The surrogate provides short-term satisfaction. Lacking healthy nutrition, it requires ever higher doses for the same satisfaction. In the long run, it exhausts.
Smoking, alcohol and drugs can break down the strength to resist overuse, making addiction increasingly difficult to stop.
But property, power and sex are also addictive when meaning and love are missing. There are many forms of addiction in which people encapsulate an unhealthy way of life.
Addictions take away the vision of healthy solutions. People delude themselves that they are better off in their safe inner space.
Yet they too have an inner compass. Somewhere they do feel that something is wrong. That they too want to be loved and meaningful in a bigger picture, however deeply they have tucked that away.