Addiction. ......is it a choice? That is the question from the hive learners table this morning
So I am going to be very honest with you including sharing my own personal example because I think that is the only way to have this conversation properly.
Let me start here , I think addiction is a choice, at least at the beginning it is, Nobody forces you to start something.
, you just pick it up yourself, you go back to it yourself, and somewhere along the line what started as a choice becomes something that feels like it has a life of its own, that is where it gets complicated, that is where the choice argument starts to feel a little too simple.
Because here is the thing about quitting, everyone will tell you that quitting is hard , we all know that. We say it so easily , oh it is hard to quit, oh addiction is difficult to break , but I do not think we fully appreciate what that actually means until we are in the middle of it ourselves trying to stop something and failing repeatedly despite genuinely wanting to stop.
I know this personally, and my addiction is bread, Yes, bread. Dont laugh eh ...
I noticed earlier this year that every time I ate a lot of bread I gained weight, significant weight, so I made a decision at the beginning of the year to stop, I was serious about it, I was committed, I had a reason and the reason was standing right in front of me every time I looked in the mirror, i stopped, i lost almost 9kg, Nine kilograms, I was doing it.
And then somehow I found my way back to bread, i genuinely cannot fully explain how it happened, It was not one big dramatic moment where I decided to throw away all my progress. It was small small , it was gradual, it crept back in quietly and before I knew it I was back to eating bread regularly and the 9kg I lost came back, all of it,And then some, under three months it took, under three months for everything I worked for to reverse itself completely.
Do I like that I added the weight back? Absolutely not, does that stop me from eating the bread? Apparently not.
And here is what I think made it worse , there is a bakery right next to where I stay, Fresh bread every single day, the smell alone is an entire problem, How exactly am I supposed to fight something that is physically that close to me every single day? The environment is working against me and I do not think people talk enough about how much environment plays into addiction, It is not just about willpower here, It is about what is around you, what is accessible, what is familiar, what is comforting.
I genuinely believe that if I moved away from this environment I would be able to control my bread addiction, Remove the bakery from the equation and half the problem disappears, that tells me something important that sometimes the inability to quit is not purely weakness of character. Sometimes it is circumstance. Sometimes it is environment. Sometimes it is the fact that the thing you are trying to quit is sitting right outside your front door smelling like fresh bread every single morning.
So is addiction a choice? I think starting is, I think the first step toward something is always a choice, But staying stuck in it that is a more complicated conversation, because if choice alone was enough then every person who genuinely wanted to quit something would have quit it already, and we know that is not how it works.
Addiction is real, It is heavy, and it does not care how strong your willpower is on the days when the bakery just put out a fresh batch.
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