If one was to look at society today, they would find many addictions that haunt people’s every day life. Most often society thinks as an addiction being only to some sort of drug or alcohol. They think that people can only be addicted to drugs, like heroin, cocaine, PCP, or LSD. We always look at addictions as being bad. By looking at the bad side to everything we tend to ignore the good that comes from some of our small addictions, some we probably did not even know we had.
Addiction is the inability to function without the addictive substance that is dismaying, the dependence of the organism upon a certain experience and an increasing inability to function normally without it. My little addiction is wearing a baseball hat. This little addiction of mine does not seem to be at all destructive at first glance. But when you take a much a closer look at how it affects my everyday life, anyone can see that it is as troublesome as some drugs. Without my hat, I start to feel incomplete.
It gives me a sort of meaning. My hat is as much a part of me as an arm or a leg or even my head, on which in sits. It’s like my hat completes me as a person. Without it I am just half a person, not whole; searching for that one thing that completes me. I like to wear my hat all over the place. I think it started when I was in the seventh grade and my friends and I started to wear hats that matched. We were sort of a hat clan, and we kept close together because of our hats.
Back then our hats gave us a sense of identity, they told others who we were and set us aside from the numerous amounts of others in the school. In Marie Winn’s TV Addiction, she talks about people’s addiction to TV. She talks about how the essence of serious addiction is the pursuit of a pleasure or high that normal life does not supply. She explains how TV is similar to drugs. It always leaves the person looking for more. It never really satisfies the urge or need to watch.
A heavier viewer can just sit there and watch for hours, getting nothing out of it. No feelings about it, just a waste of time sitting in a chair or on a couch staring. Her main argument is that all TV watching is bad. This is the only thing that I disagree with. I believe that some TV is good, and teaches a valuable lesson in some way. Although many people in the world today are addicted to something small, that does not seem important to their every day living, they are greatly affected by their tendency to overindulge in some pleasurable activity.
Whether it is in only reading mystery books, to liking a specific cookie, to the more serious addictions such as heroin and cocaine, one can only try to separate the good from the bad pleasures of life. Since everyone needs something that helps him or her get through the day, like the wearing of my hat to feel complete, it is no wonder that people become addicted to such little things. These things bring a false and short sense of happiness to the lives of many people.