Anyone who’s ever been addicted to something will know what I’m on about. I’m talking about plugging in.

It’s the thrill of connecting to something that carries an almost electric charge for us: an experience, a relationship, a substance, a community, a religion, a status. It can be as bland as the pap of TV soaps, or as intense as shooting up smack or getting fucked bareback. It can be as “healthy” as working out at the gym seven days a week or as “destructive” as smoking. It can be as “ordinary” as being a workaholic, or as “extreme” as not being able to pass a public toilet without going in and hunting for sex. It can be as deceptive as constantly looking after others, or as obvious as the guy drinking meths on the park bench. Fame, the new religion, has us all wanting to plug into “reality” television shows, where we can feed off the hype of celebrity.

Sometimes people live their lives “plugged in” and don’t have time to notice that it’s what they’re doing. People who miraculously go from partner to partner and are never single may be doing it. Someone who drinks or gets stoned every day may never notice it. It’s not necessarily a problem – it’s when people put a hell of a lot of energy into avoiding what James Hillman calls the “spirit of loneliness”. Some people succeed, and it only catches up with them when they are bereaved, or their liver packs in.

If you peel your eyes, you can see when people are doing it. When someone poor is buying ten or twenty Lotto tickets, they may not be aware of the thrilling anxiety that they are fixing on, but it’s palpable if you’re standing behind them, taking in their body language. When someone is In Love, and speaks with a catch in the throat about how extraordinary their new paragon of beauty, warmth and virtue is, and you feel queasy as their eyes glaze over: they’re plugging in. When someone you’re with persuades you to get kinky in bed, and you aren’t sure, and it dawns on you that their high is really nothing to do with you, that’s plugging in.

People describe it in many different ways, most of them pejorative. Co-dependency, for the person who repeatedly attracts a partner (married already, commitment-phobic, abusive) guaranteed to provide a gratifying voltage of grief and angst. The higher the current, the greater the buzz, and the more dangerous it gets. “Battered wife syndrome” is plugging in taken to one of its most extreme forms, when violence itself is the charge that attracts. A “dry drunk” is someone who ostensibly has given up the drink, but is still living their life in “alcoholic” ways, fixing on people, routines and things, trying to control their environment and everyone around them. Obese people are unfortunate in that their way of plugging in, comfort eating, is obvious to us all – they make us uncomfortable; we wish that they could find a more discreet way of doing it. Gay men on the scene are experts at it, those who can’t keep away from the pubs and clubs because they get off on the thrill of new encounters, the ego-boosting world-is-our-oyster promise of eyes locking across a crowded room. Smokers are the pluggers-in who require quite a bit of bravery at the moment; defiantly demonstrating their pleasure as they suck in the toxins. Their voltage is lethal, and all the more satisfying for it.(I’m nine months off them now. I don’t miss them. Much.) People who rage at the world, or perpetually allow themselves to be wounded by the world, or get off on shocking the world, all plugging in. Need I mention those out to save the world, the ecstasy of the religious zealot enjoining us to plug into Jesus? There are socially acceptable ways of plugging in: currently consumerism is the approved way, retail therapy to make us feel as if we’re involved, by letting brands plug into us.

I’m calling it plugging in because when you stop, it can feel like the lights are switched off, the warmth has gone, and there’s nobody home. The emptiness, the isolation, the despair of not connecting, can drive us crazy. Like cutting a psychic umbilical cord. The struggle that has occupied us for so long, that has distracted us from our existential isolation, is no longer there – and it feels like we’re thrown into a dismembering eye-popping freezing vacuum. We are lost in space, banished from any source of heat or light, no power. It’s as if we forget that we are alive. And, sometimes, if the pain is bad enough, we don’t care whether we are alive or not. If we can’t plug in to the voltage of life that we’re familiar with, if we can’t keep ourselves busy with our constant search for it, then what is there? Just us? On our own? For many of us, that prospect is too horrifying, for we don’t believe that we can survive it. Far better to keep connected to the source of our confusion, our suffering, our mystery, the tragic human flaw that serves to undo us in the end, then to just be, by ourselves, alone, and to be content with that.

I think, if you’re a plugger-in, and probably most of us are in some way, the knack is to recognise it and then to plug into something worthwhile. I’m a great believer in creativity being the best place to work out our demons; if we can translate our struggle with loneliness into something that communicates our life experience to another, then we have succeeded in changing the void of space into something: an awareness that there are plenty of others out there, just like us, coping the best we can with being on our own. Indeed, far from being a terrifying pitch black, space – when we really allow ourselves to go there, and face our isolation – is a tapestry of light, a shimmering grey carpet of stars, surrounding us.