Workaholism and over-entertainment, symptoms of deeper issues

The suppression of feelings has become one of the major forces causing our culture's most destructive addictions, be it workaholism or over-entertainment. 

We fear the quiet moments when emotions might surface, and we abhor the void between tasks where we might have to confront our raw, unadulterated image and our undiluted emotions and feelings.

Instead of espousing quiet moments, discomfort, grief, anxiety, or even joy, we forcefully fill every silent moment with some form of stimulation. 

Work becomes a refuge from our inner turmoils, a place where productivity is a pale substitute for the emptiness we feel and where unwarranted achievements give some meaning to our existence.

We spend time loitering in the streets because going home means facing silence, questions, and feelings we are trying to elude. 

The workaholics are not enamoured with their work, they fear the alternative. They fear the moment when there is nothing left to do but to face themselves, to feel the weight of their past decisions and the burden of their abandoned dreams.
Entertainment has evolved into a mechanism for emotional avoidance, offering us numerous ways to escape our reality. We watch mindless content to drown out the voice that asks uncomfortable questions. We scroll through social media to distract our mind and to lose ourselves in a mindless whirlpool of stimuli. 

We consume an endless stream of music, movies and games , bathing our brain in a flow of stimulations that suppresses real feelings and prohibits their emergence. 

This over-entertainment creates an emotional numbness, where we become consumers of experiences rather than real participants in our own lives. 

As the process of habituation sets in, we realize that we need increasingly intense stimuli to be able to numb ourselves.

The entertainment industry designs products that monopolize our attention and keep us perpetually distracted while offering us the illusion of a life sometimes in the guise of fictional characters that we slip into.

The issue is that feelings, when suppressed, don't just vanish, they accumulate like a body of water behind a dam, eventually causing the dam to crack and break wreaking havoc and destruction.

The workaholic experiences burnouts and bouts of anxiety attacks as their avoided emotions violently surge to the surface.

The "over-entertained" suffers from depression, attention deficit, and a profound sense of meaninglessness.

We mistake entertainment for peace and relaxation. 

Healing, peace and growth can only happen when we develop the courage to turn off distractions and sit quietly with ourselves. 

Authentic living requires us to befriend our emotions rather than to avoid them, to understand them rather than to rationalize them away. 

Until we learn to feel fully, we will continue to live partially, forever running from our true self.