Unbetitelt

Emancipated duels. Photo by Pavel Kurmilev

Swords: drawn

Finished stitching my Oversight series.

Recovery is boring. And I can't do proper photography. So I have put together a wireless setup to capture various birds while I am resting in bed. I have a security camera that alerts me to motion and I can trigger my camera with a little remote control.

These are the fruits of my project so far.

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.

And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.

And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.

“Oh but they took it way too far, I never would”. First of all, beating children doesn’t just affect their brain overtime - it affects your brain too. When you let yourself hurt someone when they do something you don’t like and to force their compliance, especially with objects that allows you to cause much more pain and damage with a lot less physical exertion, escalation is the predictable physiological response. That’s like saying “I can do heroin and not get addicted” Maybe you can, maybe you can’t, but you’re certainly playing a dangerous game that can go wrong faster than you think. When you use corporal punishment, you are rewarding your brain for committing violence against your child, that’s what you don’t want to say but it’s reinforcing for you when you hit your kid and they instantly comply and you regulated your own frustration in the process. If they stop reacting to the current level of punishment and you start adding things like stress positions or forced exercise (which also contributed to a lot of these kids deaths and are a form of violence) or more and more hits. And let’s be fucking real, you all say “I don’t hit out of anger” but you likely don’t even have the emotional intelligence to know what you feel if you’re beating children with objects. Yes, you’re gonna hit your kid more and have less control when you’re angry because that is how all humans work.

And secondly, even if we say that you would never go too far - that may be true, but how do you know the people hearing you joke about “whooping” kids won’t go too far? How do you really know what is happening in their homes behind closed doors that you are normalizing to them and to their children? You never can. Some kids are old enough to be on social media and still experiencing this, or they’re at the gatherings where you’re saying these things in real life. Imagine if someone saying “Yeah, I whoop my kids too haha” is actually whipping a toddler bloody and making them stand in stress position for hours after? And you in front of that person and in front of their victim laughed and endorsed that? How would you feel if you found out that child died like this and you laughed and agreed with the torture they were experiencing? Is that worth it? You may have made it that much harder for the victim to ask for help because now they think everyone is okay with this. You don’t know what you’re actually normalizing when you normalize violence against small, mentally and physically vulnerable children so how about we just fucking don’t since there is literally not one benefit to hitting or otherwise physically hurting children (again, forced exercise and stress positions aren’t better) over not hitting children.

Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isn’t monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except “a behavior I personally disapprove of.”

Addiction is not “I enjoy stimulation.” It is not “I have habits.” It is not “I seek input before I produce output.” Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.

When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about “dopamine” is not enlightened. It’s sloppy. Unserious, even.

There’s also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isn’t explicitly productive, it must be rot. We’ve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.

What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly you’re “stimulus addicted.” If you can’t brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now it’s framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.

This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesn’t trend. Alarmism does.

There’s also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having “bad dopamine habits.” It’s easier to diagnose people’s scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.

Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. That’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.

When I hear the word “addiction” tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesn’t sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.

When I went outside with my camera, almost all of them scurried away into the darkness.

Except the littlest one.

I can't say we bonded or became friends. But he decided not to be bothered by my presence, as there were leftover peanuts about. (A blue jay knocked over the entire dish of bird food. I have since secured the dish with the power of magnetism.)