A first-person philosophical essay on addiction that moves between lived testimony, decades of observation, and the research record, using the author's "jays framework" to trace the shape addiction takes across substances and behaviors alike — alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, hallucinogens, pornography, social media, and video games. The essay argues that the brain's reward machinery is the same lever reached for by both intoxication and ordinary human connection, and that what turns use into suffering is not the substance but the frequency of solitary repetition. Working from a harm-reduction stance while foregrounding hard clinical boundaries — the potentially fatal danger of unsupervised alcohol and benzodiazepine withdrawal, the contraindication of moderation for some, and the supervised-only status of psychedelic- and dissociative-assisted therapies — it reframes recovery as the gradual widening of the gap between uses and the honest search for why the use began. In its closing movement the essay draws on Jung's concepts of ego inflation and the ego–Self relationship (with the ever-present archetype of wholeness restored through anamnesis) and on the documented Jung–Wilson correspondence (spiritus contra spiritum) to cast craving as a low, misdirected form of the drive toward wholeness, and recovery as a remembering of a center that was never truly lost. All personal testimony is rendered in the first person to preserve the anonymity of those whose stories it carries; the essay opens with crisis resources and follows safe-messaging conventions throughout.
Jamison Johsnon (Tue,) studied this question.