• by Jeff Einstein , June 8, 2004

Of course, the most visible characteristic of addiction is obsessive- compulsive behavior, the topic of this week's column. Just for fun, I checked out the definition of "obsessive-compulsive" on dictionary.com...

"Relating to or characterized by a tendency to dwell on unwanted thoughts or ideas or perform certain repetitious rituals, especially as a defense against anxiety from unconscious conflicts: obsessive-compulsive behavior."

...which leads to the question: When's the last time you checked your email?

So extensive is the list of obsessive-compulsive behaviors in the Age of Technoculture that it might be easier and quicker simply to list those behaviors that aren't obsessive-compulsive. The 21st-century hit parade of behavioral obsessions and disorders only begins with media abuse. The list also includes various eating disorders, workaholism, sex addiction, alcoholism, credit abuse, compulsive gambling, and licit and illicit substance abuse. Given the circumstances, therefore, you may not be entirely surprised to learn that the vast majority of addicts suffer from multiple addictions throughout their lives. You might also forgive me if this week's column runs a little longer than usual.

The dot-com boom of the 1990s was a virtual orgy of obsessive- compulsive behavior. That's when the Great American Dream went digital and took most of the country with it. Those of us who were not so willing to pursue our own dreams online were more than willing to invest in the dreams of others.

Suddenly the Wall Street culture was everywhere. We all spoke the same language of spreadsheets and finance, the language of quarterly projections, equity options, stock valuations, online trading, and early IPOs. The pace of day-to-day life shot through the roof--unabated and unencumbered, it seemed, by the more pedestrian and non-digital concerns of home and family. Mothers and fathers and sons and daughters enthusiastically donned new titles, tools, and responsibilities as the CEOs, COOs, CFOs, and CTOs of the dot- com economy. We all happily worked 16-hour days and seven-day workweeks in eager anticipation of cashing in quick and retiring young.

Everyone I knew was steeped in obsessive-compulsive behavior or in a relationship with someone who was, and everyone I knew carried the icons of the digital age--the laptops, cell phones, pagers, and PDAs--to prove their devotion. We lived, breathed, ate, and slept digital. None of us had time or patience, it seemed, for anything else. Between frenzied phone calls, emails, and meetings, we stole precious minutes on the fire escapes of the city just to smoke cigarettes and catch our breath. We knew where we were going, how we would get there, and exactly how long it would take. We fired our stockbrokers and hired financial planners instead. Together we tracked the minute-by-minute progress of the IPO du jour online. Life was a cyber-fairy tale, with digital dragons to slay, and analog maidens to rescue. We believed our own press and deemed life good--despite the long hours and stress, despite the meals away from home and family, and despite the chronic exhaustion.

We were high on everything--utterly and completely entertained and preoccupied by our own digitally driven dream world, twenty hours a day. No one put a gun to our heads and forced us to abandon reality for virtual reality. No one had to: We were having a blast.

All of our obsessive-compulsive behaviors found a home in the dot-com boom and bust. In retrospect, it was a pretty typical addictive cycle: We got high for a few years, and then we crashed--we bottomed out. Suddenly, gone was the money. Suddenly, gone were the dreams. Only the addictions and the technologies that fueled them remained intact, stronger than ever. The dot-com boom and bust was just the price of entry into the Great Age of Addiction...

MEDIA ADDICTION

As mentioned in my debut column, the average American adult now consumes an estimated eleven hours of media every day. Media multitasking, the act of plugging into at least two devices at the same time, is already common practice, although the typical teenager--in typical fashion--makes the typical adult look like a multitasking neophyte: According to a recent MTV Networks-Viacom study, the average American teenager consumes thirty hours of media every day. More alarming than the numbers themselves is the fact that the study itself wasn't commissioned to raise a red flag about excess media consumption among teenagers. Far from it. It was commissioned to provide proof of purchase to attract more advertisers. It was, in fact, commissioned as a tool to sell even more media to teenagers.

