1st guest post: "Am I an addict?"

 Post by Srijan

Am I an addict?

A week ago, Nimisha wrote a blog post on her addiction to shopping. Since addiction is a theme that has always attracted me, an attempt to analyse whether I am one or not seemed like an appropriate way of taking up some space in her blog.

An addict is generally defined in the dictionary as a person who is physically and mentally dependent on a particular substance or activity. If that is so, then I am an addict. Not to alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, or to any other substance, but to inactivity itself, which is the only activity I truly engage in.

Of course, this inactivity is difficult to diagnose, for its symptoms never remain the same. They take up different forms at different times in different situations, but the inactivity that lies just below the surface remains constant. Over the last month or so, for instance, I have begun almost every single day by logging into Facebook only to remain logged in for the rest of the day until I finally log out at bedtime. This cycle is broken only when I am some place where there is no computer screen to stare at.

Since there is no point in simply remaining idle on Facebook, I update my status on it every single day, mostly by sharing links and writing 420 characters each on every one of them. Once I found out that I wanted to do this on a daily basis, I also wanted to come up with a system for it. Accordingly, I decided that I would try to update my status every day at midnight, which meant that I needed to find a link and write 420 characters on it every day, too. Not happy just with a fixed time at which to update my status every day, I also came up with a system for deciding which links to share every day. To that end, I decided to log into Britannica every day to go through their ‘This Day in History’ so that I can finalise which event or birth to commemorate by sharing a link related to it. Once the occasion is finalised, I go to Google Videos in search for an appropriate video, which usually happens to be a documentary. This, in short, is the system that I have devised for Facebook. I, of course, deviate from it on some days, but this template remains the same throughout.

I believe that this proves beyond all reasonable doubt that I am addicted to Facebook. However, it does not prove that I am addicted to inactivity since what I have described above also entails some activity. To me, however, any activity that I should not engage in, especially if it is at the cost of something that I should be engaged in instead, is equivalent to inactivity. And if that be the case, one would be hard put to find a person more addicted than I. I only hope not for long.

 Image 2: source google