It happened again. I was sitting at home bored, and I was going to go back to do the same thing I do every day: read, learn, write, and spend time with my wife.

I guess I couldn't help myself. Why read when I can do that? Why learn when I can fly high? Why spend time with my wife if I can be content within myself?

And so I took out my iPad and turned on my video game. It's amazing, that game. It sucks me in from the moment I touch it. I'll turn it on and suddenly three hours will pass. Soon I was hooked more and more. I stopped reading, and I stopped writing, and I spent less time with my wife.

There's always this voice in my head that tells me:

Elad, it's OK. You're still doing well at your work. You're getting along just fine with your wife. Your kids are asleep. Let yourself enjoy this time.

I hate that voice. It's the sneakiest, evilest voice in the world. It's the "reasonable voice". And it's the voice that's hooked me to every addiction I've ever had. I have this thing they call an "addictive personality". When I find something I love, something that turns me on, that captures my mind, I suck it up like a man lost in the desert sucks up water.

In college, I became a big pot smoker. I had never touched the stuff in high school. But I became friends with some big pot smokers in college, and they were big fans of saying things like, "Pot isn't addictive, man!' and "Gateway drug, man? Come on!" Honestly, I could see that they were right. Most of them didn't do any other drugs. Some of them smoked a lot of pot, but others didn't. They had that reasonable voice in their heads, too.

It took me years, but I finally shook that addiction. But the voice wasn't done with me. This time, it spoke to me about poker. I mean, I was making money from it. Sure, I was an emotional wreck, but that was always a problem for me.

It took my going broke, completely, hopelessly broke, to finally wake up. And to finally start on the road towards living a balanced life.

For years, I used that voice to justify my addictions. From video games to pot to poker. These were all things that many people consider "safe" or at least not overly harmful. Great rewards for a hard day's work. For so many years, I've tried to figure out what it was about these things that I've seen as so dangerous. Was it really just an addictive personality? I'm much more stable now, and playing video games hasn't destroyed my life. So why did I choose to stay away?

Recently, I've realized that this "addictive" thing that's alive in me is more like an overactive imagination, and an intense desire for meaning. When I enter a video game, I am, within seconds, changing the world. I am saving countries from annihilation. I am building up an army of unstoppable warriors. And the music is awesome. In other words, video games give me meaning.

I had the same feeling with pot. The moment I sucked it into my lungs, coughed, and felt the high seep into my veins, I felt this powerful feeling of meaning. Music was more alive. Watching movies was powerful. I'd have conversations with friends that felt incredibly deep.

With poker, I'd walk into the casino and I'd hear the voices of people cheering in glee or screaming at unfair hands ringing through the room. Once I was in the game, I was in a world where fortunes were made and lost; where drama reigned supreme. The problem with these things always began, though, when I wasn't in them. When I would turn off that video game. When I would come down from my high. When I left the casino. Suddenly, I would be out of my imagination and in my life.

Because of poker or pot or video games, I didn't have time to do other things. I didn't have time to do the things that mattered to me; writing, learning, connecting with the people who mattered to me. Over time, I've realized that this is what the reasonable voice keeps trying to get me to avoid seeing. It's what recently tricked me into thinking I was justified in playing video games again.

Because it's true: in theory I could live a perfectly happy, healthy life playing video games. Or playing poker on the side. Or maybe even smoking pot, if I was smart about it. But it would be a life where I would be giving up on the things that make me whole, on the time that I use to take my life from normal and productive to incredible and full of meaning. Because it is those moments after work, those times when I can relax, kick back, and do anything in the world that transform my life.

The time I take to read gives me real meaning. When I write, I am more alive than I am doing anything else. When I spend time with my wife, my life becomes rich.

What's hard about them, at first, is that they don't suck me in the way video games and pot did. They don't make me feel like I'm changing the world with the flick of a switch. Deeper meaning doesn't come quickly, but slowly. But the meaning I get from them is real, and it goes with me wherever I go. A meaning that I can feel without being directly attached to something.

This is why I feel simultaneously worried and resigned about the legalization of pot in Colorado. I'm resigned because I think that if people want a way to distract themselves, they will always find a way. Pot is really just a chemical form of the empty meaning people find in video games and poker.

But I am worried because I think of the legalization as a symbol. A symbol that the world has become more accepting of living a mediocre life. A life that isn't spent trying to turn every moment into a transformative event that brings us higher and higher. Instead, I hear more and more "reasonable voices" discussing pot. I hear them sounding like my friends in college: "It doesn't destroy lives! People can live perfectly healthy lives while smoking it."

These are reasonable arguments. But the reasonable nature belies the danger of pot: that it creates a false sense of meaning. It is a temporary way of filling the hole within us. All we really want is to live a life that is true to who we are; to live a glorious, beautiful, productive life, connected to something larger. And the more we accept pot and other distractions as perfectly normal, the more we are accepting mediocrity.

I'm sure pot will become legal in more places. I'm sure we'll all start to accept it more. I'm sure video games will continue to be so ubiquitous. And poker will grow, even online.

The question we all have to ask ourselves, though, is whether accepting these things means that we should accept a world where the goal is to simply live until we die.