The More Things Change…

The more things change, the more they stay the same. While this saying has been quoted into being a trite cliche, its truth is hidden beneath the obvious meaning. It is obvious that, new things under the Sun notwithstanding, there is very little change in this world. Life forms are actually designed to preserve homeostasis when it is possible. And whether or not this stasis is a good thing rarely matters at all to the life forms involved. After all, a past that we just barely lived through is still a past that we survived. And now that we know more about it, we could probably live better.

Consider how well you could live if you went back to high school. Maybe you were something of a non entity back in those days, where the beautiful and the socially adept either picked on you or ignored you. We can let the scholars debate which one of those is the worse fate. But consider how well you would likely do if you were able to go back to that stage of life, knowing all of the things you know today – and we are not even talking about which stocks to buy here.

The concept of change also relates to the use of drugs. How many people a hundred years ago “broke” the cocaine addiction, just by switching to morphine? And by the same token, how many alcoholics “sober up,” just to go on to do any number of different drugs instead of tipping the bottle? If the statistics were thoroughly tested, the number would most likely be higher than a mathematician would theorize. The idea of “changing” one part of life, while preserving the underlying lifestyle, is an area that is rarely talked about in the drug community. But we need to break the mindset of addiction, if we are ever to conquer it.