This is the rule, not the exception, among addicts. Every recovery program (12-step or not) emphasizes that drugs are not a drug addict's only problem. Obviously they are a very destructive part of the problem, but every addict who stops using long enough learns that -- surprise! -- they're still a self-centered, fear-driven, manipulative, obsessive person. That stuff doesn't just go away when you stop using; if anything, it flares up in other ways (as you've seen firsthand).
A wise old woman in AA once told me that addicts are just like everybody else, only more so." You will find a full spectrum of introverts to extroverts in Recovery.
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I don't think a definition of addictive "personality" is used. Most addicts are using to manage extreme negative internal states. Not everyday bad moods.
I agree with the poster who mentioned Infinite Jest as capturing some of the subjective experience of the "insanity" of an addict.
That's very interesting. Do you think addicts already have those personality traits from before they became addicted, or the traits developed as a result of the addiction?
I used to read obsessively as a kid. I also ate lots and lots of candy- I'd finish entire packets at one go. Went on to be an internet addict and cigarette smoker.
I think... I just never learned focus, discipline, self-control, portion-control, when to stop. I think it's a habit more than anything else. I think I've always had some "addictive" personality, but I think I could've kept it in better check if I developed habits of discipline and control- which I never really did.
Most addicts are abused (or experience comparable longterm stress) as children, which causes brain damage, which leads to addiction. There is a certain genetic component also, but it mostly has to do with your childhood.
This sounds rather much like speculation to me. Do you have any sources to back up your "Most" statement. Since the disease is generational, quite often children of addicts will have a stressful upbringing, but your theory of brain damage from stress causing the addiction is quite a stretch.
Gabor Mate discusses this in his Angry Ghosts book. If you search through my comments for his name, there is a link to an interview where he discusses this also.
It's not necessarily always "abuse" so much as mis-parenting and/or unhealthy environments. I forget who said it but there's a quote that goes something like this: 'All healthy families share similar traits and patterns, but unhealthy families all have their own hosts of unique issues.'
For one source that hit home for me, see Addiction as an Attachment Disorder by Philip Flores
Religious practice can be remarkably effective at curing afflictions of the mind including depression and addiction. I knew a guy who recounted his story of being continuously depressed, addicted to everything he could get his hands on. One day he, on a whim, walked into a church, and was instantly cured of everything. Now he can hold a job, work towards a future. Doesn't go to AA meetings, doesn't need to. It's like God flipped a switch in his brain, is the way he described it. You'd think a guy like that would be preaching God from the rooftops, but he doesn't. He's real chill, easygoing.
I have met several people addicted to religion. It's socially accepted and can fill the needs of some people vary well, but it can also be just as destructive as heroin.
The religious basis of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), after which nearly all 12-step programs are modeled, does not require "accepting Jesus as your savior". It does require, however, accepting that a "higher power" might restore you to sanity.
This is a very important distinction, because AA goes to great lengths to clarify that the "higher power" is one of your own understanding. It is not Jesus, it is not a Christian-Jewish-Muslim God. It is simply something "bigger than yourself" which exists and which you can feel comfortable addressing.
It could be the Pacific Ocean for all you care. It just must be bigger than you.
I agree, but would say this its not that will power alone won't work, but that some people don't believe in the power of there own will, and need to submit (at least to start with) to another force. Once people break the cycle they can come to realise that they do have the power within them.
That's the rub, though; for whatever reasons, physical or psychological or both, some people do not and cannot provide enough will power alone and need help.
This is why addicts talk to other addicts; because other addicts "get it" and can provide help in overcoming the problem that isn't just "learn how to use your own will power". That's just condescending.
It's obvious, really; if it were that simple, there would be a great deal less addicts in the world.
It's unfortunate that this has been your experience. Where I am from recovery groups are as hand-off when it comes to personal religious/spiritual/atheistic beliefs as they can be. I've never once had someone try to push a set of beliefs on me, and I am grateful they haven't tried as that would have pushed me out of recovery faster than anything.
