(FORTUNE Magazine) – I was having my second martini the other night after work with my pal Bob, who insists on sticking to chardonnay. Most of the time we talk about things of mutual interest, but sometimes we just drink. After achieving a certain common altitude, we depart our pleasant tavern. I go to my train. He humps it back to the office, because he is in Finance, and the mercantile grindings of the corporation never cease, while I am not, and I do.

We used to engage in this little rite perhaps once a quarter. Then it was a monthly engagement. Then every two or three weeks, then weekly. Now we drop by the watering hole maybe two, three times a week when we're both in town and things are waxing aggravating.

That's how it is with habits. They turn into addictions, grab hold of you, and don't let you go until you break them, if you can, if you choose to, if it's even advisable, which a lot of the time it isn't, you know. Who would we be without a bouquet of physical and emotional dependencies?

A lot of people are snarky about guys like Bob and me, who suck up perhaps a bit too much vodka, gin, sangria, Scotch, or wine on any given evening, just as we all are about the poor slobs who abuse their veins or noses with more debilitating stuff, particularly if they have no expense accounts to feed their habits. But the addictions we enjoy are many and varied. Most of us have more than one and feed our list every day. They make it possible, in some way, for us to go on.

There are the cravings to which all of us are prey. Food, for instance. And water. But the weirdnesses to which our contemporary flesh is heir? Get out of here. Like the need for the same Cobb salad each day? Or halibut, taken in tiny squares devoid of sauce? That's a form of dementia. So is our need for water that comes in a bottle. Just look at everybody walking down the street with their stupid bottles of water. Aren't we a bunch of losers?

Many women, and even some men, are addicted to lip balm. This may seem harmless until you are stuck in a car on the Interstate with, say, my daughter, and she realizes that she has left her works elsewhere. "We have to take the next exit," she will murmur with a tremble in her voice, rummaging through her bag. "I can't believe I left my ChapStick in the other purse." Like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, she has lip balm squirreled away in many locations, possibly stopping short of a stash in the ceiling light fixture, but maybe not. It's harmless, except for the effect it has on her lips, which turn dry and aggrieved now without their periodic fix of goo.

My old boss, Walt, was addicted to his little masking-tape roller, which he employed to remove lint from his clothing. He never did so frivolously or lightly. Some weighty matter would arise, Walt would have trouble articulating his thoughts on it, and whoops, out would come the little roller. First one leg would be de-linted. Then the other.

Me, I'm addicted to a lot of stuff besides the martini that graces the end of my day. I'm physically dependent on my BlackBerry, as are most of my pals around the corporation and a whole bunch of you bozos too. Don't say you're not.

I'm addicted to the act of purchasing. Every Saturday morning I awaken with a tingling in my tummy and the nugget of an idea in my head about how I might spend a couple hundred bucks on something. Last weekend I bought a color printer for the remarkable price of $79 (after rebate), a new GameCube for $99 (the old one had broken and would cost more to fix than to replace), and a large red bougainvillea for some ungodly sum, which looked very nice at a corner of my garden. I spend, therefore I am. And I feel better, at least until my next fix.

In that, I don't think I'm any different from my chairman. He just likes to mainline major acquisitions of other companies. When he can't, he gets as testy as those guys who shoot their cars when they're coming down too hard, too fast.

Those crazy dudes who want to blow up our financial buildings? They're high on hate, which they feed with intermittent bouts of prayer. That's a lot worse, I suppose, than being high on love with equal piety thrown in for morale purposes, although almost as many depredations have been visited on humanity by people who were driven by that. Just google the word "Crusades" sometime.

Power. Money. The latest iBook. We're all jonesing after something to take the edge off our common destination. When I was a kid, it was sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Now it's those little Altoid strips that you put on your tongue. They sting but they make your breath bodacious. I started with one every now and then, sometime last year. Now I've got to stick about an entire pack in my mouth just to give myself a decent buzz.

Stanley Bing is an executive at a FORTUNE 500 company he'd rather not name. He is the author of two recent books: The Big Bing, a collection of essays, and You Look Nice Today, a novel. He can be reached at stanleybing@aol.com.