“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral
The author sounds like she suffers from crippling anxiety and possibly depression, and I am incredibly empathetic because I have lived through similar things. I can understand from personal experience how a person could come to the conclusions she does.
But I hope that she manages to find the solution that frees her of this burden. Whether it's meds, lifestyle changes, or moving to a place that gets more sun, I want to believe that there is a solution out there for her. For me it was quitting drinking -- I never had a drinking problem in the traditional sense, but what I didn't realize was that it was making me emotionally very unstable.
It's hell being the kind of person who spends weeks reacting to one mean comment. It is the worst thing ever. But living a life that's free of that is the best thing ever. It's worth doing whatever it takes to find out how to achieve it.
You might be projecting the putative "crippling anxiety" into her words. I think she was trying to write something worth reading, and so naturally dramatized her story a bit. I thought it was well-written, displaying a healthy level of self-observation and satisfying developmental progress for the length of the piece.
"But let me assure you, this conceptual poet was digging his nails into my heart—he knew it, and, five minutes later, I suddenly felt it too—which led to a week and a half of fuming in bed, unable to sleep, my declaring this man my enemy, the reconceiving of a magazine article I was writing in such a way as to include a subtextual layer that would annihilate conceptual poetics, a week and a half of going out every night and talking through the insult with each of my friends—what am I even saying? It took leaving the continent for the insult to finally recede into the background of my days, and for me to regain my equilibrium."
---
"And then . . . I destroyed it. I met someone and then another person and before I knew it, all the chaos of life came back, along with all my self-doubt and anxiety and fear."
I dunno, I read it as her just being dramatic for effect, but you could be right. I am skeptical that someone truly this anxious would willingly share such intimate thoughts with us.
You can say that about any piece though: "I dont think the author meant what he said". At some point we have to stop second guessing and discuss what was said, not what we think the author wanted to say. At the very least discussing the actual content is certainly not off-topic. :)
I think you are mistaking the dramatic flourishes of the essay for its true message. It's a well-written piece that has a twist ending (not entirely unexpected).
"Maybe we go out in order to fall short . . . because we want to learn how to be good at being people . . . and moreover, because we want to be people."
She's saying that addiction to people is not the same as addiction to cigarettes. This is a good kind of addiction because human beings are by nature social creatures and should interact with one another.
I agree with your assessment of the essay's conclusion. All I'm saying is that the essay's whole thought process began with the basic problem that social situations often backfire for the author in very negative ways. If these negative experiences didn't cut so deep, it might not have been necessary for her to spend 2500 words convincing herself that some socializing is better than completely cutting yourself off from the world.
I could be totally wrong about all this, and I really regret if my original comment comes off sounding at all presumptuous. My point is just that if indeed the author suffers in the way that the essay describes (which sounds totally believable to me), I have a lot of compassion, but also hope that things can be better for her.
FWIW, I think your comments DO some off a bit presumptuous, and a bit condescending, despite you saying that you have a lot of compassion and are incredibly empathetic.
Using language like "This is not normal" and "crippling anxiety" is really making a lot of assumptions about the author. It kind of presupposes that you know what's normal. Of course it's possible that you actually do, maybe you're a psychologist or therapist, and as an expert can assert that you do know what's normal, but I would argue you can't infer enough from this piece to know for sure.
There was a review of Sheila Heti's new book in this week's NYer, and from that I gleaned that her work draws from life but also involves a lot of dramatization and fictionalization of her life, and isn't entirely non-fiction.
That's fair. In retrospect I wish I had written my comment in more of the form: "If X, then Y", instead of presuming X. If the essay is fictionalized and she didn't actually move to a new city to avoid social interaction, or find herself totally consumed for weeks by one mean comment, then surely none of what I am saying applies.
Re: "this is not normal," if I sound like I'm claiming some kind of authority, it is only the authority of personal experience. I could have written those passages that I quoted, and not too long ago either. Those were my "normal." Once I experienced what it was like to feel secure and free of those unmanageable emotional responses, I found it incredibly liberating.
The strong belief I took from this experience is: no one should have to live that way. No one should have to structure their life around avoiding things that they emotionally can't handle. I can't say with certainty that this is her situation, but I know it was mine.
Cat, if you go outdoors you must walk in the snow.
You will come back with little white shoes on your feet,
Little white slippers of snow that have heels of sleet.
Stay by the fire, my Cat. Lie still, do not go.
