Enjoy your job…or are you…addicted?
          There is a difference.
          Addiction, we assume, is the fare regularly served up at the end of plastic straws for snorting off a mirror and needles for puncturing abused skin. 
Sure, there is addiction to gambling, sexuality, lying, over-eating, golf and, the ultimate junkie, the chocoholic.
But there is another addiction few of us talk about or admit to:  work. 
All addictive behavior provides a “high.”  “Getting high” is not segregated to ingested chemicals.  Ask a runner.  After the first agonizing mile, the feet seem to barely kiss the surface of the road and it feels like your body is flying (I get the impression not many of you runners are identifying with this analogy).
So what is the “high” for working? 
You, undoubtedly will say, “The money.”  Well, if that was the case why do most people stand around at coffee break carping about their resulting depression when they pick up their weekly check? 
No, the “high” in work is discovering the space we abhor and complain about actually dishes up huge portions of self-worth.  Most of us do not feel comfortable saying it out loud in our workplace (because of accusations of “sucking up” to some boss), but people who get more “worth” from his/her job, in contrast to anywhere else in his/her life, will quickly become addicted to work.
If you think this is sick, you are right.  When a job description becomes the sum total of who I am as a person, I can hear pathology knocking at the door. 
I see workplace addiction all the time.  These addicted people have moved the “center of intimacy” from their homes/private lives to the office.  Realistically, they would rather be a work because they get more “highs,” more “strokes,” more “recognition” than in their personal lives.
You got it; they do not have a life.
         Want to know if you are among the “hooked-on-work” crowd?  Here is a short quiz.  Just answer “yes” or “no” to the following five questions.

• Do you normally work more than 60 hours a week?
• Do you regularly come back from vacations exhausted and cannot wait to get back to work?
• Do you regularly say, “This job will be the death of me”?
• Do you normally work through lunch?
• Do you constantly talk about work when at home?

If you answered, “yes” to three or more of those questions, there may be addiction smeared on your time card.
Peter Block, a noted business writer, said, “People who bring their bodies to work and leave their brains at home, will destroy us.”  These are the people who consider work just showing up.  All of us can get up a head of steam about these louts who languish in our organizations.
It is my opinion that equally as dangerous are the addicts who mainline on opening and closing the office because their identity, as a person, is what he/she does, not who he/she is. 
This is a one-dimensional person who expects everyone else to adhere to the credo of crazed.  They infect others with a tantalizing message that, if we just work hard enough, we will unlatch the secret of our humanity. 
When the doors are locked, the lights turned off and the spreadsheets printed, no one hears the haunting emptiness of this obsessed life rung out in the pursuit of a higher ROI.
Entrepreneurs, senior management and anyone in the helping professions (education, health, safety, religious) are especially vulnerable.  Who can argue with using up a life chasing a dream, keeping others employed, teaching our children, performing life-saving operations or placing someone’s hand in the palm of God?
I love my work, but I love my life much more.  If I could never speak or write again, my life would be difficult, but it would not be over.  My greatest legacy to those who try to find my footprints in the sands of history will not be an IRA account or audiocassette series on assertiveness. 
It will be a balanced life, glued together by lots of work, love, family, friendship and quiet moments that echo with the beat of a grateful heart.