And therein we discover the heart of the problem: Of all of the major addictions that afflict us, our addiction to media is by far the most ubiquitous, by far the most powerful and influential, and by far the least alarming to the public at large. Then again, our addiction to media assumed control over the media consumption debate many years ago. The result was pretty predictable, and all but guaranteed no public debate whatsoever about media addiction--just one of the reasons why successfully selling drugs to teenagers will land you in jail, while successfully advertising to pre- schoolers will land you in the annals of "Advertising Age."

As mentioned earlier, we are not only addicted to media, but our addiction to media is the driving engine--the primary enabler--for most of our other addictions as well.You name it--drugs, tobacco, liquor, sex, gambling, credit, whatever--the media is the number one dealer for all of them, a state-sanctioned pusher with few if any meaningful constraints and absolutely no appreciation for the concept of moderation. No one ever got rich by selling less. "Just say no" is anathema to all addiction, media addiction not least.

WORKAHOLISM

Workaholism is often referred to as the respectable addiction, largely because the American work ethic values and respects hard work above and beyond just about any other virtue. Nevertheless, human resource professionals and social anthropologists alike are just now beginning to understand that the real price of work addiction--like the price of every other addiction--is far greater than we may care to admit. And not just in business terms, but also when measured in more human terms, the cost of shattered careers, broken marriages, stress-related illness, and dysfunctional families. The bill for the respectable addiction already totals in the tens of billions of dollars annually, and the price keeps going up.

I became aware of my own addiction to work (just one of many for yours truly) when I lost my job in the spring of 2001, a full year after the stock market crashed. One of the first lessons I learned when I got canned was that my addiction to work had little to do with my employment status, in large part because the pervasive digital technology that drove me as a work addict on the job went home with me when I lost my job. I took it all home--the laptop, the cell phone, and the PDA--despite the fact that I suddenly had no more work to do, no one to call, and no place to be.

My life at home without work adopted all the manic inertia of a stationary bike, complete with a speedometer to tell me how fast I wasn't going, and an odometer to tell me how far I hadn't gone. Within a month or two I had effectively replaced the technology-driven demands of employment with the technology-driven demands of unemployment: endless networking events, outplacement counseling, interviews, teleconferences, surfing the job boards, working and reworking my resume, working and reworking my Web site, and so on. Instead of being obsessed with technology on the job, I was obsessed with the technology of the job. But it was the same obsession and the same technology either way: My life and time revolved around my addiction to work, with or without a job.

EATING DISORDERS

Over the years, a litany of powerful technologies--everything from chemical fertilizers to refrigeration to the interstate highway system to jet aircraft to the microwave oven, the food processor, irradiation, and biogenetics--has influenced what and how we eat. But perhaps the biggest change so far in our eating habits happened quietly one night in 1954.

It happened in the seemingly innocent confluence of the frozen entrée and television, when American consumers sat down to their first TV dinners. The path to addiction is ritualized obsession, and the race to ritualize our obsession with TV was on. So too, it seems, was the race to obesity.

In the early years of the commuter culture, dinnertime suddenly became a race against time, and the dinner table--for generations the original source of evening news--all but disappeared in millions of homes, eventually replaced instead by the individual TV tray and the network news. As our addiction to TV grew, so did our appetites. What started as an innocent snack in front of the TV evolved into an all-you-can-eat buffet, and dinnertime soon extended straight through prime time to bedtime, nonstop, for decades.

We grew fat because we couldn't stop eating in front of the TV, then grew fatter still because we couldn't stop eating in front of the computer either. We can no longer ignore the link between media and eating disorders. Obesity tells us as much about our relationship with television and the media as it does about our relationship with food.

SEX ADDICTION

No one seriously doubts the link between the Internet and the explosive growth of sex addiction, a disease first encountered in meaningful numbers not long after the successful introduction of an earlier technology, the VCR. But as an enabling technology, the Internet is the crack cocaine of sex addiction, and makes the VCR look like a speed bump on the information superhighway. Both, however, owe their early appeal and success as commercial media to pornography, a basic staple of many sex addicts. Indeed, the escalation of sex addiction as a disease seems to mirror the general escalation of sex and violence across all commercial media.

