My father started doing it and now he doesn't do anything else.
He might as well be addicted to meth, except that he has enough common sense not to quit his job. But every waking minute that he's not eating or driving or at work, he's on the computer wasting time with stock charts. It's not that he's wasting time trying to make a living, it's that the most fearsome enemy in the stock market is yourself, and he knows absolutely nothing of himself. By the time he realizes how addicted he is and how much time he wasted in the dream of the future, he will already be too old. He will already have alzheimers. His entire life revolves around money, and he doesn't even need it. It's just an empty promise of freedom from the pain of the Now.

It's incredible how hard someone can work to lie to themselves, to rationalize their actions in the face of codependancy. And if you decide to go down this path, don't listen to Cramer, he uses his fans and has even admitted that some of his manipulations in the stock market would be illegal if they knew how he did it.