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.

Want, want, mine

[image: a coal mine in Wyoming, from Wikipedia commons]
I have always been pretty uninterested in history, except to respond to the reports of great harm. The history presented to me as a girl was clearly about men wanting power and territory for reasons that seemed abstract. It was like a sort of outdoor stage play, a world a poet said, "where ignorant armies clash by night."

But recently a friend mentioned to me the idea put forth by an economist that all history is about scarcity. The scarcity of resources. Ah. I like great unifying theories. "Oil," I said, thinking of the wars in my lifetime.

So I have been thinking more about this, and I want to take it a little further, to look behind the word "scarcity." I think it means -

there is not enough of this for all of us, and I want it, and I think I need it to survive, or to live the way I want to live, therefore I want to own it. To keep it as mine.

But how much is the battle ever really about necessities, about having a drink of clean water? About a place to put up a little shelter? (In fact, battles often creates hordes of refugees gathered in places where it is almost impossible to provide clean water and simple sanitation, let alone livelihood and food.) I put the quote above in red, the color of desire and of blood.

It fascinated me to watch my grandson learn to talk. Pre-verbal, he learned to shake his head No vigorously, so right away he wanted to say "No" and say it often. Self-definition. Soon after came the shrieked "Want!" Boy, could that kid attach to a want. And then, as every preschool teacher knows, comes "Mine!" So the teachers concentrate on teaching kids how to share, a good idea, but one that doesn't usually apply to adult life or video games. Imagine a game where you win by giving away the most? Hmmm. You'd still have to get it. Hard to imagine a game, since games tend to be about competition and winning. Winning points. Useless.

So take oil. Oil is scarce. By that I mean, we don't have enough here in America to do what we want to do. Right? For decades, liberal thinkers have suggested we learn to do with less oil, to destroy less of the world's finite resources and cultivate the endless bounty of the sun - endless until we build a cloud around this earth making even that impossible. But there is something attractive about violence, about destroyers and aircraft carriers and jets flying in formation. Dropping bombs and shooting guns is fun, I hear. Is that a different story, or is it more of the desire for excitement and personal power? Desire.

So it seems to me the Buddha was right, suffering is caused by desire. It is definitely not just personal, not just about how we make ourselves crazy longing for a certain person's love or trying to get ourselves a different-looking body or buying things we can't afford. We are part of the world. Want, want, mine, our behavior to get what we want, in fact every step we take, every breath we take extends us into the world.

Knowing this leads to some uncomfortable personal questions. What does it mean to the world that I want to be cool in summer, hate to sweat, actually, and turn on the air conditioner? Ah, the power plant runs on coal strip-mined in Appalachia and brought here on trains . . . .