See how the flames are leaping and hissing low,
I will bring you a saucer of milk like a Marguerite,
So white and smooth, so spherical and sweet--
Stay with me, Cat. Outdoors the wild winds blow.
Outdoors the wild winds blow, Mistress, and dark is the night.
Strange voices cry in the trees, intoning strange lore;
And more than cats move, lit by our eyes' green light,
On silent feet where the meadow grasses hang hoar--
Mistress, there are portentas abroad of magic and might,
And things that are yet to be done. Open the door!
What a horribly sad way to live your life. People are no addiction, they're a necessary (and awesome) part of life. Regardless of your spiritual bent:
Athiesm - We evolved from social primates into other social primates. You're adding a lot of psychological stress at a fundamental level when you don't live the way you're bred.
Christianity/Judaism - God made us for community. "It is not good for Man to be alone".
Budhhism - Everything is interconnected, including other people.
People differ greatly in their appetite for social interactions vs. solitude.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for
the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our
chambers.
—Henry David Thoreau
Do you agree with Thoreau? Probably not. But some people do, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I do agree with the first part. I once spent an entire year alone in my apartment, never speaking to anyone and rarely even going outside except to get groceries and go to the family Christmas get-together. It was heaven, but it couldn't last because my money wouldn't last, and so I returned to the job force. My need for money outweighs the draining effect other people have on me.
However, I can't speak to the second part because I don't understand "loneliness", since I've never felt it (at least I don't think I have).
Loneliness can be compared to other withdrawal symptoms. People that are used to and expect a lot of social interaction enter a negative mental state to being without it.
When you don't find the social contact addicting, and do not engage in it much, you never are exposed to the "withdrawal" symptoms.
I don't think the point of the parent comment contradicts what you are saying.
Arguably those "introverted" folks tend to be the types who long for human beings to understand each other even more than "extroverted" people do.
One of Thoreau's crowning achievements was his work on non violent resistance, which in practice is aimed at precisely the same target as the wishes the parent commenter lists.
As an atheist, I dislike such "spiritual bents" being forced into the concept. In no way does Atheism entail a belief* in evolution. It is merely a lack of belief in any god(s).
Also, your argument implies that every atheist views sex-change operation as necessarily bad, since they're a fundamental modification to "the way you're bred". This is certainly not true.
While the dictionary doesn't define atheism as holding a belief in evolution, I would suspect there is an extremely high correlation between them. It's always the religious fundamentalists that reject evolution because anyone with any kind of scientific mind would accept the mountains of evidence.
If one rejects the spiritual or mythological explanation for things being the way they are, it's hard to come up with another possibility. Evolution or creationism, but I seldom hear of a third theory. There are of course many threads of opinion within the basic umbrella of evolution.
If god didn't plant all those bones to make it look like evolution then who did?
Many atheists I know don't know nearly enough about evolution to have a belief in it. They mostly don't know or care who planted those bones.
The issue is that we have the tendency to consider as atheist only the people who self-identify as such, while there's a lot of atheists who don't know they are one, they just don't have a belief in god(s).
As someone who lives in an increasingly less religious place - where even the majority of self-identified Christians is pro-choice - that describes almost everyone of my age that I know of.
God is something outside (and can be inside at the same moment) the Universe, meaning that it is something we cannot grasp. If we cannot grasp how God operates then whatever we look at is just an observation of a single event, however long we look at it. So whatever time we perceive within our Universe it may be just a single very short moment to God. Hence evolution isn't really how we interpret it - it can be completely possible that how God creates us we perceive as evolution.
So, let me replace "God" with your definition ("something outside the Universe").
If we cannot grasp how something outside the Universe operated then whatever we look at is just an observation of a single event, however long we look at it. So whatever time we perceive within our Universe it may be just a single very short moment to something outside the Universe. Hence evolution isn't really how we interpret it - it can be completely possible that how something outside the Universe creates us we perceive as evolution.
As you see, they're just completely meaningless statements. They apply just as well to George Carlin's "Big Electron" as to a random fluctuation in an energy field, and anything else we can imagine.
Exactly. It's the same as telling to a blind person about the shades of colours. Only in our case I'm blind too and simply dreaming up that what we touch isn't all there is.
God is something outside (and can be inside at the same moment) the Universe, meaning that it is something we cannot grasp, and who wants me to vote Republican.
I'm not sure I follow you. Or rather I follow what you're saying, but don't see how it relates to my comment in any way.
