So addiction affects us all. It's not just about substances. It's also manifest through

behaviors like food, social media, shopping, porn, work, doom scrolling, gambling, and as

core addiction is a defense against emotional pain.

It's not a moral failing.

It's not a weakness of willpower.

The Buddha, in the first noble truth,

says that there's inevitable pain

that we're going to have in life. We're going to know old age, sickness, death.

We're going to be separated from people we love. We're going to be stuck in situations that we don't

love, and we're not going to get what we want.

And none of this, by the way, is personal.

The detail might seem personal, but the experience of loss, physical pain, setbacks and plans, being separated from people we want to be with, these

are universal experiences.

The Buddha's second noble truth is founded on a very psychologically sound principle, which

is that we would be able to endure the inevitable pains of life,

worried not for a couple of things.

One, that we take all of these events personally.

And that's just the nature of the interpretive region of the brain that

narrates experience from a first-person perspective, and it seems as if everything we go through in life is very much about me,

because after all, I'm experiencing it so the interpersonal frustrations

the the setbacks the experience of aging all of that can feel very very

personal because I'm the one who's experiencing it and part of the left

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