What my dog taught me about being an addict

...and, how the extraordinary offers an alternative

Today’s essay is part of a seventh series by a group of men writing here on Substack including myself,

Latham Turner

,

Joshua Doležal

,

Lyle McKeany

,

Dee Rambeau

, and

Michael Mohr

. You may recall our past series on philosophy, fatherhood, work, “recovery,” trust, and home. This series is on ordinary things.

Just yesterday, as the early afternoon’s writing session came to a close, my eyelids drooping, I thought briefly of stretching out on the sofa for a nap—but then, thanks to the fact that not long ago I did one of the most normal things I can possibly imagine, I put the dog in the car and drove to the beach. Although of course I’ve known plenty of people with dogs over the years, I hadn’t quite been able to picture myself with one as an adult until recently. Traveling so much—but also, the noise, the disruption—and the poop. Things have changed though, and I’m no longer that traveling man—and it turns out that those little plastic bags work pretty damn well!

Enzo lay curled on the floor as I wound my way over the mountain to the open expanse of Stinson Beach, stretching two and a half miles from the parking lot to the mouth of Bolinas Lagoon. The dog doesn’t need to figure out what to do there, or anywhere—water, birds, children, and other four-legged people fill his awareness, and I soon forgot that I’d left my phone in the car, as my own attention was on him and the world around us. A mouthful of sun, the sea in our ears, sand in our hair, running full speed to get those birds!

At low tide, the long stretch of beach includes a multitude of gently sloped sandbars, incipient springs, miniature tidepools, and, at the northern end, the meandering channels of warmer water ebbing into the sea from the lagoon. As a young water dog, Enzo will readily wade in at the shore, but he hasn’t yet taken to full-on swimming from the beach. I tromped into one of the channels, bent on exploring an island of seabed exposed by the tide. Of course, the dog followed at my heels, and when I looked back, I saw him up to his whithers…and then—swimming! We made several laps back and forth across the sand-bottomed stream, and he quickly got the hang of dashing straight in after me. Watching him learn to swim was the highlight of the afternoon.

Despite the obvious and ordinary joy of this seaside scene, from as early as I can remember, I’ve worked hard trying (not necessarily succeeding) to be anything but ordinary—and I've also always felt left out for not being more normal. Never married, no kids, only rarely with a steady job. Only more recently have I come to feel less like a monad, and able to apprecaite the calm, deep, delicious ordinary of “conforming to the normal order of things.^⁠1” At fifty-five, I finally find myself gratified to have—at least more often than not—a regular, everyday, peaceful, joyful life.

The drive to be less ordinary has taken me to some wonderful places, and also to some very dark ones. When I look back at where I’ve been and what’s taken me there, I can’t help but be struck with the parallel between this tension with the ordinary and how I used think of myself as absolutely not the ‘addictive type.’ In a way, I was right, because that isn’t really as much of a thing as many people once thought^⁠2 (or maybe it’s even more of a thing, if you buy Sapolsky’s argument that it’s “turtles all the way down^⁠3”). Similarly, I thought I wasn’t an “addict“ because I didn’t die or suffer as much as many of my teenage friends here in San Francisco—again, I was right, but not because that wasn’t quite my path. I’m only ‘right’ because I’m not going to slot myself into anything so narrow as a word—nor one whose meaning is so contentious.

Either way, and with both ordinariness and addiction, like almost everything else about being human, it’s not an either/or—it’s a range of variations between hypothetical extremes. I now know myself as someone who continues to live with many addictive patterns. I’ve moved through quite a few of them, and many are still with me. The degree to which I experience hooks, triggers, urges, cravings, the drive to escape, the hunger for vice—wanting some sort of fix—it varies, sometimes less and sometimes more, but I don’t expect it to ever really go away. That’s not the journey of addiction or ‘recovery’ though—that’s the journey of life.

These desires can be seen as be addictive impulses, or just what’s pulled me along in becoming and being who I am—and that are both good and bad for me.

Not so ordinary at all, for example, are the various ‘extreme’ sports that I’ve practiced all my life: skateboarding, rock climbing, kitesurfing, paragliding, and most recently what’s known as “wing-foiling,” almost always outside the bridge in the open waters of roiling Golden Gate, smashed in all dimensions between thirty knots of cold northerly wind, five knots of outgoing current, fifty-two degree salt water, ten feet of incoming swell—and eight-hundred foot cargo ships. Although this feels ordinary to me, I’m well aware and proud of the fact that it’s nowhere near the mainstream of jogging, yoga, and whatever has replaced Crossfit Nation. I used to vehemently deny that I was anything like an ‘adrenaline junkie’ driven by some sort of urge to cheat death or inject myself with a stream of biochemical adreno-stimulants, but after doing this sort of thing for many many years, my perspective has shifted, and I’ve come to feel that, well, it is fairly extreme after all. I can feel how radical it is. I love that feeling, and also I know that not only do I not need that feeling all the time, I may well not want it at all, at some point—and I’ll be fine with that, just as I’m fine no longer flying alone in my paraglider, suspended beneath a nylon canopy at ten thousand feet above what is indisputably the much more ordinary, pedestrian landscape. The same goes for rock-climbing—or for climbing that same bridge, for that matter! And yet still, even after being rescued by the Coast Guard just recently, I often find myself pulled as if by some need or compulsion to rig my gear and head out the Gate once again, as I will most likely do this very afternoon.