I don't think a rational mind should just stop and give up trying to explain things. I believe in science, which is why I believe in evolution, or rather the evidence for it.
What I'm saying is evolution as we see it is part of a bigger picture, and the Universe can be part of something bigger. You trying to describe the elephant just looking at it's ear.
We were talking specifically about evolution, not the big picture. Taking your analogy, parent wasn't trying to "describe the elephant", just "its ear", so it's perfectly fine to look just at it.
If I start talking about traffic jams in big cities and do so for a long while without giving the whole picture, then everybody will think that's just how big cities operate.
I didn't know I get to come to Mars as well. Well this is fantastic. I'll certainly give it a go. I take it you are paying for the tickets? I'd like a first class window seat if that's at all possible. Have the lab cleaned up and I'll go find a suitable elephant.
It's true that for the great majority of people, going out and having a ton of social relationships correlates with increased happiness. For me, not so much. I'm a very happy and optimistic person, yet I don't go out (here meaning social stuff besides the usual seeing and talking to a few friends, talking with colleagues, etc) more than twice a month. And that's actually a lot for me. This does not mean that I don't enjoy socializing now and then - I do. But I can say from personal experience that it is definitely NOT a necessity for me. I've sometimes done so for several months at a time, and have not noticed any side-effects.
I read an article by an East Orthodox priest once - evidently the idea was the hermit life was popular for wrestling with the Self and for the pursuit of reflection and personal betterment.
The problem is that she just sort of smacks into that conclusion. Like it was just getting too depressing, so she tacked on a happy ending sitcom-style.
I think it was intentional. The point of the article is not to hold your hand and guide you out of the forest, but to snap her fingers and make it dissolve.
>We evolved from social primates into other social primates. You're adding a lot of psychological stress at a fundamental level when you don't live the way you're bred
Hardly. Few people choose to live in caves, and a life of doing so would probably be more stressful than normal, despite that it's what we're bred for. And I'm pretty sure going to a bar or a rock concert was never part of the ancestral environment.
If you tried staying in, found it made you feel much more stressed and so switched to going out that would be one thing, but that's not the experience the author describes at all.
Did you not finish the article? She postulates that perhaps people are an addiction to be wary of but ultimately applauds them as a vital addiction to continue fostering...
I think she is a little bit neurotic, and she missed all the evolutionary stuff - that we are hardwired for social interaction.
I live an overly solitary life, and I crave for company. My social circle is nearly empty, no GF, and almost all my friends have moved to other cities, so I have just one close friend.
Damn, I need to go out. I need more human contact, not less.
Humans may in general be hardwired for social interaction, but not everyone is. In fact, there's an entire spectrum of need for social interaction, ranging from constant need to none at all.
In her case, she doesn't seem to have any neuroses that couldn't be fixed with perspective. Instead of brooding about a perceived insult from some experimental poet guy she met at a bar, she could try volunteering in any number of capacities, from neutral social/cultural organizations to civil libertarian causes to overt partisan activism. You can't look closely at the lives and roles of others without seeing your own in more detail.
Somewhere in the Universe a supernova or a gamma-ray burst probably wiped out a dozen advanced civilizations between the time I typed 'Somewhere' and the time I typed 'typed.' Fretting over anything less is, by definition, sweating the small stuff.
Brooding isn't voluntary. Bad experiences with people don't fade away with time and can return in flashbacks many years after when your mood is down for whatever reason. I perfectly understand OP as I'm also the kind of person that has this strange memory for people doing me harm by what for most people seem nearly benign act.
Perhaps, but still, it seems like a lot of people are confusing the introvert <-> extrovert axis with the self-centered <-> socially-conscious axis. They are in fact highly orthogonal in my experience. At least insofar as it's possible to judge someone's psychology from a blog post, she would score far into the "self-centered" region of the latter axis, while being somewhere on the introverted side of center on the former... even if she doesn't recognize it.
I don't expect a leopard to change its spots, but at the same time I believe it's possible to consciously nudge yourself in one direction or the other on both axes.
If you watch TV that might be the cause. It's like being second hand smoker while you are quitting.
I'm speaking from personal experience. When I was alone for prolonged time I noticed how miserable watching TV makes me. Only after that when I ditched TV the calmness and true peace that OP wrote about came.
Human contact really plays on the same strings in human brain as addiction complete with binges, hangover and withdrawal. At least for me and the OP it does.
