The Addictive Society

Photo from the Academia bridge in Venice, Italy

“The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things not people. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff — in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”
~ Johann Hari

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“We cut down the forests, we’re pushing animals into closer contact with people, animals are being trafficked, and many of them from different parts of Asia and even from Africa are ending up in the wildlife meat markets in Asia in horrible, unhygienic conditions. … So it’s our fault. It’s our disrespect,” she continues. “Here are we, the most intellectual creature that’s ever walked the planet, so how come we’re destroying our only home?”

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“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the green heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the…