By 1999, the National Council on Sexual Addiction Compulsivity already estimated the number of sex addicts to be in the range of 6-8 percent of the general population, anywhere from 16-22 million Americans.

But even the high end of that estimate is now presumed to be woefully conservative, just five years later. And unfortunately, sex addiction still carries the kind of social stigma that keeps many addicts in the closet and out of recovery. In any event, the real numbers are sure to escalate sharply as broadband Internet and cable video-on-demand access increases over the next decade.

CREDIT ABUSE

Credit may be the real currency in the Age of Technoculture, but debt and addiction are the real legacies. According to Robert Manning, author of Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America's Addiction to Credit, U.S. consumer debt now tops a mind-numbing $6.5 trillion dollars, surpassing both the federal debt and total corporate debt.

With the possible exception of online stock transactions, porn may be the most frequently purchased commodity online--almost all of it paid for by credit card, like everything else on the Internet. Not surprisingly, three of the most heavily advertised products online are pornography, credit cards, and--rising rapidly to meet the challenge--debt consolidation and counseling services.

More alarming to me, however, are not the hard debt numbers themselves, but the extent to which promiscuous credit serves as an enabler and underwriter for almost every other form of obsessive-compulsive behavior and addiction.

The 21st-century combination of easy access to all of our addictions and instant financing for them is too potent to ignore. Clearly, many of us can't.

Credit also contributes to our denial by deferring and amortizing the repercussions of damaging behavior over time. Thanks to the modern digital miracle of consumer credit, we can act out in full today and make the minimum payment against our behavior at the end of the month. Addiction on the installment plan.

COMPULSIVE GAMBLING

One of the more interesting facts about addiction in the Age of Technoculture is that nearly all of it--with the exception of the small subset of illicit substances identified in the War Against Drugs--is state-sanctioned and in many cases state-subsidized. Gambling is certainly no exception.

The recent movement to outlaw online gambling in this country may have less to do with protecting hapless consumers from venal and unscrupulous online operators, and more to do with eliminating potential competition for the states themselves, nearly all of whom are shamelessly engaged in their own schemes to cash in on our compulsive need to gamble away our finances and futures. State lotteries and new casinos are increasingly viewed by state lawmakers as quick-fix solutions to dwindling tax revenues and escalating debt. Gambling is a growth industry, especially in tough economic times--and gambling interests, both state-owned and private, are among the most aggressive players at the table right now.

Ironically, many twelve-step fellowships hand out specially engraved poker chips to commemorate milestones in sobriety, and to remind recovering addicts that when they act out they are in fact gambling with their lives.

DRUG ABUSE

I mentioned in an earlier column that the War Against Drugs as portrayed across commercial media is confined to a relatively small subset of illicit substances. But fourteen of the top twenty most abused mood-altering substances are in fact prescription drugs.

Now factor in the Age of Technoculture: In less than ten years, the Internet has already become the world's largest pharmacy and legitimate drug dealer. Combine enhanced and largely unregulated access to prescription drugs with the dramatically increased investment in pharmaceutical advertising and marketing, and we have a recipe for disaster waiting to happen.

We likely won't have to wait long, however. Indeed, the crisis is already upon us: An estimated 17 percent of Americans age sixty and up are prescription drug abusers, and 11 percent of women over the age of fifty-nine are addicted to psychoactive prescription drugs. In other words, your neighborhood drug dealer is just as likely nowadays to deal OxyContin as Ecstasy on the very same street corner.

Next week we'll begin to examine how each of the four signature characteristics of addiction and Technoculture--unmanageable complexity, paralyzing inertia, deception and denial, and obsessive-compulsive behavior--manifest themselves in work-related scenarios supplied by readers and yours truly.

Please feel free to send me related stories from your own work experience.

Again, I need all the help I can get.

Gotta run and check my email. Many thanks until next time, and all the best to you and yours.