Yup, get yourself out there, sharpish. Form/join another peer group. Is there a scifi writer's group in your location? Join it. If not, start one.
If you work in tech, start some workshops on something mainstream in your local coffee shop/community centre ('blogging for charity workers' or 'podcasting for beginners' or something)
> I live an overly solitary life, and I crave for company. My social circle is nearly empty, no GF, and almost all my friends have moved to other cities, so I have just one close friend. Damn, I need to go out. I need more human contact, not less.
The difference is: even though she makes it seem like being alone might be desirable she then twists it in the end; in my opinion she is clearly a VERY social person with healthy relationships and a suitable amount of casual sex and lots of friends. She is coming from the other end of the spectrum, looking in the direction of loneliness with a sort-of "greener pastures" attitude. I would guess she is probably so very social and has SO many friends and hookups that a little vacation from all that stress of handling THAT many people is all this was about.
You, and me too unfortunately, sound like you are coming from the other end of that spectrum...
Therefore, from that perspective this article feels mean or ungrateful when you look at it like that - first world sort-of complaining about having too many friends and casual sex.
This article seems to be written from a completely different perspective than my own life experiences. Perhaps it is introvert vs. extrovert, or perhaps it is something else entirely.
I was called an introvert all throughout high school because I was quiet. Everyone was certain of it. I knew I wasn't an introvert because I gain energy from being around other people. When I am alone, I get tired and depressed. When I am around a few others or in large groups, I am happy and gain energy.
Probably the reason New York City has so much appeal to me.
People have often wildly conflicting views on what it means to be an introvert.
I subscribe to the definition that an introvert is someone who primarily derives validation and worth from himself, rather than external people or stimuli -- think staying late to solve a tough problem, rather than staying late to impress a boss.
I'm definitely an extrovert, despite being relatively quiet and thriving in private situations. That being said, I still love 'going out' in the broad sense; our minds thrive on novelty, and people are definitely part of that.
I don't know why we have to bin people like that. I love staying in to program, or read, or whatever, but I need to go out a lot (every day, or more, if I can help it), because I love hanging out with friends, meeting new people, doing new things, etc.
Intrinsic vs extrinsic validation doesn't really factor into it. I just like hanging out with friends and making new ones.
We bin people like that because, before the bins, we just assumed there was one and that people who weren't in it were bad. Now we know there are two, and people might simply be in a different "good" rather than out in the "bad".
I think, (and I'm being presumptuous here), everyone knows there are no true 'bins', and that people are complicated, and every characteristic is from in a continuous metric, and there is no good or bad.
I also think that this is why bins are used. It's not an attempt at correctly describing people, but rather a simplification, using general terms in order to communicate the traits in a, best-effort, meaningful way.
I could never adequately describe how I _truly_ am as a person. All I can do is draw on gross simplifications that you yourself can translate to a meaningful metric based on your own experience.
Mirrors are not the only way to gain insight from an externality - other people hold up mirrors we can't see.
After the perceived slight from the conceptual poet, I would have pointed out that their question might not be a challenge or putdown but an invitation to a debate - best answered with another question. "Why would you think that your work is not intrinsically interesting to everyone?" etc. This insight did not and probably could not have come from within.
And again, "whenever I go out into the world, whenever I get involved in a relationship, my idea of who I think I am utterly collides with the reality of who I actually am."
This is off-topic regarding the actual article, but has anyone else noticed the keyword stuffing spam in the page footer if javascript is disabled?
I sent a quick email to the site contact address describing the problem, but I'm curious if anyone has any better ways of informing people about this sort of thing?
I've tried a few times for different sites in the last few weeks, and I never hear back; I assume the words needed to describe the problem are themselves liable to get spamfiltered and so nobody even sees my mail. Or it looks like a phishing/scamming attempt itself (although I'd like to think with better spelling & grammar), and gets binned for that.
I am amazed that you looked through the source code of the page. It seemed like a pretty bland/generic site to me, not worth checking out what's going on under the hood. Good find though.
Nah, I found it because I generally browse with Firefox + NoScript which disables most javascript, including the little snippet that this spamblob uses to hide itself with css. So it appeared black and bold in the middle of the page footer :)
I don't think there's any desperation in her voice at all. She sounds genuinely bored with something she has plenty of - and no trouble getting - other people.
To be honest she comes across as a rich person complaining about the shallowness of people seeking money.