Horribly off topic, but what is the current status of the Electric Duet player routine? I read somewhere that you had placed it in the public domain in the 90s, but I can't find any confirmation of that.
I didn't really "place" it in the public domain, I just let nature take its course. The inevitable result is that there are now only versions of the program online in which my name and copyright notice have been removed:
I searched for the original program online, but couldn't find it -- only the pirated version. By "pirated" I mean someone has removed my copyright notice and offered the program as their own, successfully replacing the original in all online archives.
Yeah, the Apple II era seems to have been particularly destructive with removing copyright notices in favor of "crack screens" and other drivel. Bleah.
More recently, I've been working on my own Apple II game (really). I'd like to release it fully open source, which makes it particularly challenging to use third-party libraries since open source wasn't really a "thing" when they were written. Some of them (notably old Beagle Bros. disks) have since been explicitly placed in the public domain.
So... I would very much like to have some Electric-Duet-based music and sound effects in my upcoming open source Apple II game. (Yes, I just typed that.) Would you be willing to relicense your amazing player routine under an open source license, or to place it in the public domain? I would, of course, give you full copyright attribution in the scrolling credits screen or wherever you'd like.
The original was copy-protected, I believe, which means it cannot be archived in the standard .dsk format (there are some more complicated formats that represent a disk at a lower level, but they are not very well supported by emulators). In a few decades, the only surviving copies of many 80s software programs will be the ones that were cracked and distributed widely. In this way, crackers and pirates acted as inadvertent archivists.
For what it's worth, the pirated version I had (back in the old days) had your name on it (plus a crack group's name and probably BBS phone number). I remember thinking "Hey, that's the Apple Writer guy, what else did he write?" and that's how I found GraFORTH. Bought Leo Brodie's book and had a blast learning the language, then actually implementing small Forth-like languages for the fun of it. There was a Byte book, "Threaded Interpretive Languages" that gave me several epiphanies about programming in general and language design in particular.
I used Apple Writer for years, until eventually my typing speed increased so much that the program couldn't keep up with me anymore when typing long paragraphs (the word wrap algorithm, that was run after each character, apparently took time proportional to the length of the current paragraph, with a big enough constant that my 1 MHz Apple II started dropping keystrokes regularly despite the program having a 32-character buffer). I eventually resorted to disabling word-wrap while typing, and re-enabling it prior to printing (Control-Z, I think it was). Later, I bought a Zip Chip that increased the computer speed to about 3.5 MHz, and the problem disappeared.
I wasn't using Apple Writer by then, because I had discovered
another word processor, a weird, Rube Goldberg contraption called Gutenberg Sr. that used double-high-resolution graphics at a time when few programs did, and had a more powerful markup language (troff-inspired, I found out later), could two two-column printing and had some page layout capabilities, and had great support for printer-downloadable fonts, including user-defined ones. The interface was atrocious but the software itself was powerful.
This is the most inspiring thing I've read in a long time. There's a lot of chatter on HN about how people became an "expert" in this or that, but for some reason, the way you phrased it really resonated with me. And to see the end result -- holy crap. HTML is complicated.
An open source game for the Apple II, written in 6502 assembly language. Original music transcribed from public domain scores (played with the 2-tone Electric Duet software). It's been very mind-opening to have to think about every byte of memory, learn bit twiddling tricks, design efficient data structures to fit game data on a 140KB floppy disk, etc.
> Despite that issue, we want our videos streamed in high quality and securely
Based on the previous paragraph (about getting Netflix to almost work on Linux), I'm guessing that the "we" here is consumers of video, not producers or distributors. In which case, no, "we" do not give a rat's ass about whether our videos are streamed "securely."
"We" want to watch what we want to watch when we want to watch it. Content producers insisted on "security" and Netflix chose Silverlight as a short-term technical solution to that problem. No one else wanted it. We just tolerated it.
There's a Cydia app called BrowserChanger that lets you change the default browser (so clicking a link in Mail will open Chrome instead of Safari, for example). Is there a similar app that lets you change the default maps application?
Source: many years clean in NA