We're a culture coming clean. Coming to terms with our propensity toward addiction. And excess. So the pendulum swings, as we disown anything that smacks of fixation, shunning obsession, paring our life down to the basics, now measured and fueled by self-control. Becoming, with little irony, all the more fixated and obsessed. To which Kurt Vonnegut (Fates Worse Than Death) writes:
"To all my friends and relatives in Alcoholics Anonymous," I began, "I say that they were right to become intoxicated. Life without moments of intoxication is not worth 'a pitcher of spit,' as the felicitous saying goes. They simply chose what was for them a deadly poison on which to get drunk.
"Good examples of harmless toots are some of the things children do. They get smashed for hours on some strictly limited aspect of the Great Big Everything, the Universe, such as water or snow or mud or colors or rocks (throwing little ones, looking under big ones), or echoes or funny sounds from the voice box or banging on a drum and so on."
— Terry Hershey, Soul Gardening