The Problem Isn’t in Your Brain. It’s in How You Choose to Live.
Addiction, Agency, And Unmet Needs
Our modern epidemics of depression and addiction do not require modern solutions.
Quite the opposite. The very reason these problems exist is precisely because we have become detached from the foundations of human life.
These foundations are ancient, and now, they’re forgotten.
What we call ‘disorders’ and ‘diseases’ are, in many cases, a rational response of the body to an irrational way of living.
The problem isn’t that we are broken. It’s because we’ve normalised a way of life that is.
Needs Are The Foundation of Well-Being
To function well as a human being, certain needs must be met.
These physiological, emotional, psychological, and existential needs are what make us human, and they are prerequisites for our wellness. One should never underestimate their importance.
This list isn’t complete, but it shows you what I mean when I talk about needs.
Physiological: rest, nourishment, exercise
Emotional and relational: belonging, love, connection
Psychological: self-worth, competence, direction
Existential: autonomy, purpose, contribution
Expressive: fun, spontaneity, creativity
(See here and here for more articles on needs.)
Whether we see these needs as evolutionary or spiritual is beside the point. They exist, they matter, and can make all the difference between a good life and a broken one.
When these needs are met, we experience vitality, contentment, and alignment. When they are not, we feel the consequences: unease, listlessness, alienation, or despair. Not because something is wrong, but because something essential is missing.
There’s an issue, though: we don’t have a built-in biological alarm system for unmet higher needs the way we do for hunger, thirst, or burning skin. We don’t feel an organ rumbling when we haven’t contributed to something larger than ourselves. We don’t feel a sharp pain when we haven’t recently built something of our own.
Modern life makes unmet needs even harder to notice. Our culture is saturated with pointless distractions and shallow rewards. This means with no immediate alarm system, and with a constant stream of short-lived stimulation, you wouldn’t know that you weren’t meeting your needs.
Compounded further because, as a society, we are not encouraged to develop our inner awareness of these needs. Instead, we’re moulded to conform to the modern system; encouraged to abide by its hollow values like performance, consumption, and brain-numbing entertainment. Under the radar, the damage slowly accumulates.
The result is that modern adults are dealing with unknown unease from an unknown source. People feel like shit and they don’t know why. We believe we’re making all the right choices, but actually, we’re following the wrong rule book.
As multi-dimensional beings stuck in a two-dimensional game, it’s no wonder we feel flat.
Addiction Is Not A Disease
We’re built to meet our needs, which include the need to escape pain. When the pain becomes unbearable and the source is unknown, we’ll reach for what relief is available. And in today’s world, that’s never far away.
Proscribed substances. Prescribed medications. Stimulants and sedatives. Screens, porn, food, gambling, consumerism. Whatever it is. They’re different flavours of the same escape from an emptiness we can’t quite name.
The drug dealer, the pharmaceutical company, the high-definition porn, and the free spins in the online casino all serve the same psychological function: change my state, now. Distract me from this misery.
And they do just that. But only briefly and superficially. That’s why they’re addictive. They work just enough to give you the illusion of relief, but without addressing the real cause.
In this light, addiction is not a disease but a behaviour: a learned, repeated coping strategy that attempts to escape intolerable existential dissatisfaction.
It’s misdirected, yet not entirely irrational. Within the internal logic of the person suffering, it makes sense, considering it is a justifiable adaptation to find relief. But it is ultimately self-defeating. The behaviour never fulfils the unmet need, and only delays the recognition of it.
The longer someone engages in the behaviour, the further they drift from asking the big question:
What do I really need?
Legalised Addiction
I deeply respect medicine. I have a passion for science. But applying disease models to non-diseases is a disservice to both. It’s neither ethical nor scientific, in the truest sense of seeking what is real.
Depression medication is now a socially sanctioned anaesthetic, but it’s no different in function to alcohol or an illicit substance. It’s an exogenous chemical used to suppress a deeper hurt and displaces the work required to resolve it.
Instead of recognising your signal to meet your needs, the modern system pathologises it and offers a chemical solution, saying, “The problem isn’t in your unmet needs, your environment, or the structure of your life: it’s in your brain.”
To numb a pain signal without addressing the source is like removing the batteries from a fire alarm to stop the beeping while the flames continue to burn.
This is not just wrong but highly dangerous. It teaches people not to ask why they feel as they do, but to chemically sever themselves from feeling it. Agency, a vital human need, is chemically castrated. This proposed ‘solution’ is creating yet another layer of suffering: helplessness by design.
