Coming Clean on a Modern Day Addiction

A quick "define:addiction" search on Google, shows that: "Addiction is a studio album by former Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Trapeze vocalist/ bassist Glenn Hughes. It was released in 1996 on Zero Corporation, SPV and Shrapnel records and was Hughes’ fifth solo studio album." Wait, what? That's not what I was looking for. Seriously though, that shits real, Google told me so.So the addiction I'm referring to is more of the 'being abnormally tolerant to and dependent on something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming'. Addiction is an interesting word, it instantly conjures up mental pictures of junkies in putrid conditions, and yet it is a word, a concept, that reaches far further than substances alone and because of this I much prefer the definition of 'excessive, repetitive use of pleasurable activities'. Oh yeah, stew in those words for a bit. So these days, in this techno-crazy modern world, you can be addicted to all sorts of things, like TV, gambling, drugs and computer games. If you find it pleasurable and you do it 'too much', sugar, you're addicted.

So my addiction, or at least the one I’m focussed on sorting out now, is mutherflippin eBay. Not a day goes by when I don’t long to be bathed in its glow. I daydream of spending hours flicking through pages in the hopes that that one hard to find item will appear, and upon clicking the ‘Buy It Now’ button, my life becomes entirely complete, or at least until the next thing I want pops up and I’m empty again. I once searched ‘Mini Cooper S’ on eBay, and then proceeded to trawl through all 9809 items, or 184 pages (at 50 items per page) with no specific aim or want. In fact, just in researching those figures I managed to spend a good half hour trawling through things I don’t want or need.

At the height of my madness, I may have been waiting on more than 15 packages to be delivered at any one time. Even in what I would consider a quiet period I’d have 3-5 outstanding items hurrying across the globe to be with me. I feel very uneasy if I have less than 3 items on their way. I can’t explain it. Traditionally, until eBay sunk its claws in, I wasn’t that much of an impulse buyer. In fact I wasn’t much of a buyer at all, now I can’t help myself.

Flash forward a little, to the present day, and it’s been 14 days since I last bought anything off eBay. That may seem fairly pathetic, but the road to recovery is a long and winding one, and we all have to start somewhere. Apparently if you can last 28 days without whatever you’re addicted to, you become free of the addiction and will be welcomed back into society. Technically, I don’t think society has cast me out yet anyways, maybe one day there’ll come a time when eBay addiction is recognised and frowned upon, but today is not the day.

Anyways, 14 is half of 28, so I guess I’ve reached the point of no return, or at least the point where it would be stupid to return cos ‘you’ve just done SO well up until now’. Will I write a follow up come 28 days? Unlikely. Will I get back on the bandwagon and go bananas again in the future? Probably.

Let my addiction be a lesson to you all, and don’t follow me down this dangerous path of self gratification, materialism and impulsiveness. You never know, it could be you sitting on your eBay-bought couch, using your eBay-bought laptop, while you wait for your eBay-bought socks to dry on the clothes rack you got off eBay, so you can put them on and go to the post office to pick up the next 11 packages with your name on it.

You have been warned.