Far more common is something else I that I love to do: scrolling Kam Patterson shorts on Youtube. Kam is genuinely funny AF, one of Tony Hinchcliffe’s standout ‘bucket pulls’ that has been rightly catapulted into stand-up stardom, so why not laugh my ass off and celebrate this young man’s success while I’m at it? Because as much as I ❤️ Kam Patterson and enjoy watching his comedy, I also know that it’s 10:30pm and that I’ll feel better in the morning if I go to sleep instead of having a few laughs before I crash for the night. Same for mucking around with AI as a writing tool, which began with some fairly, well, no-so ordinary but well-intentioned research—and then quickly devolved into revisiting my teenage obsessions with coding and porn, which had me sitting at the computer into the small hours of the morning, desperately bleary but so hooked on ginning up stories about a sentient, sex-obsessed spaceship that I couldn’t get anything like my proper forty winks—and that was the least of the damage being done. Although I’m a big believer of what Adi Jaffe calls the “abstinence myth^⁠4,” boundaries can be very helpful, and I’m grateful for things like the Downtime feature on my phone and the StayFocusd Chrome extension to help keep me on the rails. For the same reasons, I try to skip the section of Trader Joe’s where they line up the plastic containers of sugary treats, and try not to keep ice cream in the house—and rarely skip an opportunity to get a scoop if my parking karma provides the space.

It’s hard enough to detach myself from any one of the numerous hooks that I have in me, let alone from the overall mechanism of addiction. Part of the reason is the bodily fear of the space which is opens up when we move away from any particular addiction—or any behavior, or relationship, for that matter—and that it will stay empty, like the sucking, frozen vacuum of space. Gerald G. May writes beautifully about how one addictive attachment is often “reformed” by substitution with another, so as to fill the maddening emptiness of this “desert,” which is how even daily exercise, meditation, and healthy eating can become addictions, and also how many “an alcoholic becomes addicted to AA^⁠5”—or at least to coffee or (in the old days) cigarettes.

Whatever I’m doing a lot of is what’s normal, and may also be addictive—and might still be good for me in some ways. These ordinary addictions may be healthful and contribute to balance in the context of days, and may also be unbalancing in the context of months or years. I know a lot of fit-as-fuck cyclists that look like bowlegged freaks—and a lot of slim-Jim runners that have died from sudden heart attacks while out clocking up miles.

I’ve got much more in common with those cyclists and runners than I want to admit. Even though I feel more ordinary in many ways, I also feel chronically disregulated—in a more subtle way than in the past, but more often. I’m more sensitive now than I’ve ever been, in that I’m feeling more—which is also perfectly normal, and good, and desirable. What this adds up to though is that my resting state still doesn’t seem restful enough, often enough. It’s hard for me to slow down. There’s still something driving me which feels like much of the same thing pushing athletes like Charlie Engle, who I interviewed back in 2023 about running across the entire Sahara desert, having swapped that sort of ultra-punishing long-distance mania for a long-standing relationship with alcohol and crack cocaine.

As with all biological systems, humans evolved to naturally seek and return to equilibrium; we always want more—that’s the basic drive of life—but we can only live peacefully in some kind of balance—guaranteed, in the end, for all of us, by death. One of the inherent dichotomies and polarities within us is the pull of more that can lead to too much, countered by the pull back toward balance and the restfulness of less—which is just as often not quite enough.

When this everyday struggle swings to extremes though, our human organism becomes overwhelmed by the roller-coaster of huge highs and deep troughs—and this seems to be where so many of us find ourselves these days. What’s changed is not our biology, or how broken we are as individuals—it’s our culture which has turned human norms upside-down in favor of machine n0rml. What manifests as addiction in the modern world is the natural tension and dynamism of the human state of being, but exaggerated to hazardous extent by the mechanisms of modernity.

The simple truth seems to be that human nature plus civilization is a pretty straightforward recipe for addiction^⁠6. It’s not a disease—except as part of the disease of civilization^⁠7, with its oversupply of super-satisfying substances and behaviors. Our insistence that it’s an exception is a very human, very futile attempt at denying the imperfection of the system that we’ve sunk so much into, but of course that doesn’t do anything to help^⁠8 either.

