 Something that's boring goes nowhere. It travels in a circle, it never arrives at its destination. The repetitive nature of the shadow life and of addiction is what makes both so tedious. No traction is ever gained, no progress is made, we're stuck in the same endlessly repeating loop. That's what makes addiction like hell. All addictions share, among others, two primary qualities. One, they embody repetition without progress. Two, they produce incapacity as a payoff. Remember my friend who is addicted to love? She's charming, she's interesting, she's beautiful and adventurous and intelligent. If you saw a story about her in Vanity Fair, you might think, wow, what a brilliant life this woman leads, full of drama and romance and glamour, I wish I had that life. I love my friend, but she has wasted her life. I know because I've wasted vast tracks of my own. My friend has used the pursuit of love to produce incapacity, and it has worked for her for decades. Her multiple talents have gone unexplored, untried and unrealized. She has become a version of herself, but it is a shadow version, an inverted version, a crippled version. She is miserable and she cannot or will not change. You might disagree with me. You might say my friend has a great life. You might be right. Distraction and displacement seem innocent on the surface. How can we be harming ourselves by having fun or seeking romance or enjoying the fruits of this big, beautiful world? But lives go down the tubes one repetition at a time, one deflection at a time, 140 characters at a time. The following is a sampling in no particular order of garden variety addictions that fall short of hardcore chemical dependency, but are still more than potent enough to cripple, malform and destroy our lives. 23. Addicted to failure. There's a difference between failing, which is a natural and normal part of life, and being addicted to failure. When we're addicted to failure, we enjoy it. Each time we fail, we are secretly relieved. There's a glamour to failure that has been mined for centuries by starving poets, romantic suicides, and other self-defined doomed souls. This glamour inverts failure and turns it into quote-unquote success. I've had a romance with this goddess myself. Have you? The lure of failure can be as intoxicating as the hardest of hardcore narcotics. Its payoff is incapacity. When we fail, we are off the hook. We have given ourselves a get-out-of-jail free card. We no longer have to ask and answer Stanislavski's famous three questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What do I want? 24. Addicted to sex. If addictions and shadow careers are metaphors, sex is the richest one of all and the most difficult to decode. Why are we obsessed with sex? Does sex represent conquest or surrender? Are we seeking the oblivion of orgasm or the transcendence of escaping the ego? Is union with another our goal or are we seeking to dominate or humiliate our partner? Is sex about love? Are we seeking a soulmate, a mother, slash father? Are we trying to reach God? I don't see what all of us about sex is, said the comedian. It's only friction. My own theory is that the obsessive pursuit of sex is an attempt to obliterate the ego, i.e. normal consciousness, the monkey mind that tortures us with restlessness, fear, anger, and self-centeredness. We're trying to get to the level above that. The entity we're seeking union with is ourselves. We're trying to connect with our true being, our soul, our self. 25. Addicted to distraction. Resistance hates two qualities above all others. Concentration and depth. Why? Because when we work with focus and we work deep, we succeed. How did Tom Brady master the art of the forward pass? How did Picasso paint? How did Yo-Yo Ma learn the cello? Resistance wants to keep us shallow and unfocused, so it makes the superficial and the vain intoxicating. Have you checked your email in the last half hour? When you sit down to do your work, do you leave your web connection on? It can be fatal keeping up with the Kardashians. 26. Addicted to money. The real utility of money is its convenience as a medium of exchange. If you and I have a goat in Smyrna, we don't have to carry the poor beast in our arms all the way to Aleppo to trade it for a carpet. We can sell the goat in Smyrna, stash a silver derrick in our pocket, and take the derrick to Aleppo to buy the carpet. But when we're addicted to money, we become hooked on the metaphor. Is money how we keep score? Is it magic? Is wealth a currency that opens doors, realizes possibilities, produces transcendence? Money is second only to sex and the richness of its metaphor. But as in the case of carnality, our real object is the currency of our own hearts. The same premise applies to power, fame, and all other external expressions of potency. What you and I are really seeking is our own voice, our own truth, our own authenticity. 27. Addicted to trouble. There are more than two million people behind bars in the United States and another five million on probation or parole. How many millions more are self-emprisoned in cycles of abuse of others or of themselves or habituated to other forms of vice, corruption, and depravity? Why is trouble so intoxicating? Because its payoff is in capacity. The scars and tattoos of the convict are his shadow symphony, his displaced epic, his unpainted masterpiece. The individual addicted to trouble will never get out of jail, because he is safer behind bars than free out in the world. Each time he is released, he will find a way to get sent back. The payoff for the prisoner is release from the agonizing imperative of identifying, embracing, and bringing into material existence the dreams and visions of his own deepest, noblest, and most honorable heart.