The language of it all matters greatly, too. Words have power. Once internalised, words can define how a person sees themself. Words like ‘disorder’ and ‘depression’ are no longer phases to work through, but terminal identities to live under. People behave according to their self-concept, especially those already vulnerable, and they may never pursue something deeper than the label. They’ve ‘found what’s wrong,’ and the belief is set. The search for deeper answers ends before it begins.
Mainstream ‘Recovery’ Dogma Isn’t Much Different
The myth that addiction is a lifelong disease still circulates in mainstream recovery dogma.
This is a mirror image of the same pathology-first mindset. Individuals seeking help are taught that something is lurking within them, waiting to resurface; that they must live with it and hope to only manage it.
This is being dry but not sober. And the belief in the disease becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Without pursuing and addressing the real reasons why someone feels the need to escape life, and with the embedded suggestion to expect its return, sure enough, the relapse occurs, the cycle completes, and the ‘disease’ appears confirmed.
One of the very forces that keeps addiction alive is helplessness. So when a recovery framework treats helplessness with more helplessness, it will undoubtedly create a merry-go-round between states of unfulfilled abstinence and self-medication in relapse.
This is not what recovery means. Recovery is supposed to be a process that ends with a return to health, not a permanent state of limbo. Instead, this model is a mental trap that has borrowed the word recovery, emptied it of its meaning, and replaced it with a terminal identity. This isn’t an attack on real recovery, though. I’ve been through it myself, and it has profoundly changed me. But I have since moved on into a good, sober life, in every sense of the word ‘sober’. I am neither in addiction nor in recovery. Those words have ceased to define me, and so why would I choose to define myself with them?
Addiction is not something you have inside of you. Addiction is a behaviour that is learned. And what can be learned can be taken apart, examined, and replaced, but you must be willing to understand why you learned it in the first place. That’s where the real work is: in finding and meeting the unmet needs that made addiction feel like a way to cope.
And it’s a powerful thing to realise there’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve just been living in a way that’s wrong for you.
The Solution To Helplessness Isn’t More of The Same. It’s a Mindset Shift to Self-Empowerment.
The path forward is to take back what modern life has stripped away: our awareness, our agency, and our rightful duty to create our own well-being.
No substance or outside system can ever replace this, because agency itself is a human need that must be met. Without it, no amount of chemical intervention will work.
We must build lives where the idea of escape becomes obsolete, because the emptiness we’ve been running from is filled at its source.
The work starts with shifting from an external locus of control to an internal one: ending the wait to be rescued and instead taking up the responsibility that was always ours. Even if that means walking through the necessary trials required to meet the deeply unmet parts of ourselves.
We are not broken. We are built to grow into our potential through challenge, choice, and living consciously.
We must choose, daily, to live in alignment with our real needs. To build health, meaning, and spirit rather than outsource them.
There are no shortcuts. They must be earned on the other side of the work.
And somewhere along the way, the mysterious afflictions may lift. Maybe we’ll learn they were always signals to understand and not sentences to live.
We are not powerless. We’ve just been persuaded to forget our power.
We need to remember who we are.
Beings capable of reason, agency, and choice.
Lives that can be remade by their own hands.
The world will continue to offer distractions, disorders, and dependencies.
Let it. None of that changes what must be done.
Govern what is yours to govern. Live by what is true.
And leave the rest behind.
Thank You
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Previous Articles
Three Years Sober, One Thousand Subscribers, and Introducing Personalised Coaching
The Choice Journals #1: Mechanics of Choice
The Choice Journals #2: Finding Hidden Choices
The Choice Journals #3: On Becoming Agentic
Shrink Addiction Into Irrelevance
Very good. Especially the role of learned helplessness and low agency. Both can be reversed.
Embracing the illness model is of course comforting. Far nicer to believe you have some predisposition or a chemical imbalance. This is not just encouraged by society but eagerly embraced by its adherents.
But any path to sobriety must first accept full responsibility otherwise it is just a pantomime.
We cannot run away from our needs, we cannot medicate ourselves to meaning. Some voids must be faced and sat with; substances - prescribed or not - are no long-term solution.
An excellent analysis, Adam. I really hope that many will see that needs aren't illnesses, and that seeing and classifying them as so only distracts from the essence of life.
This take is very important in combating addiction and dealing with depression. Capitalism will keep pushing 'solutions' to things that are nothing more than the discomfort of deviation ... from what live was originally meant to be.
We should return to life, not search for the most effective ways to sustain deviation.