Why is Candy Crush so addictive?

My name is Jeanne, and I am an addict.  That's why I feel entitled to write about this.

This is not the first time I've been addicted.  It runs in the family, actually.  Everyone else in my family was addicted to alcohol; I was the one addicted to alcoholics.  Before and during that, to cigarettes.  Had a doughnut addiction at one time, too - I'm not kidding.  I had to diet off 30 pounds when I woke up to that one.

But enough about me.  I want to talk more abstractly about addiction, which is a form of craving that gets itself lodged in you as a habit.  In the case of substances, like nicotine, your body's chemistry gets involved.  Smoking anything is a really fast delivery system; inhale the substance and

in seven seconds it hits your brain.  This makes me very glad I never tried a lot of not-so-legal drugs that nobody seems able to quit (and knowing that, I just can't enjoy "Breaking Bad").

Getting off cigarettes after smoking for thirty years was a slow, tortured process.  Many many recovering alcoholics can't quit smoking.  It is addictive psychologically and behaviorally, but the chemical thing is also real.  About fifteen minutes after you finish a cigarette, the nicotine level in your blood starts to fall.  And fall.  Lower, lower, until you are positively uncomfortable.  Your body craves it, to get back in balance.  When you light up again, reward!

Candy Crush isn't actual candy or I would weigh 400 pounds.  It doesn't have to be.  The horse races aren't substances, slot machines aren't, romance isn't - things just have to be exciting and promise a reward.  And occasionally deliver.  Not too often.  And never be completely fulfilling.

A big piece of the fundamental message of Buddhism is that you're unhappy because you desire.  Big things, like being Someone Special and staying young, little things like potato chips.  A lot of what American Buddhists practice is controlling our impulses, both sitting in meditation and making nice after sitting on hold for fifteen minutes.

In Candy Crush, you are rewarded for every move, more so if you have the sound on.  And when you win!  OMG!  Lights, bells, whistles, fish swarming across the page.  It's great, for five seconds.  Then you want to move to the next level: winning doesn't satisfy you. This is actually true about everything, up to the Nobel Prize.  Whatever you do, if you do it to get somewhere it won't make you happy.

Recently I met a guy who does extreme sports.  He told me sports jumpers are the ones who die in parachute jumps - not the rank amateurs who just want to try it once.  Because the extreme sport addict always wants to dare a little bit more.  "Waiting till you're 1,000 feet from the ground, before you open the chute," he said, "what a rush!  Now you want to try 950 next time.  It's the danger that's the rush, the adrenaline.  And I'm addicted to that."  He does a lot of those sports, he told me - a man with a wife and children.  Go figure.

But isn't it just the same when you have that restless desire to shop for new shoes?  When you keep trying new restaurants?  When you work for a bigger more pixels more power flat screen/vehicle/salary/kitchen/house?  I think that's why you'll see people get divorced after they remodel.  It didn't work.

The sad/funny thing about the human animal is that we are pretty slow to figure these things out.  That's partly because a lot of people get very rich by building those cravings.  This is why I don't enjoy "Mad Men" either.  It's too true - the people at the top earn big money devising commercials to make people believe that a lustrous new car will make you the person you want to be in the world over the rainbow.  Maybe it does for a few hours or weeks.  Or until the next model comes out.  Compared to that, Candy Crush is harmless.

The Problem of Aging

Escaping the frame

I was struck by this thought yesterday, and rushed to put it in a box on this blog:

 Being old is not necessarily a problem.  

It wasn't actually that striking, more like interesting in a quiet way.  So I've been thinking about problems in general and aging in particular.

Aging, being old, is a fact, a condition created by a series of experiences, of changes.  Problems themselves do not exist in reality.  The word problem is abstract, a concept in my head tied up with a judgement that it is difficult and I don't like it.  These thoughts made me remember Joan Halifax's story about when Issan was dying, and she was crying at his bedside.  He said to her, "That isn't necessary, you know."  He was a Zen master (so is she), so I thought seriously about that.  Not necessary to be sorry your friend is dying?  How about yourself - does your death have to be a problem?  Is sickness necessarily a problem?  Is pain?

