Life doesn’t have to be so unsatisfactory. This is the good news: there is a cause to our confusion and suffering—it is our relationship to craving—and that cause can be altered to bring about a different effect. Notice that here, we don’t say it’s craving itself that’s the problem. That’s just a natural phenomenon of the conditioned heart- mind. No, the problem lies in our addiction to satisfying the craving. We all experience craving. When we have a pleasant experience, we crave more of it—we wish for it to increase or at least to last. When we have an unpleasant experience, we crave for it to go away. We feel the need to escape from pain, to destroy it and to replace it with pleasure. This is especially true for the addict, who has set in motion a long-term habitual reaction of avoiding pain and creating pleasure with substances or behaviors he or she became addicted to.⁠