A lot of people would read the title of this article and just about throw a fit. “What,” they would almost shout out in near shock. “Why in the world would anybody WANT to cultivate an addiction to something,” they would ask, incredulous at the very notion of trying to form an addiction. Then comes the part where they show off that they are ignorant: “All addictions are bad!” Unfortunately, such attitudes are so common that articles like these simply have to be written. Reading basic treatises of this nature are valuable to the condition of many people, all around the world.

When you cultivate an addiction, you are obviously not talking about taking up recreational heroin use. Well, in fairness, you might be talking about that. But this article is not talking about forming any kind of addiction that would be likely to hurt you. So if you are thinking that this is going to encourage you to develop a raging, unquenchable desire for alcohol or the inescapable urge to gamble away your life savings, stop thinking things like that! That makes you sound like one of those reactionaries that we talked about a moment ago. This is about helping yourself, not hurting yourself.

Now of course, if you really do want to hurt yourself, nothing an anonymous person online could say would ever make much of a difference. But if you are not a part of the masochistic variety of people, you might actually want to help yourself in some way. And one of the best ways to help yourself is to start into doing something every day, until it becomes something that you are compelled to do. It almost does not matter what this thing is, as long as it helps you to reach a worthwhile goal.

A lot of times, a person develops an addiction, but thinks that they can will their way out of it. While this is a possibility (especially when the addicted person’s self image is as a person who can change their ways easily enough), the power of will alone is so rarely enough to escape from the gravity like effect of a deeply ingrained habit. And if this habit has reached the level of an outright “addiction,” the chances of backsliding into it are extremely high. And even the best of us can fall prey to this siren’s song of the fun and the familiar.

When you backslide, you pretty much do exactly what the term implies. You slide backward, from the top of a hill you just conquered (like giving up drinking) into a valley where you used to be (as in, by falling off of the wagon again). And while it is not the end of the world to backslide on very rare occasions, it is not the path to recovery and sanity that an addicted person really needs. While you could choose to do some kind of activity that you know hurts you on an occasional basis, the risk of going right back into old habits (and suffering through all of the damage that doing such a thing could put you through) more than outweighs the potential for good that such a situation might present you with.

For example, if you were to backslide into being a murderer, you would be risking prison time. No matter how annoying people might become, it is simply not right to go around killing them. And these laws are in place, not to be a “square” or to rain on your parade, but because our world can not afford to backslide into chaos and madness.

They say that the most basic emotions we feel are rooted in the physical world. We feel the lust that drives us to reproduce, and also the hunger that causes us to want to eat. We feel anger when we are threatened and believe that we can defeat the threat at hand, and we also feel a basic feeling of fear when we do not believe we have any real power against something that could hurt us. Every other emotion that we have basically springs out of some kind of natural necessity – we feel love so that we can nurture one another (and be nurtured ourselves), greed so that we can gain more in life, and so on.

The addicted mind is not so much different from that of any other mind. It could even be argued that since we are all addicted to something or other (even if it is love, food, or success), that the mindset of addiction is a common characteristic of all human beings everywhere. But one reason why a great many people who are addicts suffer by themselves is out of sheer, gut wrenching terror of what other people might say or do, if they were to either find out or try to stop them.

Anger is generally the first response you will get when a person’s humor proves an ineffective defense against the truth. At first, we try to play it off. And then, since that rarely works against a determined person, we become angry, and may even get downright violent about the whole thing. But once that is taken care of (and possibly when the person has run out of steam), the real reason for their anger becomes evident. In most cases, the angry addict is just scared of something. The hard part is figuring out just what that fear is of.