Self Addiction

I think that it is engrained deep in human nature the tendency for addiction. This is commonly seen in the realm of drug addiction, but the range of addiction is so unbelievably wide. People can addict to things of a sexual nature, exercise, other people, their job, eating, I mean the list could really go on and on. The one that I would like to focus on is the addiction of ourselves.

We are all endlessly and hopelessly addicted to ourselves and the roles we play in society. We constantly concern ourselves with how we see ourselves and how others see us. We spend our days trying to make the role of ourselves happier or more successful or whatever we think it should be. We may set ourselves apart from an evil and do battle. Every experience we go through is filtered by our consciousness and in a split second we cast our judgment upon it. The sort of what do I think about this? How do I feel about it? And we rarely take experiences for simply what they are. We are conditioned to analyze everything that we think or feel, and are taught that the mind, the ego is the real self. To me, this is all the doings of a creature that takes itself to seriously. The thought has occured to me before that perhaps every sense of frustration, anxiety or pain that we feel in our lives exists as a reminder to laugh at yourself and to stop taking yourself so seriously.

I would argue that this addiction is the largest cause of one's inability to find inner peace. Think of all the frustration and stress we cause ourselves just dealing with this role; the trouble accepting oneself or others, the fruitless self-improvement attempts. We are so addicted to the role we play that the idea of it being a role seems to be completely ridiculous and impossible. Even the thought of not taking it so seriously can rarely be realized. Like the actor who truly becomes the part he or she is playing we become completely absorbed with this character and ignore clear signs that may lead us to believe otherwise. The clear sign to me in this case would be death.

Of course no one knows what happens after we die, but to me the most improbable thing seems to be that I would be exactly the same and be in a similar place. It seems to me that even if my consciousness would remain in the same state, it would require the same culture to produce the same role. Even though everything about "me" would be the same, my role, or who "I am", would change completely based on the structure of whatever or wherever I was. So really who are you? I mean that is how we take on this role in the first place. It isn't self imposed, we are told who and what we are. This is done at such an impressionable age, and with such convincing arguments that we accept it as the foundation of our experience. But is this really who we are? Or have we played this role for so long that we have become completely addicted and attached to it? Maybe that is why death exists, to remind us of this. To free us from ourselves