One thing about it, I am finding that ponds and their owners are unique individuals. This is what makes a forum like this one special. Everyone enjoys wildlife and the outdoors, but each individual creates their own ideal pond in their own fashion, for the most part, and the pond reflects their personality. So, your pond is actually almost a window to your soul. It presents the outward personna of who you are and how you relate with nature and how you percieve yourself to be. I guess it is the part of a person's ego that they can display, through the pond, to show themselves off in a way that simply says, "This is me... This is WHO I AM inside".
Some people buy fancy cars, some people build elaborate sculptures, some people paint pictures.
Pond people create works of art with natural stones, water and fish and plants and all sorts of things related to the natural world.
Each pond is different, unique, because each pond owner is an individual and they are different and unique. It is not really an addiction, it is sincerely a passion. It is a love of what you see in nature and you have a passion to recreate it on a scale that you can fit in your back yard. Just as an artist paints a picture to show what his heart and mind and eyes see, we create a pond to show what our hearts, our minds and our eyes see.
Besides that, it's just a lot of fun to play in the mud!
Gordy