Using the word problem is a way of framing a large issue.  You could say the real problem is not aging, but that we resist its reality instead of  flowing with it.  It's like "difficult emotions" in that way.

Framing a couple of issues

It's funny how we welcome risk and surprise when we pay for it.  People go to theme parks, travel uncomfortably on planes and go more uncomfortably through airports, which have become fun houses, delays popping up like monsters in the corner.  We deliberately meet fear on roller coasters, we pay to be thrown around on those teacup rides. But when life throws us around, we hate it.

These thoughts must be growing out of my current interest in softening to difficult feelings (discussed a little in the previous post).  My own "difficult" feelings arise when I don't like what's happening.  Depression. Pain.  People who don't do what they said they would (had to throw in something trivial). 

I couldn't explain why, but this is making me visualize making a not-too complicated mandala.  Reds for desire.  Some black strokes for judgement.  Here and there beautiful greens, restful lavender......What would be at its center?  Maybe a nice peaceful white, or a blue sky with puffy high clouds passing over.  Maybe some glitter.  

Why even diets that work, don't work

An untitled spring painting by Joe Brainard

from Writer's Almanac this morning:
There's a diet named after Nobel laureate economist George Stigler. The Stigler Diet is actually a mathematical model for the cost of subsistence eating — a linear programming problem on how to get the most nutritional bang for your buck. Specifically, Stigler's math problem was this: Say you have a man who weighs 154 pounds. Out of 77 foods commonly available, how much of each one should be eaten daily so that the man gets the right amount of nine essential nutrients — at the cheapest cost? The nutrients Stigler took into consideration: calories, protein, iron, and some vitamins.

The solution to the optimization problem: In one year, that man should consume 370 pounds of wheat flour, 57 cans of evaporated milk, 285 pounds of dried navy beans, 23 pounds of spinach, and 111 pounds of cabbage. In 1939, dollars, this would cost about 11 cents a day. Today, it'd be close to $1.75 per day. Stigler was subjected to a barrage of ridicule for suggesting this dull and bland diet, and he tried to remind people that it was just a mathematical model. He issued a statement: "No one recommends these diets for anyone, let alone everyone."

Last week Tom's sister Diane visited for a couple of days.  One night for dinner we went to a German restaurant/social club for which I had recklessly bought a coupon months ago - a coupon about to run out.  This turned out very well.  We liked the place, one of those last-century phenomena about to disappear, its decor untouched since the fifties.  And we loved the food, starting with sauerkraut balls. I went on have bratwurst, hot German potato salad, and sauerkraut.

Midway through this journey, I realized that before the transplant I could not have eaten a thing on my plate.  Bratwurst and sauerkraut, way too salty.  Potatoes, too high in potassium.  But now I was taking it for granted, eating what I liked, as much as I liked. 

Here's the little insight there:  for years, as I struggled to stay alive and off dialysis, I had to think about everything I ate, including a few cashews (nuts are high in phosphates).  And I had this lingering almost unconscious desire.  Now the desire was being fulfilled, and guess what - it didn't much matter. Not being able to eat what I liked, that gave rise to this craving.  I take it from this that getting what you want is not the answer.

Change the Energy Day

A while back I was able to train with Roshi Daniel Terragno, whose words had a way of being clear and penetrating for me. Once we were talking on the phone and I brought to him the problem I had with my work. I believed I should be sending manuscripts out, and I couldn't make myself do it. I had a sense of being an engine at the starting line, huffing and puffing, but not able to get traction and move forward.

He said (I could hear the shrug), "Why don't you just send something out - that will change the energy around it."

I loved that. I have a mystical streak a yard wide, my grandmother would have said, and have experienced energy in many contexts, enough to know it's real. Change the energy around it is a principle of feng shui, for instance. I've read the advice that to recover from a spouse's death you should immediately change the bedclothes, and if possible, the position of the bed in the room. I experience energy every week when I get acupuncture.

Yesterday this particular concept popped up for me when my friend Gini called. We usually have lunch on Wednesday, but neither of us had any ideas. "Do you want to do lunch or breakfast?" she asked.

