Addiction: Stairway to heaven or step toward gates of hell?

Home > Opinion > Meanwhile

Addiction: Stairway to heaven or step toward gates of hell?

Published: 28 Nov. 2025, 00:05

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Yang Sung-hee

The author is a columnist at the JoongAng Ilbo.

A contributor to “Addiction” (2022), written by Kim Ji-hyo and others, describes social media as a hierarchy built on visible affection. “It feels like there is such a thing as a face worth a million followers or a face worth a hundred thousand,” he says. The number of followers, he adds, shows “how much love I am getting,” and becomes a kind of ranking system. “If this were a game, I would be in the gold tier.”

The cover of “Addiction,” published in 2022 and written by Kim Ji-hyo and co-authors. [MINUMSA]

The collection examines the many ways addiction threads through ordinary life. It argues that a life without any fixation is dull, yet excessive attachment can become an illness. The essay on social media addiction shows how validation turns into a metric and how desire for recognition reinforces dependence.

Another account in the book features a woman in her sixties who has struggled with depression. “I like cigarettes more than food,” she says. Each morning she drinks cold water, makes coffee at the sink, sits on the veranda in a rocking chair and smokes. “It is wonderful. It tastes unbelievably good.” Her ritual shows how comfort can mask deeper unease. As Richard Wilkinson notes, addictions born from anxiety are false solutions. Johann Hari writes that the opposite of addiction is not a pure state of clarity but connection.

The book also explores obsessions that are not harmful. In eighteenth century Korea, people who immersed themselves in specific passions were often dismissed as strange. Yet these individuals brought creativity to a rigid society. Scholar Noh Kyung-hee writes that they became forerunners of modern enthusiasts. They devoted themselves to paintings, books, stones, swords or travel, cutting across classes from aristocrats to commoners and entertainers.

One figure, Jo Sin-seon, became known as a book “addict” who cared more about books as objects than about their content. He traded books across the country and eventually gained a reputation for understanding the world with unusual clarity. His attachment, once mocked, became a source of insight.

“Addiction is the only path through which finite human beings can grasp a sense of the eternal,” Noh writes. It can be a staircase to heaven or a step toward the gates of hell. “But who can say? What we believe to be heaven may in fact be someone else’s hell, and what everyone calls hell may turn out to be our own heaven.”

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.