Lately, in my neck of the woods, many denizens have their hands full juggling coffees, phones and leashes: their dose of caffeine, dopamine and oxytocin. Often their dogs waylay me for pats, as if ecstatic to see my hands free. Do all these smartphones, coffees to go, and dogs bred to live indoors lend comfort as global instability soars?

Having spent the last six months creatively inspired by light and weather changes and the budding, blooming and fading of flowers, I feel out of step with the yuppie lifestyle around me. Of course I’m getting my fix too, but what sparks my neurons is a dawn-tinged sky or the din of crickets. There are worse addictions.

During the ’90s, after a breakup with an alcoholic, I stumbled upon the twelve steps. I’d known of AA, but not that it had been adapted for other kinds of addicts as well as their partners, friends and relatives. So I found some fellowships and learned about how addiction and codependency form a system.

Addicts cause chaos. Codependents crave control. Yet twelve-step programs can help both – once they become willing to ‘hand it over’ to ‘the God of [their] understanding’ or a ‘Higher Power’. Until then, some codependents hide out in denial, avoid conflict through co-addiction, or pressure the addict to quit.

My mother favoured denial. Except on Friday nights when my father came home pissed as a newt. Her hissy fits pissed me off more than his excuses, and by the age of sixteen I was drinking too much too. From then on, at intervals, I got involved with addicts. The first time, denial worked until I had a breakdown. The next time, I tried to meet the addict halfway, but couldn’t keep up. Still, I learned lots about addiction. So I tried to save the next addict. But to ignore, adopt or try to change an addict’s behaviour enables it. Twelve-step fellowships gave me insight into my own behaviour and, with time, addicts lost their magic.

Yet the twelve steps gets a bum rap in our culture. Comedians send it up. Critics cite its low success rate. As if recovery were a product, not a process – because capitalism prizes results. Abstinence is bad for business. Salaried addicts make ideal consumers. Yet too much productivity can kill. Increasing exploitation of workers in a race to produce more, faster, ensures their reliance on uppers, downers, pain meds and psych drugs.

So how does an addict quit unless they hit rock bottom? Who wants to admit that their life has become unmanageable? And codependent conditioning can be even harder to kick. With substances, you can see temptation coming. But where does codependency begin and end? The havoc addicts wreak can suck you into their orbit and keep you busy dealing with the fallout. A child who never grew up, the addict rebels and disrupts, and the codependent reacts by making rules for them to break.

Move fast and break things, once a mantra at Facebook, and the norm for Big Tech and the US president, also goes for natural catastrophes. More of which we can anticipate unless World War III distracts us. Meanwhile, the co-addictive dynamic plays out collectively. Bent on total control through nannyism and censorship, the left has enabled its shadow: the addict. Yet too few voters notice that leaders on both sides are puppets manipulated by one master. Regardless of who has the upper hand, the vast corporate body to which both left and right must answer continues to wage war on humanity while trashing the planet.

Like codependents blaming addicts, the left deems the right evil. Addiction isn’t a demon, though, nor any kind of presence, but a process spawned in the absence of other rewards. Yet brain chemistry explanations ignore the existential dimension. Addiction fills a hole or deadens pain. Projected on a grand scale, it’s the triumph of the will, the primacy of the individual – like, say, the wannabe dictator of a totalitarian state, enabled by the teetotalitarian left and its top-down program to swap tall poppies for quotas as it guilt-trips anyone white, male, hetero, cisgender, middle-class, neurotypical and/or abled and pays lip service to the less privileged: codependent compensation for an impaired sense of self.

As with individuals, addiction on the world stage is shameless: a plutocrat or leader whose lust for more moolah, power and territory takes precedence. Everyone for him/her self: the logic of privatisation that speeds the fall of civilisation as the masses get cheated by elites.

Witness Musk and his minions dismantling the vast apparatus designed to keep the excesses of tech titans like him in check despite too little public money ever reaching those who most need it. And the tendency of addicts to act out in full view spurs codependents to preach and proclaim moral superiority, alienating the underclass they purport to defend.

Because addiction is a trickster. It bargains and cuts deals. You just need to water your whisky. Exchange petrol for electricity. The West is in free fall and yet we can’t see the ground rushing up to meet us, with our data increasingly stored in the cloud, worth reduced to virtue signals, wealth reduced to ones and zeroes, health reduced to stats, fake news bouncing off satellites, bullshit spouting from chatbots…

The thing is, codependents, like addicts, hit rock bottoms, and collective descent began before the right wrenched the reins (reign?) from the left. Yet now the left wrings its hands and points fingers as the right binges. How will we know when we’ve bottomed out if we can’t see we’re on the way down?

Yet what if we could wake from the spell cast by Big Tech, dethrone our phones, explore withdrawal and call off the dogs of war? How to exit the treadmill of abuse and/or enabling? In a personal relationship, either party can bail. Tough enough with a shared lease, mortgage, assets, investments, kids, pets etc. But what about on a global scale?

The move to ditch or boycott Teslas and dump Tesla stock sounds good. Ditto pushback from sundry countries against US tariffs. But shifting brand allegiances and changing trade arrangements doesn’t rehabilitate capitalism. As with most hardcore habits, recovery starts after collapse. The only alternative, from a twelve-step standpoint, is to stage an intervention. And good luck with that. So buckle up, folks.

Meanwhile, the twelve steps come with twelve traditions, the last of which defies Western values. Principles before personalities. Hence the need for anonymity. Humility forms the basis for awakening spirituality. To work the twelve steps, an addict surrenders to the care of a higher power, with support from a sponsor, and not the sort who buys ad space. The latter obeys the logic of the market, where traders vie for attention – the antithesis of anonymity. That’s why to be anonymous is uncool online – AI Overview notes its potential for ‘predatory behaviour’ (the irony!) – but far worse than trolls and hackers, from Big Tech’s perspective, anonymity defeats surveillance tactics. Virtuality – used by too many humans to fill a spiritual vacuum – gives Big Tech all the power. A spiritual life offline takes it back.