"Breakfast!" I said. What a good idea! Get me out of the house, something different. I asked her, "White Castle or Waffle House?"A change from our usual quiet sort of place.

I swear I could see her eyes light up. "Waffle House!"

Well, we had a good time, and ate as you can there, terrifically enjoying the grits, hashbrowns smothered and covered, a full midwestern breakfast and really good service with the coffee. It turned out to be a good place to talk after a meal, too, not too busy, they don't bug you. Then, coming home we got lost, you might say, and enjoyed a leaf tour of the neighborhood we have lived in for much of our adult lives.

Different is refreshing. When we choose it, I guess. Maybe we could look at all change that way. This morning I got up to a storm of falling oak leaves. It wasn't very windy out there, but it was as if all eleven oaks out back decided it was time. My impulse was not to like it - fall is hurrying away faster, too fast. Don't like winter. I didn't like yesterday either, when I got up to black sticks. So many leaves had fallen overnight that the woods had a new aspect, was no longer about foliage but about the black lines of trunks and branches.

Not liking reality - Daniel calls that stuff "preference." I'd prefer Indian summer forever. I'd prefer to live in northern California, only not to lose the roots I have here. When the sun shines, as it is right now, I grasp at it - how do you do that? I don't know. Inside me that engine is saying Stay, stay, stay, like a child trying to make something happen through sheer intensity of wishing. I prefer sunshine. Beyond "prefer."

Tonight is Trick or Treat here, so yesterday Gini and I stopped at Giant Eagle to get some candy. Lord, they have a great candy shop. We got foil-wrapped eyeballs for the kids and authentic Reese's peanut butter cups, and various old-fashioned penny candies for ourselves. Checking out we found ourselves in the cigarette aisle and my craving peeked up. I think craving is preference with chemistry added. We both quit smoking years ago, and had to work very hard at it, too. We agreed that we would love a cigarette just then, and were going to let that impulse pass.

Happy End of Day

[image: End of Day glass]
I certainly prefer birth over death, beginnings over endings. A baby is fresh and new, a delight of potential and surprise. Old age, sickness, and death are so sobering. Yet, many Buddhists work with that. I believe it was Issan, a Buddhist abbott, who started the first hospice, when the AIDs epidemic hit California, and no one knew what to do. Buddhists find hospice work fulfilling, as do many people once they have served as caregivers for a spouse or parent. Facing death, we are more sincere, we are leveled.

In my church, memorial services often glide over the hard part and emphasize the joys of the person's life, before he got so sick, that is. It is a celebration. Yet I remember one service in which people spoke about the dead woman, Lisa, her eternal youthfulness, and at last one man got up and said, "She did not remain herself to the end. That was the tragedy." I knew that, too. I had visited her in her locked dementia ward. She had been dressed well, and sat on an absorbent pad on the bed, smiling, pretending to know us. She was not herself anymore. I appreciated that man's honesty. He loved her.

As I understand it, it was encountering the realities of end-of-life that led the Buddha to leave his home and search for some consolation. It took him a while, years of traveling from one esteemed teacher to another, learning what they had to teach, meditating, doing all sorts of rigorous spiritual practices. What he came up with was - Life is hard. Very unsatisfactory, say. Because in every single birth, death is implicit. All living things mature and die. Our problem, the Buddha said, is our endless thirst. Our craving to not have life be the way it is.

You sure know about this when you end up like me, limited by a mortal illness our medical system tries hard to defeat. Beyond "lifestyle" treatments, kidney failure can be addressed only by dialysis and transplant. Both are crude, painful, elaborate and expensive treatments, but dialysis is worse, and is usually low yield in terms of restoring health. So we thirst for that magical transplant.

I had to stop there the other day and examine that. This is one reason we meditate, to go deeper with ourselves, until we face the strength of our cravings and our unrealistic delusions. Transplant is not in fact so magic as all that; the real story with Cinderella is that you might marry the Prince, but you will still have to sweep up the ashes of life, metaphorically speaking. Our lives don't stop at the beautiful waltz of the beginning.

