Rock Bottom: Ego and Addiction to Suffering in Self & Society

You are likely familiar with the adage that “addicts” must hit rock bottom in order to make sustainable change — to become sober. I believe the world is undergoing a similar experience.

I put “addicts” in quotes because most people, including myself, have been conditioned to equate the term with someone addicted to substances. While this is one example, the truth is that we are all addicts in some capacity. Addiction is a manifestation of the ego, and while addiction may take the form of drug abuse, we all suffer from the compulsory tendencies of the ego in some way or another. These habits are designed to keep us entrenched in suffering.

The same process holds on a collective level. While egoic addiction certainly presents itself in more obvious ways — the opioid drug epidemic, Wall Street greed, power hungry politicians — in effect, it pervades almost every corner of our collective consciousness and civic sphere.

Ego is present in our marketplace, where our basic capitalistic system is not a problem in itself but is rather exploited by the “hungry ghosts” (as Buddhism refers to it) of our psyche: the constant need for more, the perception of separation, the zero-sum mentality of “more for me means less for you.”

Ego is present in our political system, where one side attempts to dominate the other through their own ideology and policy, instead of being humbled by our beliefs and collaboratively working together.

Ego is present in our international conflicts, where we tragically fail to see the common humanity in the other “side.”

And of course, ego keeps us imprisoned in suffering in the same way it does individually: it feeds off its own unhelpful habits and creates a spiral of addiction until eventually we hit rock bottom. At some point, humanity hopefully will have “had enough,” and will make the conscious choice to start undoing the chains and constraints placed on our psyche and civic space.

Until that time comes, we will remain addicted to suffering; we will continue to raise the stakes of our survival — the same roulette played by the “addict” — until we get close to rock bottom. This, I believe, is largely why the world “seems to be going to sh*t” all at onece. COVID? Nah… that is not enough suffering. More, please. The war in Ukraine? Just a little bit more… The Israel-Hamas war?

We are co-conspiring with one another, albeit unconsciously, to produce more suffering. Why would we do this? So that we can wake up.