Flirting with Inevitability

March 23

There’s the thing itself, then there’s the project of the thing. For example, take heroin:

(to clarify, you should take the example, not the actual drug).

When we talk about addiction being a disease, we are in effect saying that addiction is more an observation about a substance that a person. There is a process or projected associated with an otherwise inanimate thing. We don’t say “I can’t believe someone got hooked on heroin” when we know that hooking people is exactly what heroin does.

That’s a relatively final example, though: smartphones, video games, workaholicism, cigarettes, we’re surrounded by things that aren’t just things, but projects. We all navigate around a different mix of them in our own lives, moderating in varying degrees of success.

That would lead to a really simple moralism about avoiding those things—except it works positively as well. Reading, working out, meditating, they all have a way of sucking you in, a project that while not completely inevitable begins to flirt with inevitability.

Maybe that’s why we almost universally suggest those activities—not because of their direct effect, but because we know the project they operate on, an upward spiral, like some kind of positive version of addiction?

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