The Vice

Understanding your bad habits

Category: The Body

You know the thing. The scroll at 2 AM. The third glass when two was the limit. The cigarette you were done with six months ago. The person you keep texting. You’ve promised yourself. Made plans. Set boundaries. You know it’s bad for you. That’s not the mystery. The mystery is why you keep doing it anyway.

The Return

You did it again. The thing you weren’t going to do. The thing you decided against. The thing you promised, yourself, them, God, whoever was listening last time, you were finished with. You’re not finished. You’re doing it right now. Or you just did. Or you’re about to and you know it.

The Function

The vice numbs something. Pain. Anxiety. Boredom. Emptiness. The feeling you can’t sit with. Can’t process. Can’t tolerate. The vice makes it go away. Temporarily. The temporary is enough. Right now. In this moment. The numbing is worth the cost. Until it’s not. Then you do it again anyway.

The Cost

You’re smaller than you were. The vice shrinks you. Narrows your world. Everything becomes about managing the vice. Hiding it. Feeding it. Recovering from it. Your life gets smaller. Your dreams get smaller. You get smaller. Until you barely recognize yourself.

Good Company

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts — Gabor Maté, 2008
Maté explores addiction not as moral failure but as attempted self-repair for unprocessed pain. He writes about what compulsive behaviors are actually doing for us, the numbing, the filling, the temporary relief from unbearable feelings.
Leaving Las Vegas — Mike Figgis, 1995
Ben goes to Vegas explicitly to drink himself to death. The film captures the honesty of knowing something is killing you and doing it anyway, the function the vice serves when living feels unbearable.
Good News for People Who Love Bad News — Modest Mouse, 2004
Isaac Brock writes about self-destruction, compulsion, and the gap between knowing better and doing better. The album holds both the vice’s appeal and its cost without pretending either isn’t real.