A short story begins...
(please read this first)
As Joe stood, the bead of sweat that had been welling on his forehead trickled down, leaving behind it a thin trail. The smoke that hung in the air and the hushed voices of the listeners were almost enough to make him run.
He wasn't the first. There had been Katie, the alcoholic, and Davy, the heroin addict, but this was his turn...
"I'm Joe, and I'm a consumer..."
"Hello Joe," the crowd responded. He didn't know whether to feel relieved, or bolt.
"I've been clean for two weeks, three days, six hours and..." He paused to check his watch, "thirteen minutes."
The crowd began to clap, some to cheer, but he could tell that they weren't convinced.
His addiction had echoes in their own experiences. While he had no physical compulsion, no tangible cold-turkey, his was the trigger, the source of each of their addictions.
Joe, a recovering consumer, was surrounded by consumers, by those who turned to the drink, the hit, or the toke for solace. Each on an endless search for that feeling of happiness, that temporary high, to aleviate the deep throb of their bitter pain.
The precision of the last words off his lips revealed the struggle that the last two-and-a-bit weeks had been. The whole time he had battled with a nagging feeling that it is impossible to recover from this affliction. Can someone really live in the twenty-first century, in the 'developed' west, as a non-consumer? Is there a feasible model for such an existence?
Joe knew how easy it is to replace one vice for another, like the heroin addicts turning to cigarettes, or the alcoholics becoming 'religious.' Deep inside his longing was not for an alternative dependancy, but for freedom, freedom from that hopeless numbness that led him to consume. Freedom from the 'I' that day by day tightened it's grip upon his senses. He could barely remember a time when he was connected, where he didn't feel the need for alcohol to mediate his contact with his fellow man, or when the television, playstation, or broadband wasn't a medium for escapism.