Again, we evolved to seek and function in balance—not stasis, but with fluctuations that look and feel more like the ebb and flow of the tides, the rustling of the wind, the slowly changing temperature of the air, or the meandering of a river than the explosive impact of a line of coke, the constant buzz of scrolling Insta, or the instant hit of pulling up Pornhub. While we once thought of addiction as an exception, it actually turns out to be…incredibly ordinary. As I see it, my other favorite subject—intuition—was an everyday thing and has become, in many peoples’ minds, literally extraordinary, outside of what’s considered normal—or even possible—while addiction was almost certainly almost nonexistent in evolutionary times, and has now become commonplace.

Because these extreme, amplified, unnatural versions of our natural human drive for more have become so common, we’ve lost track of the fact that we’re actually very good at coming up with generative, productive, satisfying ways to fill the emptiness we fear. That empty space is what we fill with the stories of living—if we remember how—and what naturally balances the exaggerated centifugal pull of our addictive desires is none other than that which I'm calling intuition, which is simply our natural sense of what is right, good, and perhaps most of all, enough.

“Think of the intuitive process as a narrative—as a personal story… The stories we construct are passed from person to person and across generations, and through these shared habits of mind—in tune with the collective experience—our cultural beliefs are perpetuated. In short, the intuitive personal narrative and its individual expression not only shape culture but also are the glue that holds society together.” — Peter C. Whybrow^⁠9

For me, getting back closer to something like balance has been about realizing that I was practicing the wrong thing. I’ve spent a lot of time seeking extremes to compensate for the subtle joy, wonder, and satisfaction that I wasn’t able to recognize in the ordinary. Paying more attention to what I feel and how I want to feel means that I chase something closer to normal more and more now, because—as strange as it may seem—I just don’t want to be all that excited all that much these days. I do want awe and wonder. I want all the colors and subtle shades of light. I want the storms and the rain—but I don’t want to be thrown off my game. I don’t want anxiety. I don’t want disregulation. I want to stay in my zone, and I want the zone to keep growing, and to get deeper, and richer.

Even though what we call addiction is far more ordinary than we might like to think, there’s an equally ordinary antidote. Learning—slowly, and with many failings—to find a greater appreciation for the beauty in the everyday, normal, ordinary way things are, without motorcycles, straight vodka, meth, Hustler, NSFW AI storygen, NYC, and supermarket sugar snacks is what creates the opening required for intuitive, creative energy to emerge and move into. The difficult and more subtle truth is that dry valleys are filled very naturally with the water of own self, our energy, nature, and connection—if we allow it.

Being ‘grateful’ for everything has replaced having ‘no regrets’ as perhaps the most popular spiritual bypass. While I'm not quite sure that I'm grateful for all of my experiences, I am grateful for the convoluted and unconventional path toward normal that I have experienced. Reading before dawn, rolling on the floor with my dog, making soup with whatever’s at hand, doing pushups on the beach, snuggling into bed with my sweetheart, the short walk down to the end of the dock—or the long drive to some dead-end dirt road where I can roll up and sleep under the stars for free—those are the ordinary things that have taken on a glow that outshines the extraordinary—but shorter-lived—sparkle of the extreme.

¹ Oxford English Dictionary, “ordinary (adj. & adv.),” March 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6935698454.

² Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky, Love and Addiction (Watertown, Massachusetts: Broadrow Publications, 2015), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9780985387228.

³ Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will (New York: Penguin Press, 2023), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9780525560999.

⁴ Adi Jaffe, The Abstinence Myth: A New Approach for Overcoming Addiction without Shame, Judgment, or Rules, First edition (Los Angeles, CA: IGNTD Press, 2018), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9781732239401.

⁵ Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9780061122439, 147.

⁶ Elias Dakwar, The Captive Imagination: Addiction, Reality, and Our Search for Meaning (Harper, 2024), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9780063340480.

⁷ Christopher Ryan, Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2020), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9781451659115.

⁸ “Sunk Cost,” in Wikipedia, March 20, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sunk_cost&oldid=1281525662#Fallacy_effect.

⁹ Peter C. Whybrow, The Well-Tuned Brain: The Remedy for a Manic Society (New York: W W Norton & Company, 2016), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9780393353044, 8.

---

I’m glad you’re here, thank you for reading 🙏🏻

• If you’re not already on the list, please do subscribe.

• The best use of money is for art. If you value the work, consider upgrading to a paid subscription—or, buy me a coffee ☕️

• Share this post. Forward it, share it on social media, or print it out and give it to someone you know.

Read the rest of the series on “Ordinary Things”

The ordinary might be the key to present, but that's not the whole story

A Prayer For Spring Planting

The unique nature of ordinary

Routine Vs. Drama

How to Prepare Medications

Questions for you

1. What’s ordinary for you? What’s extraordinary?

2. What’s your favorite pizza?

Please do leave a comment—and click the little ♡ heart
👇🏻 right down there to let me know if you found this worthwhile.