Overcoming Addiction As A Society

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Addiction is a serious problem facing our society today. And while it impacts many different groups in different ways, I will primarily focus on the impact it has on young White men and what it means for our future as a society.

Addiction can take many forms, depending on the person and their particular ability to overcome otherwise addictive behaviors. We are, of course, familiar with addiction to drugs and alcohol. But young males can be addicted to other things such as eating, video games, and pornography.

Alcohol and drugs are pretty straightforward and relatively easy to understand as addictions; people often turn to these outlets to cope with stress in their lives, allowing them to numb their pain, silence those internal voices for a time, and be able to, albeit temporarily, forget who they are and what they have to deal with.

Newer addictions such as pornography and video games serve largely the same function, with a similar impact on brain chemistry, and necessitating more and more of the same in order to have a “positive” affect on the addict.

Older generations, however, might find it hard to understand how these things can be addictive. In fact, it was only very recently that porn and sex addiction began to be taken seriously by clinicians, as research into such topics was, ironically, unsexy to those who fund research grants and studies.

This lack of funding was further compounded by the fact that some of this research revealed certain uncomfortable truths about some segments of our wider population, in particular their views about sex and sexuality and how their behaviors are intimately tied to this identity of themselves.

Root Causes

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There are several different reasons why a young man might turn to drugs, alcohol, pornography, video games, or any other form of addiction: loss of a job, loss of a relationship, a major death in the family, work or school stress, legal troubles, or even an inability to overcome childhood trauma.

But at the root of all these reasons is a single unifying lack: these young men who often turn to addictive behaviors are missing a sense of purpose and community – this is especially true among young White men who, unlike their parents and grandparents before them, often do not have social outlets like fraternal orders, sports clubs, or church groups available to them in today’s highly atomized society.

Similarly, many young White men have moved away from their small towns, most of which have been hollowed out with the destruction of our manufacturing industry and large retailers like Wal-Mart all but destroying local economies. As a result of having put local shops out of business and moving industries overseas, jobs in small town America have become increasingly scarce.

These young men leave behind traditional support structures like family and childhood friends to move to an alien environment, where cultural differences between the rural and urban mindset may make it hard to form new bonds with neighbors and friends. In times past, coworkers may have served as a surrogate support structure – but as these young men are often unemployed for long stretches or having to hop from job to job – coworkers aren’t a consistently reliable source of support.

Add on top of this the rise of gig jobs (such as ride share platforms and middle-man food delivery services) in addition to many jobs going remote, a typical young man who works in these fields may rarely if ever see a coworker or even know of their existence.

In short, they often have no community or support network to fall back on.

Likewise, they increasingly have no sense of purpose in their lives. Young White males are increasingly dropping out of the job market, largely due to societal pressures that place a higher priority on hiring women and non-Whites over White men, many who also increasingly lack a college education where university enrollment is ever more a female-dominated sphere, and the push for diversity places these young White males firmly at the back of the line for admission to many competitive programs.

Combine this situation with a society that has, for the last decade or more, attacked men and masculinity as inherently evil and you have a recipe for two or more generations of young men who feel mentally beaten and battered by the world around them. Is it any wonder these young men turn to addiction in order to cope with their seemingly meaningless existence?

Previous Addiction Research and the Rat Park Experiment

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Most of us may be familiar with the classic rats with drug-laced water bottles experiment. The idea behind it being to study the impacts of addiction, though this particular experiment was flawed from the outset for reasons I will describe shortly.

If you are unfamiliar with this experiment, the way it worked was a researcher would introduce a rat in a small enclosure to two water bottles. One was filled with regular water, and the other had water laced with some type of addictive drug. The researcher would then watch as the rat chooses to drink from the drug-laced water, even to the point of fatal overdose. Their conclusion, of course, being that an addict would always choose drugs even if an alternative were offered.

We know now that this is a very simplistic conclusion and hardly applicable to humans, and in fact, it’s not even applicable to the rats themselves.

Enter the Rat Park Experiment. In this experiment, a researcher created what he termed a “rat park”, a larger enclosure with things a rat would enjoy such as things to climb on, toys to play with, bits and bobs to dig through or toss around, and most importantly, other rats with which he could socialize within the same enclosure. Then this researcher introduced the two water bottles as in the previous type of experiment.

Can you guess what happened?

Surprisingly enough, the rats in this so-called rat park didn’t overdose themselves on the drug-laced water. One might argue that these rats had a purpose and a community – their innate “rat-ness” was encouraged and fulfilled by their environment, rather than stifled by artificial restrictions and barriers.

Can you imagine how much we’d counter the ills of addiction among our human population if we did likewise and removed those artificial barriers that only serve to restrain that innate human drive for meaning and belonging?

Potential Strategies to Overcome Addiction

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I’ll preface this by saying I am no licensed professional nor do any of my degrees relate to this particular field – but I am someone who has struggled with and continues to struggle with certain addictions in my life, and I have received input from other prior addicts on some of the strategies that have worked for them.

· Be honest with yourself, acknowledge that you have a problem and you want to overcome it, and that it will take some hard work and some time to do it

· Remember your dreams and goals, many if not all of them are still achievable, you just have to believe in yourself and your potential

· Stay busy and engaged with your work and other hobbies, like that old saying goes “idle hands are the devil’s playground” – likewise, keeping busy will help you avoid falling into addictive behaviors

· There is no such thing as perfect sobriety, set small goals and approach it via baby steps, working incrementally towards becoming “cleaner”

· Being a functioning addict is better than going cold turkey, going to a few AA/NA meetings, then hitting a rough spot and falling hard into relapse just because they stumbled once and decide to give up entirely

· If you are clean for 364 days and stumble on the 365^th day, you should be proud of achieving the 364 days rather than focusing on that 365^th day. You still got a year under your belt – dust yourself off and get back to it

· Don’t be so hard on yourself, give yourself the grace to make mistakes, to fail from time to time, so long as you are making steady progress, that’s what’s most important

Social Solutions to Mitigate the Damage of Addiction

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Much as with the rat park experiment, we see a simple solution to this grave social ill, if we as a society are willing to take that step and make such a change.

So long as a significant part of our population feels they lack purpose and community, they will have no healthy outlets for coping with their seemingly meaningless existence. If even a quarter of this nation’s roughly 16 million White male youth between 18-25 are similarly situated, that would be about 4 million young White men in this sort of addictive stasis, unable to move forward in their lives and with little social incentive to do so, and caught in a perpetual state of malaise.

Unless we as a society are willing to relegate so many millions of our nation to this half-living walking dead existence, we have to provide the opportunities for them to find their purpose and to build their communities. Social cohesion and advancement shouldn’t be a zero-sum game.

The idea that one group should be favored over another group in the granting of opportunities should be something passé by this point in our social development. However far too often, it appears to many, especially to young White males, that it is more important that your doctor, engineer, lawyer, politician, accountant, or child’s teacher be anything other than a White male rather than they simply be someone skilled and knowledgeable about their craft.

Likewise, the idea that only certain groups should be allowed to form cohesive bonds while others are prohibited from doing so goes against not only thousands of years of human nature, but the ideals of liberty enshrined in our founding documents just a few centuries ago. And while one may argue that times have changed, human nature has not – despite the various attempts by modernity to redefine reality into something less “problematic”. 

If we as a society simply removed these artificial barriers and restrictions blocking a substantial portion of our population from seeking out and achieving their own purpose and community, we would see the current crisis of addiction dwindle in short order.