Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

I am grateful for my life where I get to show off for a living, and as a consequence of this I will occasionally be photographed. Now if I were you, reading this, determined not to change my Weltanschauung (‘world view’ in German), I’d go, ‘That’s easy for you to say, you’re loaded and you’re on a rowboat on the Thames with yer luvverly bird of course you can accept a modicum of inconvenience.’ Well here is my riposte: ‘If you determine your life by external data, there will always be something to complain about. There will always be some facet of reality that is not going as you would like it to. There is always more to be consumed, people more rich and famous than you. To be clear, unless I’m much mistaken you’re not reading this in a ditch in the slums of Kibera with the barrel of a gun in your mouth while a rabid warlord bums you for his amusement are you?’ And yet that horrific scenario (other than having to read this book while it happens) is reality for some people. In fact half of humanity live in conditions of galling poverty so any of us that have swerved that nightmare would do well to not spend our leisure time bemoaning the fact that we are not laid out on a yacht with a Kardashian slurping away at our privates because, the sages are right, the material world is an illusion and its treasures all too temporal.