The average individual loves having an addiction. These addictions come in many shapes and sizes. A couple prevalent addictions that plague our society:

  • Posting your food to social media
  • Binge watching television shows endlessly
  • Engaging in idiotic online debates
  • Collecting funko pops like mini-inmates trapped in boxy prison cells stacked on your shelf
  • Getting sucked into your smartphone like Odysseus’ crew succumbing to The Sirens
  • And of course, there are the tried-and-true addictions such as swimming in a pool of alcohol and/ or skiing the slopes of cocaine

 

Based on no research and relying on unfounded conjecture, there is an unspoken addiction that has permeated through society for over a century. That addiction is ChapStick.

If our lips were the Sahara Desert, ChapStick is the oasis. An oasis that continuously dries up and we need more and more and more until our lips themselves are nothing more than a flavored waxy covering. A shell of our natural lips that once were. Every swipe of the stick providing a little shot of dopamine to keep us applying lip balm for all eternity. Through no analysis or professional due diligence, it is believed that some lifelong addicts will request their coffin to be filled with waxy goo so they can be preserved like a prehistoric mosquito in amber while being lowered into their final cherry-flavored resting place.

Beyond wax, many lip balms include numbing agents such as camphor which leads to the question, are we all addicted to ChapStick in an effort to numb ourselves to this dark dark world? And you know, why shouldn’t we? Why shouldn’t we keep applying numbing agents in a world of starvation wages? Maybe we need to moisten our lips because our voices are already drowned out in the cacophony of mundane online content such as I Hope This Is News.

Maybe the circular tubes of lip balm are the structural columns holding up civilization. For a world without ChapStick we turn to the Percy Shelley poem, Ozymandias:

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away

 

So pick your poison. Cherry, strawberry, original, spearmint, vanilla or even medicated! In the debated words of Charles Bukowski, “Find what you love, and let it kill you.”