It is sad beyond words that the human condition is so flawed for so many people that they become neurotically dissatisfied with what life offers them. Their own genetic endowments are found to be faulty, from the inheritance of hair colour and texture to the shape of their bodies. Rarely do people regret that they did not inherit greater intelligence; it is the external, the surface that seems to matter so much.

They reject and find inadequate their genetic endowments, and do everything they can to alter what they can so they can project a physical appearance more approximating in their judgement, what is desirable. In the same token, those born with chronic physical impairment are more likely to accept themselves, while those around them do not, and make targets of them.

Suicidal escapes from reality afflict both those who are dissatisfied with themselves, as well as those plagued with mental illness, and who can find no inner peace, and those whom others afflict with their dislike or disgust at their apparent physical deformities or intellectual backwardness. Human nature is an imperfect instrument too prone to emotional confusion and rejection.

Least understandable is those who are born with beauty and talent, and for whom hard work and good luck bring them fame and fortune. While they revel for a while in their celebrity, and preen and parade themselves before their admirers they become all too readily bored with the level of their success and look for other avenues to give them the highs they crave.

In order to determine how addictive a street drug is, researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland train a rat to press a bar until it gets a shot of the drug. The harder the animal is willing to work to press the bar, the more addictive the drug. Cocaine, almost all other illegal drugs, and even nondrug addictions such as running make the pleasure-giving neurotransmitter dopamine more active in the brain. Dopamine is called the reward transmitter, because when we accomplish something - run a race and win - our brain triggers its release. Though exhausted, we get a surge of energy, exciting pleasure, and confidence and even raise our hands and run a victory lap. The losers, on the other hand, who get no such dopamine surge, immediately run out of energy, collapse at the finish line, and feel awful about themselves. By hijacking our dopamine system, addictive substances give us pleasure without having to work for it. Norman Doige, M.D.

Popular public figures who derive their celebrity from the field of entertainment are notorious for becoming addicted to alcohol and recreational drugs, to a degree that they deliberately, albeit helplessly, endanger their lives. One star in the firmament of popular entertainment after another, of immense talent and tragic self-rejection, makes headline news after losing their lives to their own sense of insecurity and misery.

They've achieved everything they set out to do, and their vast audience cherished their talents and made them wealthy, yet this is not satisfying enough for them to rationally rest on their laurels. They end up spurning normalcy, and in the end, court death.