short note sharing an interesting reddit comment, and I end up psychoanalysing myself, as always.