Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

The very idea that you can somehow make your life alright by attaining primitive material goals – whether it’s getting the ideal relationship, the ideal job, a beautiful Berber rug or forty quids’ worth of smack – the underlying idea, ‘if I could just get X, Y, Z, I would be okay’, is consistent and it is quite wrong.

In a sense we re-write our past. We change our narrative. We reprogram ourselves. There is no objective history, this we know, only stories. Our character is the result of this story we tell ourselves about ourselves,

Isn’t it a good thing to know about yourself? That you are going through life requesting friends on Facebook and asking people on dates driven by an existential fear that you will always be alone? When were you planning to address that? Is your plan to go through your (finite) human life motivated by unexamined dread? Is that your plan? And you wonder why you’re fucking nervous?! At the heart of so much activity and interaction is deep and unaddressed fear. We have to expose it! We have to amend it! We need help! Thank God you read this book you lunatic.

It is commonly understood that the opposite of addiction is connection. That in our addictive behaviours we are trying to achieve the connection. Think of it: the bliss of a hit or a drink or of sex or of gambling or eating, all legitimate drives gone awry, all a reach across the abyss, the separateness of ‘self’, all an attempt to redress this disconnect.