Going deeper with myself these days I realize how I crave healing, how I want to believe there is - or will soon be - a treatment that will give me back my life - the energy of middle age. Or at least, more years with more good days. I have an alternate craving: to forget the whole thing and just accept quietly dying; that is a choice a kidney patient can make.

Lousy alternatives. Realizing this yesterday, I went about doing my laundry yelling fervently, "Don't want!" That assertion was one of the first things my grandson learned to say, and as a toddler he could say it ferociously. "Don't want!" Of course, Don't Want is as much a craving as Want.

I came back from a Memorial Service the other day with an index card on which I had written,

There is no happy ending
to an individual life.
So, what is going to console us?

Zen says the answer is to sink deep into that truth. Accept it. I guess that is the Right Understanding piece of the way of life the Buddha recommended as our consolation, what is called The Noble Eightfold Path. Ah, so, I hear my sister-in-law say. It comes down to that after all. Where is the consolation of right livelihood, of not taking what is not yours, of kind speech? This hardly seems appealing compared to a party, or a transplant.

The image I put up today is End of Day glass. If you click on that phrase, it will take you to a site that describes this accidental art, which makes beauty is made out of the leftover scraps. That seems a very nice idea to me. Consoling, in fact.

Giving in

Article in today's NYTimes about how people head for their internet connections to the outside world first thing in the morning. Kids sleep with their phones in hand. Of course, this is deplored as taking us away from the traditional morning activities of a certain privileged demographic (us), like walking the dog or helping the kids find their homework. Yes, I think the dog should be walked. I also think there's a certain Luddite resistance to change.

If I tell you I remember when television came in, you will think I am 66 11/12 years old, and so last century. I try to think of it as accumulated wisdom, or at least experience. Television. We were all fascinated by it, stunned by the availability of entertainment. Until then I had been lucky to go to the local movies once a week, where I would patiently sit through an entire double feature, even cowboy movies. They were movies. I loved them.

I had a girlfriend whose household had the magic box, and she and I used to watch all the sitcoms we possibly could. It all pleased us, though it was aimed at adults, and I suppose we didn't understand most of what went on. We liked Topper, and My Favorite Bachelor. I knew a kid who actually sat and watched test patterns, waiting for the programming to start. Parents, surly about the whole phenomenon ("Radio was good enough for me"), became fixated on watching the evening news with Walter Cronkite. Then, hearing other grownups talk about actually indulging in TV, my own parents allowed themselves to watch Sid Caesar and the Ed Sullivan show. Thus I got to see the American debut of an English singing sensation.

I have a point here and I am wandering toward it as you can when you have no editors to please. It is this - let us stop berating email and texting and Facebook and admit it - we like this stuff. What's wrong with that? A Zen Teacher I used to work with had a way of saying things that struck home for me. In one talk he referred to simple desires, and he shocked some earnest vegetarians by saying, "If you want a Big Mac, go ahead and have one, and enjoy it. Be with it all the way." The idea was, it doesn't have to be a big thing.

Doesn't it sometimes seem like we spend our lives resisting ourselves? There are impulses well worth resisting, arson, infidelity, just one cigarette, but that doesn't mean goodness is purchased through self-denial. Sometimes I think about the string of stupid diets I've been on in my life, thinking that being slimmer or abstractly "healthier" would translate into happiness. It didn't.

I hate thinking about that self-denial. I mean, one of these diets, prescribed by an alternative MD, had me off all gluten, dairy, and sugar. You could hardly find gluten-free products at the time. When this doctor intuited that I should stop eating potatoes and drinking water, I finally said No. But I had wasted months concocting unpleasant milkshakes with all sorts of stuff in them. I regret that now that my kidneys are wearing out, because I really do have to follow a diet, no choice. The experience of the last years confirms the medical wisdom: limit potassium, phosphates, protein and, God help me, salt. I can't binge on this diet. Eating the wrong things overloads my poor kidneys, and I get a major congestion headache or an episode of arrythmia, or lie awake all night feeling the ribs I treated myself to because it was my birthday.