Back in high school I felt the same way. I couldn't understand why I went out. When I didn't I felt bad and as if I was doing something very unnatural. I come from a smallish town where everyone knew each other. After awhile I got to be known as the boy who didn't go out, which hurt.
After a few years I got over it. I realized I didn't dislike going out per se, the people in the small town just weren't people I liked, we never 'clicked'. You can't like everyone and as I realized this I started going out and being with friends and doing all the stuff I had missed out on.
It's not about being an extrovert or introvert, it's more about not understanding why other people and/or yourself put certain demands on yourself when you feel like something else. Nowadays I don't care about what I 'should' do or what I'm expected to do. Not doing something like going to someones birthday party has certain implications to people, but I understand where it's coming. Now I make a choice between the consequences of my actions, not because an abstract idea of having to do something.
The author starts off with a nicely logical analysis of whether companionship is worth it, backed by anecdotal evidence from her life. I think she doesn’t give enough evidence for her conclusion that people don’t “provide satisfaction and relaxation” – she only mentioned one story, and didn’t describe any times when people were good – but at least she tries to base her decisions on evidence. And then at the end she says “perhaps our solitude is just saving up energy for companionship” – and then stops there, assuming that that first hypothesis is right (and concluding based on that assumption that being around people is worth it, after all). Where did all her logic go? She has given no evidence of any kind for that, unlike everything else she discussed before. She’s wasting her previous painstaking analysis by ending with an unsupported storybook, feel-good decision. That’s too bad; it makes this article significantly less useful as a guide to deciding whether going out is worth it in my case.
I am surprised at how often neurotic artists and writers seem to think others are like them. It's perfectly fine to feel the way this writer does, but does she realize it is unusual? Or does she assume others feel the same way but are just faking it? Lives of quiet desperation, etc?
I go out to enjoy the scenery, get exercise, interact with people, catch up on fashion, check up on prices, try new things, golf, hike, and just enjoy life in general.
Unfortunately most all of those things listed above that I love cannot be done inside one's own home.
This is the correct interpretation. Congratulations!
I read the article and thought, "Wow, there are people like this?" I mean, I relate to a few of the issues, some social anxiety here and there, some wondering how I'm viewed in social groups, etc. But to this level?
Let me make this perfectly clear: I have nothing against these kinds of people. Not in the least. I know a lot of you out there will relate to this article and that's perfectly fine. Good for you.
But please, don't take it as some kind of validation or good advice. Be yourself, don't be a dick, stop worrying, get out and see the world, and live how you want to live. It is simply not as complicated as this author makes it out to be.
The advice you could take from this article is, get help if you need it. Honestly. You can get past anxieties, social and otherwise, and sometimes there are things you shouldn't just accept as "who you are." You can always better yourself.
I disagree, perhaps that's what the difference is between introvert and extrovert.
I find that I need some time to myself, to do my own things, or else I get perturbed.
For a while there in university I would spend even 2 or 3 day alone in my apartment, without speaking, texting, or IMing anyone. Just coding an assignment, playing video games or fooling around in Linux.
Completely giving up people didn't see terribly insane at the time.
Of course this is a moot point since I now attend a Unix group meetup every month and actually look forward to the social interaction.
I am an I :) There's introversion (the natural preference/energy focus) and then there's verging on sociopathy (lack of empathy, inability to relate to others). I think the author is closer to the 2nd, but I don't really know.
Just be aware that I fully understand introversion/extroversion and all the shades in-between. And still hold to my interpretation of the article...
You "fully understand" of all the shades of introversion/extroversion and yet you thought "Wow, there are people like this?" after reading it? I think you might need to expand the range of shades you understand. Nothing in the piece suggested to me anything verging on sociopathic.
It doesn't sound like she needed help. It sounds like she's realised she doesn't want or need as much social interaction as our culture leads you to believe you "should" - and she's living a successful, fulfilling life. If that's not validation for such an approach, then what is? Why should I want to be "better"?
I don't wholly agree with the contents of the essay, but that was so delightfully well written!
We have evolved to be social being. Being independent and content with yourself is a good thing, but total isolation can have disastrous effects on the human psyche (Look-up reports of POWs who were kept in isolation for extended periods of time).
Prisoners are not in isolation by choice. It's uncommon, quite rare even, but I don't think you can deny that there are a few people who find happiness in solitude.
I first simply want to address the smoking bit. _Something_ about smoking is habitual, or rather, not to see that a drug addiction could instantiate or engender a habit which itself re-enforces the addiction, might be the main problematic of 'quitting advice.' Rather, ignoring that cigarettes prompt a way of life only suggests to me that said advice treats an idealized person, or biological system, a model.
