Status Updates From A Passage North

"Addictions were, so often, at the beginning at least, a way of tolerating or managing yearnings that were too intense or too painful, a way of catching hold of desire that floated too freely, without an object to which it could be fastened, functioning for so many people as a means by which desire could be taken hold of and brought back down to the earth (...)"

"(...) perhaps because he was less easily sustained by the things that had attracted and stimulated him when he was younger, the desires that led him to move back and the short-lived satisfactions they offered soon came to feel misleading, like distractions or diversions from a more basic absence."