There actually is more to life than food, that's just one example. In fact, we Americans obviously do indulge too much in food, mindlessly, I think. The real thing is to become intimate with yourself and your cravings. Does this circle me back to the fact that I, too, get up, make coffee, and check my e-mail? Yes. Facebook, yes. Maybe someone else is online at 5:00 a.m.

I can make a logical argument for all this internet connection, but it really isn't about logic - it's about enjoying what we decide to do. This can be a challenge when it comes to eating that Big Mac, which I did not long ago. In reality, it is precooked and never warm enough. But eating it reminded me of these realities, and stopped the craving for that ideal Big Mac they advertise, at least for a while.

When you'll be happy

[photo: Sherlock contemplates the news of the day]
I don't know about you, but . . .
wait. I do know about you. You're like me. You have a mental list of conditions that need to be met before you can be happy. (They can also be Conditions that Should Have Been Met, which is more rock-solid, because the truth is, no matter how much you pay the therapist, you will never have had a happy childhood. . . . "You will never have had." I actually wrote that. Some sort of fantastical verb tense like they have in French. When I think of all the time I wasted, years in classes, years with books and flash cards and dictionaries, trying to learn French - if only I had spent that time studying molecular neurobiogenetic macroeconomic fashion, I'd be rich today . . . ) But I digress.

That's my name, you could say; I am One who Digresses, who keeps wandering off the path to inspect a little white violet. I used to think I'd be happy when I got a handle on that sort of unremunerative impulse and got Normal and kept a clean house and ate right. But come to find out the world is full of people yearning not to be Normal. We call them human beings. There's the problem. It's not about normal or ab-. It's about that ability to yearn.

Human beings have far too much brain, and yearning is what we use it for. On the other hand, consider the cat. His brain is the size of a walnut. Half a walnut. He does not even understand emotion, let alone Art or commitment. Whenever he tries to meditate, he falls asleep. He has one simple drive, to survive. When the territory's all snug and there's food in the dish and water in the bathroom sink, and no other cats around, is he bored and restless? If so, he will devote himself to dashing out the front door when you go to get the mail. If not, he naps, storing up energy in case something to pounce on appears. Not that he yearns for something to pounce on, not really. He's just ready. It's his nature.

The thing about being human is, we are able to desire to be like a cat. Think about it. Don't you wish you had their simple, straightforward mind, the ability to be perfectly contented when lying in bed between your humans, shedding? To purr only if and when you felt like it, without hypocrisy or guilt? If only you could get rid of this thinking, worrying mind of yours and be like a cat, then you'd be happy.

Here's where I'm going with this, if I can be said to be going anywhere except offroad: That thing that would make you happy If Only - it wouldn't. How many examples do you need? Remember how you longed for high school graduation? Free at last! Or your driver's license. Or Love. Or then, to get rid of the guy. To lose ten pounds. To finally deliver that baby. To get that teenager out of the house. When the weather changes. You get the idea.

Once in a while, it is true, something actually meets our expectations. Recently I was reminded of how thoroughly I enjoyed my sixty-fifth birthday. I got to wear a big pink sombrero while lots of people sang happy birthday to me, and then I got toys and cake. For a moment there, I was the center of my universe. I've always thought I'd be perfectly happy if only that would come true. It did, and I was.

Those readers who are not cats are probably ahead of me here, thinking, Aha, all I have to do is get rid of my selfish, unrealistic desires, like the wish to always be the center of everyone else's universe. No, I wasn't going to say that. I can't cure your big brain that easily. All I know to do is make a list. Write down your preoccupations - today's will do - all those conditions that must be met for you to be happy. All of them. Don't leave things out just because they're impossible, like, to be young again.

Think about it. Keep adding to the list. At a later time, maybe, we will discuss how to invent a personally meaningful ritual to distance yourself little from some of these conditions. Crumple the list and eat it. Or throw it in a bonfire while walking counter-clockwise. Laminate it on styrofoam and throw knives at it. Like I said, I am a fountain of creative ideas. I can't help myself. Wish I could.

The real tragedy is not missing out on the life you wanted. The real tragedy is missing out on the life you've got.