Addiction is inevitable

Everyone is addicted to something, be it morally good or bad. Them societal description of the term “addiction” turn to be bias as it defines addiction as the devotion to morally wrong activities such as regular drinking of  alcohol and drug consumption.

Addiction is naturally like a two-ways street and goes hand in hand with habit, simply put no habit, no addiction. The more one performs a particular activity, the more that activity become a habit and thus developing into an addiction.

Participation in social media has invaded the lives of young people in the 21^st century to a point that they simply can’t avoid it. One thing about addiction is that it becomes hard to get completely get rid of it once addicted in something, even when the addict feels that their addiction is complicating or dramatizing their lives.

Certain addictions may at times make the addict seem stupid or foolish to spectators and one such addiction is that of using social networking sites such as Mxit, twitter and Facebook. Nowadays it is common to see people laughing alone to their mobile phones in public and you question their mental stability, only to find out they have been laughing at a funny status update by a friend on Facebook or a tweet on twitter.

Many alcohol addicts start consuming alcohol to experiment or to enjoy themselves for a moment and before they know it, they cannot go a single weekend without “one or two beers” and thus addiction takes over their lives. When I first started watching and listening to news on radio and television at the age of 8, I was just a young curious boy who wanted to be informed about the world around him, but today if a day passes without me having listened or watched some news, I go crazy just like an alcohol addict who goes to bed for one day without having had “two beers”.

At the end of the day, we are all addicts in our own nature, but what matters is the progressiveness or lack thereof of an individual’s addiction. This is better explained by a famous Xhosa idiom which states “Umntu yiNkosi ukuzazi” which translates to “Everyone is the Master of his/her own character and personality.