[C]ontemporary seekers of authenticity often lack any but the vaguest ethical or religious commitments. Their obsession with “meaning” masks its absence from any frame of reference outside the self. . . . The effort to re-create a coherent sense of selfhood seems fated to frustration. Every failure inaugurates a new psychic quest, until the seeker

As a clinician later described it to her, addiction always ends up as a “narrowing of repertoire”: life contracts to a fixation on what you can’t live without, and the rhythms of a day, a life, are engineered to secure this thing that never satisfies, is never enough.