Opinion | Matthew Perry and the Loneliness of Addiction

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Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing: 'A candid, darkly funny book' New York Times

Addiction is in all of us. This argument has come to matter a great deal to me. The reason I care about it is that when I truly felt this notion in my bones, reading accounts of addiction and recovery from across history, it was profoundly reassuring and comforting. As I write at more length in the book, I developed a sense of fellowship with all t... See more

Toward a Unified Field Theory of Human Flourishing

Regardless of what label we give it—we already know some of the most important things about addiction. We know it can, and often does, kill. We know it hurts the people we love and ourselves. We know it’s a medical condition. And we know it’s possible to recover.

Katie MacBride • Why I Am Profoundly Uninterested in Whether or Not We Call Addiction a “Disease"

So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantl

Olivia Laing • The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

The shame of this has its own perverted delusion: an addict’s pride in the genius it takes to satisfy an addiction.

James K. A. Smith • On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

"It is a cruel and fundamentally inhuman tragedy that the culture has convinced so many of us that we must be healed in isolation, because being surrounded by people — people who love us, or care for us, or are willing to sit in the same room with us while we clean up our messes — is about the only way that I, for one, have ever been able to get be... See more

The artist and the addict both wrestle with this experience of exile. They share an acute, even excruciating sensitivity to the state of separation and isolation, and both actively seek a way to overcome it, to transcend it, or at least to make the pain go away.

Steven Pressfield • Turning Pro