We are not models. In my comment history I've noted that Juan Enriquez talks of 'living organisms,' not 'life.' Again here I wish to point out a semantic mix up. We are a mix where the advice is technically valid: we have a bio-logical imperative as an organism to reduce or differentiate carcinogen-affected cells, waste, etc. Our bodies do it and so basically we are duty bound to respect, or harmonize, with our more basic functions. 'Just quit' ignores the basic psychological component of smoking, even if that component cannot be exhaustively explained as habit. Habit has two primary forms, situational and dispositional.
When we say, 'Just quit!' We suggest that the dispositional habit is indeed ficticious. It _is_ an addiction. Being internally compelled implies a form of determinism that the agent in truth has no basis for judgement. To suggest that one has such a habit implies a personal capability to predict the conclusion of one's own habit. That being said, one only admits to the internal rules which drugs instantiates within the biological system of the agent. To one must accept the imperative, should one say it is a habit of this sort.
However, a situational habit is different, a more robust problem. At first prompt, we are forced to investigate all the various ways in which cigarette smoking enters public consciousness. To 'quit,' indeed, in similar fashion blocks any fruit that may be drawn from the situational benefits of a situational habit.
I, for instance, often decline cigarettes from close friends where the situation prompts a longform discussion. Another friend has mentioned, in passing, "I don't trust anyone who does not smoke." Andy Clarke has been lauded for his smoker's style. I personally took rolling on as a Special Interest: I can roll a perfect cigarette, reliably, almost systematically. And if anyone ever asks me to do so, I religiously oblige. This is not an internal habit, but it makes sense to describe it as habtiual in _some_ sense. I might share in some activity with this person, call it 'smoking'.
What I am not doing is romanticizing smoking. What I am suggesting is that 'cold turkey' advice should be replaced with descriptive or behavioral models which may lend to therapeutic or narrative models for therapy. 'Just quit' isn't diagnostic, and attempts to reduce the solution to smoking to our basic biological imperative. Fair.
Also, easier said that done. -- So actually work to make this advice relevant. It's blindly proscriptive, where integration and therapy should accompany.
I mean, may I just put it so prettily: "freedom from slavery"? Slavery isn't anything like a biological function of nature. When one quits cigarettes, one is avoiding something external to one's self. Slavery isn't some inevitable feature of, trade, or political systems, that one chooses or does not. The whole way of putting it, as freedom from slavery, does more harm than good. I think it misleading and sensationalist. Cigarettes are evolutionarily novel, indeed, but what still remains is that they are a feature of civilization, the mix of the raw forces of selection and human intelligence.
Abstracting a bit: this is the problem with all addiction. Ever tried to imagine never going to the pub with your pals again? Ever tried to imagine not partaking in the happy hour drinks in the office on a particularly successful friday? These events are woven into the social fabric of society and they are now off limits (at least in their fullest extent) to someone trying to kick an alcohol addiction.
A stoner trying to imagine how watch a movie or play a game with friends faces similar issues.
A cocaine addict can't imagine going dancing all night without a pick-me-up.
It isn't that any of these things are real necessarily. People don't drink at bars all the time, or play games without drugs, or dance the night away without stimulants just fine. It's that the social setting, the friends and the general expectations of one's groups are all part of the understanding. It isn't just "do the same thing without the external influence", it's "those things are built in part around the external influence". It takes a lot of lifestyle change for addicts to successfully quit. Those who aren't tend to not understand, because their social world, and their view/understanding of the world isn't built around the addiction, so it is hard for them to understand that it isn't just removal of one part of an otherwise unchanged existence.
Read Allan Carr's book, you do not actually disagree and he's done the work you ask for. The writer has taken several short cuts on the steps to epiphany in the book, which is why you may be confused.
His use of 'slavery' is merely an illustrative device, truth be told he's not a very good writer, just a man with a working solution to nicotine addiction and his writing may be poor but is good enough to communicate it.
He also repeatedly asks you do not refer to it as 'quit' or 'give up'.
Bunch of crap. They're not slaves, they're people living in extreme poverty, to whom those jobs are the only way they have of getting out of it, and those self-righteous idiots are their worst enemy, because they're actively trying to remove their possibility of having a better life. Krugman's article explains it well: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html
I think C.S. Lewis' quote is completely appropriate here:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
