Today we live in a world where addiction is almost encouraged whether it be to street drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol, food, shopping, gambling, gaming, tattoos, porn or just good old fashioned social media.
The size of dishes and plates have increased and wine glasses have grown to the size of goldfish bowls.
Everywhere excess is encouraged and even celebrated. Street drugs may not be legal, yet are easily obtainable on almost every street corner. It is no longer a shameful thing to see a young woman blind drunk on a pavement with her limbs akimbo and scant clothing compromised, but a commonplace sight.
Not so long ago only the elderly or disabled used motorised mobility carts. Now they are fast becoming the legs of an increasingly obese population.
We are expected to be connected to our electronic devices (including work-related) 24/7, no matter that we might be on a date, driving, or in the middle of a theatre show. And the programs on them all inter-connect so that a thousand different unknown sources have access to our activities, finances and movements at any given time.
Betting shops proliferate, particularly in poor areas where you often see as many as half a dozen within a few hundred yards of each other, typically next to a pawn or payday loan shop. Keeping a nation in debt (once an imprisonable offence with debtors jails in Victorian times) also keeps the risk of industrial action down for those who are in work.
Young people vie with each other to be the best looking on selfies, spiraling into narcissistic personality disorder, if not eating disorders and cosmetic surgery addictions into the bargain, if they believe they are anything less than a 'perfect 10'. They even bully and troll each other over minor human differences and imperfections.
Debt, relationship breakdown, ill-health, disability and mental illness are the end result of an unbalanced perspective and lifestyle - yet more ways a cynic might assume - to occupy the mind and keep a population tame.
Granted, all these human wrecks will cost the state a bomb in healthcare and benefits, but the good news is not for long, particularly once assisted suicide is legalised and they've been driven to it.
I believe we are watching the deliberate dismantling of our society and it all began in the 1960s with the nuclear family, the community, the church etc. For what purpose, I know not, as you would not assume it is in this country's interests to have a population so apparently useless and uneducated (and permitted to remain so) we seemingly need to import thousands of foreign nationals to do the jobs we once did, a country which continually borrows more money than it can ever pay back and has sold many of its assets off to overseas concerns, losing us national power and food security among other terrifying core assets and functions.
John Major promised a 'classless society' but what we've ended up with are two extra classes, the underclass and the super rich. Thanks to Tony Blair we've also been dragged into not just a war that had nothing to do with us, but which has cost us more in national debt than the whole of WWII (which we had only just finished paying off prior to first Gulf war), to the extent that our public services are now claiming dire financial hardship/threatening ever more draconian cuts, despite continuing to extract ever more taxes.
Perhaps there is no long term plan. Perhaps it is all about the super rich being the real ones in charge and finding ever more ingenious ways to leech all the wealth and assets out of the classes beneath by preying on their human weaknesses and engineering disadvantageous financial products for them so that they spend their entire lives in debt. More liabilities for the poor, more assets for the rich. Certainly there has never been greater financial and social inequality than there is now and no one even mentions 'social mobility' any more.
Ultimately I believe we now inhabit a world where we've never needed our wits about us more and on that basis I don't intend to lose mine, much as I have had my flirtations with social media addiction and some pretty hard core chocolate!
It is said we only use 5% of our minds. Imagine if we all decided to learn how to harness and use the other 95% of our minds through mindfulness and assorted mental training. No one would ever be able to push us around or give us their cr*p again and we could be the most incredible force for good in the world, which in itself would prove a natural anti-depressant, and even high, in the face of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Time to stand up against being turned into sheeple and take back control of our lives! If we are not in the driving seat, who is? Addiction is not 'self-medication'. It is digging an even deeper hole than the one we are in and throwing away a criminal waste of human potential.
I firmly believe an addiction free-world of mindfulness and learning to master our own minds is the only way we will ever engineer a world where drugs are not needed - the paradise would be real! The high would be permanent with no crash or hangover to fear. Moreover it would be accompanied by the pride and self-satisfaction of having achieved it through our personal intention and hard work.
