The hungry ghost at the desk

A belly without a bottom

On the Buddhist Wheel of Life there live hungry ghosts: beings with enormous bellies and mouths as small as a pinhead. They eat constantly and are never full. The Canadian physician Gabor Maté named his book on addiction after them, and the image is worth keeping. The hunger is not in the food. It is in the ratio between the emptiness and the opening.

Maté spent twelve years among people with severe drug addictions in Vancouver. What struck him there is useful well beyond that neighbourhood: addiction, in his view, turns less on the substance than on what the substance softens. Freely retold, he argues that you should not ask why someone is addicted, but why they are in pain.

The addiction that gets applause

The uncomfortable part of his story is about himself. Maté writes openly that he was a workaholic doctor, always reachable, always needed. He also bought classical music compulsively, disc after disc, for sums he lied about to his wife. His explanation for the working, freely rendered in his own words: if they will not want me, at least they will need me.

For anyone building something, that is a mirror with sharp edges. Work is the only addiction society rewards. The entrepreneur still writing quotations at midnight gets no intervention but admiration. His revenue grows, his team looks up to him, and nobody asks what he feels when things go quiet.

This is interpretation, not fact: not every long working day is a symptom. There are periods in which a company simply asks everything, and there are people who find a deep and healthy fulfilment in their work. The difference is not in the number of hours. It is in what those hours are for.

A test that is not a diagnosis

Work addiction does not appear in the DSM-5, the manual psychiatrists use to make diagnoses. The only behavioural addiction formally listed there is gambling. That matters, because it means nobody can tell you objectively where hard work turns into addicted work.

Maté's working definition of addiction can still serve as a mirror. Do you do something in which you find temporary relief or pleasure? Do you crave it when it is absent? Does it have harmful consequences, for your health, your relationships, your sleep? And do you find yourself unable to stop, even when you want to?

Hold your working week up against that. Not to give yourself a label, but to see which question you would rather skip.

Something to take with you: imagine your company has to run for a week without you tomorrow, no email, no phone, no "just checking". What do you feel first: relief or unease? That first reaction tells you more than any schedule.

The strongest counterpoint

There is a serious objection to this whole lens. Anyone who sees addiction everywhere empties the word. If devotion, ambition and perseverance all become suspect, we lose our words for something valuable. Great things are rarely built in forty hours a week, and there is little evidence that working intensely is harmful in itself when recovery, sleep and relationships hold up.

Maté also emphasises pain and childhood experience above all. Researchers such as Marc Lewis see addiction rather as a learning process of the brain, and heredity demonstrably plays a part. Not every workaholic carries an old wound. Sometimes it is simply a brain that has learned a ticked-off task is the quickest reward of the day.

What to do with it

The usable core lies between the two positions. Do not ask whether you work too hard. Ask what your work is for. If it is an expression of what you want to build, it is craftsmanship. If it is an anaesthetic for what you would rather not feel, it is a hungry ghost in a clean shirt.

A simple experiment: schedule a block of time each week in which you produce nothing and optimise nothing. See what happens. If it becomes rest, there is nothing wrong. If it becomes unease, you have found something that deserves more attention than your next quotation.

If you feel that work, substances or behaviour are taking over your life, discuss it with your doctor. In the Netherlands, if you are having thoughts of death: 113 Suicide Prevention, call 113 or 0800-0113, or chat via 113.nl.