Soft addictions are the worst kind

Getting hooked on time wasters steals our lives away

“Hi, my name is Belinda and I’m an addict.”

“Hi, Belinda, welcome to the group.”

“Hello, I’m Geoff and I’m an addict.”

“Hi, Geoff.”

“So Belinda, how was this week for you? Did you make progress?”

“ At first I did really well, Gary. Didn’t do a single one. I only looked at the safe newspapers. And some mags, they’re not a problem. I was really happy, felt great, did lots of other things. I was taking it one day at a time and following the program and remembering how good life could be.”

“ And then? Come along, you have to share with the group.”

“Well it was recycling day and I was putting out the cans and bottles and I spotted my neighbour’s pile of papers and I couldn’t resist, I just couldn’t. Before I knew it I was a goner — I could hear the baby crying and crying and the supper was burning in the oven but I couldn’t get off the sofa until I’d finished.”

“Oh dear, Belinda. We’ll come back to you. What about Geoffrey?”

“ Well, I’m not proud of it but at the end of last week I realized I’d reached a low point. I’d bought a book of the things and because I’m too embarrassed to be seen doing them in public — it’s so nerdy — I tore out the pages and pasted them into a folder of financial reports so everyone in the train would think I was poring over those.”

“Geoff, that’s not good, not good — what’s happened since then?”

“ Well, at our couples therapy my wife gave me an ultimatum, it’s tough love from now on. She told me she’d fallen for a man who read books, not a geek with a puzzle. You know, sometimes I think it’s the words they use I’m seduced by. You get past the Gentle and the Moderate and you start to feel good about yourself when you move on to Tough and Diabolical. It makes you feel you’re doing something, achieving something even.”

“OK group. OK. Geoffrey has brought up a very good point here, a point we all need to take in, and be as honest as we can about our feelings. I think we need our group slogan at this moment in time, don’t we? Just to remember why we’re here? Come on guys, all together now: It’s justa nutha wayuv wastin’ time! And again, once more please: It’s justa nutha wayuv wastin’ time! Now hold that thought. And back to you, Belinda.”

Any parent of teenagers worries about addiction. We feel powerless against the spectre of rehab. There’s no way we can protect them from exposure to addictive substances, wherever we live. But it is not all about substance abuse, or at least abusing the obvious substances. When you really think about their lives, and your own, you realize that much more interesting — because more hidden and more subtle — are our “soft” addictions, the things that aren’t really so bad for us and aren’t proscribed by society but are pointless time wasters. Procrastination is not really the thief of time. The thief of time is the daft things we do with it.

Soft addictions are lovely and we all have them. Some days you just long to flop out and turn on something mindless on TV. There’s a lifestyle guru called Judith Wright, whose book, There Must Be More Than This, claims it’s the soft addictions that wreck most people’s lives, not the hard kind. But if we need them as comfort, they must have a psychological purpose. It may be normal, even healthy, especially for children.

Parents’ moans about how their kids never want to do anything except play computer games, how obsessed they are, always make me think of myself at that age. Definitely considered a problem. I’d hide in cupboards, under my bed, behind the curtains but someone always found me and up would go the cry: “Get your nose out of that book and go outside in the nice, fresh air.” Once in the nice, fresh air — yuck — I became a soft addict of a different kind; we had no television until I was 12 but can Olympiclevel hula-hoop ( waist, neck and wrists all at once) and a PhD in yo-yo be more useful in later life than computer games?

Some soft addictions are productive and healthy: People get addicted to gardening or running in the sense that they miss them badly if they don’t do them. Most aren’t, though. There are socially acceptable addictions that hover at the soft/ hard border: People who are in a filthy mood until they’ve had the third cup of strong tea. The Internet has opened up whole new addictive possibilities: days and nights spent in chat rooms or surfing.

I’m addicted to coffee and to staring out the window and daydreaming, which is the queen of time-wasting, and maybe just another, more limited, way of surfing. So how can I get cross with my son for spending whole afternoons on the PlayStation? Or when, on a long train journey with the teenagers, all the books lie unopened while everyone is poring over a sudoku?

The weekend sudoku puzzle is on WP19.