On Coping in a Society Designed to Make You Feel Constantly Dissatisfied

And Dispelling the Illusion That Contentment Is Just Around the Corner From Wherever You Happen to Be

There have been so many times in my personal history where I was pontificating about this or that and I either a. really wanted to seem to know what I was talking about but didn’t or b. really wanted to sound deep when I was actually quite frightened of what the depth of my being might be. In actuality, I didn’t want either of those things. What I really wanted was to feel worthy of love, but that’s a tough nut to crack open—particularly if you’ve experienced a lot of childhood trauma. Plus, it doesn't come with any instructions so you can deal with it the wrong way indefinitely. For me, silencing the constant wail of my lonely heart was the main point of drugs and alcohol. It’s so funny how all those years as a junkie I thought I was living on the edge when I was actually just buying another product they were selling. The Sacklers—one of the richest families in America—made a crisp buck as they sent me on my way to a heroin problem with their OxyContin. The waters of thought can get pretty dark and sharky if you’re just swimming around in your own subconscious without any neurographical markers. By the time I was 23, I was shooting dope and felt like I had no other options. It happens pretty often in Western societies. Of course, that’s by design because it’s bad business to teach anyone actual solutions to their mental problems. Especially if you helped create the mental problems for profit.

Hikikomori didn’t just spontaneously pop up into the fabric of Japanese society of their own accord, you know. Someone somewhere is always making money off of their torpor. Someone has to be making a shitload of money off of things being the way they are, considering how most of us don’t benefit from them at all. There was also an economic motive that created the consumer market of American loserdom. I grew up in this dump, though, so for me making a market out of something no matter how deplorable it may be is pretty par for the course. World of Warcraft. Why not. League of Legends. Fortnite. Whatever. It’s just the same shit different skin, those Fortnite fanboys should understand that reference. I’ve seen what that strange addiction can do to a guy, so what? You wanna read about it? Fine. Maybe sometime in my mid-20s after a rehab stint, I sat with a friend in an apartment in the middle of nowhere for months and watched him not bathe while he rot in front of the blue light of his monitor. His whole place smelled like body odor, and if you wanted him to smoke you out you’d just have to tolerate it until your olfactory nerves got tuckered out. There were no smartphones then, so while you were waiting you had limited options for entertainment. You could either play an old console game, watch basic cable, or stare at the wall. I was depressed a lot during that time so that goddamn wall got more than a once-over out of the author. Every time he had company he’d just stare at a computer screen the entire time. It was disturbing to watch. He always had pot, though, which is why anyone put up with this sad display of goblindom. The corporations selling gaming products do not give a fuck about it. They’re shouting like, “Sit in a diaper in your computer chair for all I care fuckstick—cough up the dollars!” Since I have to live and function in my own corrupt society, the thunderous clouds of malcontent will inevitably pour into my head at some point or another over something or nothing at all. It could be triggered by a recent negative event, or an insecurity implanted in me when I was a kid. It could be triggered by taking a piss or the smell of jasmine in the wind; the trigger is irrelevant. The point is, there are a hundred thousand temptations to take a hit of whatever that are intentionally being broadcasted everywhere a human being might see it. That means it’s impossible to avoid confrontation with it. The emotional center of human consciousness is so unpredictable it’s literally insane, but that doesn’t negate the fact that constant attempts are being made by powerful lobbies to manipulate it. What makes it do what from one person to the next is anyone’s guess, but those are the kinds of guesses that get billions pumped into them by corporations.

The fact I or anyone else has ever tried to make future plans based on how we feel right now is fucking hilarious. That’s a good-natured tone in that sentence; I’m not bitter. I’m not gonna go all Rust Cohle on y’all, even though it might seem like it for a minute. I’m far enough away chronologically and conceptually from the heft of acute pain involved in my own soap opera that I can take the more objective—if not perfect—bird’s eye view to see how amusing all the pathetic melodrama we act out is. I’ve spent a lot of unnecessary time in the depths of human despair that ended up costing me parts of my body and I still see the humor in it. Imagine having to endure major surgery, and relearn how to walk because you drank too much cheap liquor. What a rube! What a buffoonish display of utter tomfoolery! Ah, but I lived to tell a joke or two. That’s incomprehensibly lucky, and when I remember that I have gratitude. Many have said it better than I have: Whether something is funny or sad is primarily a matter of how you’re looking at it. Besides, I think in order for a person to be able to withstand existing in a persistent state of philosophical anguish like Cohle’s alcoholism has to be fully active. That’s why he used crushed Lonestar tallboy cans to explain Nietzsche’s little what-if about time being a flat circle and not a pen and a napkin. There was a time when I couldn’t have related to down-and-out Rust more. It was when True Detective was first released and just happened to catch it. It didn’t have a reputation yet, so I had no idea what to expect and I found a character going through my exact struggle. It was cathartic. I wasn’t the only alcoholic, opioid-addicted part-time bartender who thought too much and didn’t feel like existence was worth the trouble. Luckily, I finally figured out that the only other option to running from your fate is to accept it fully; maybe even embrace it by learning to love it. Sartre’s Myth of Sisyphus, sure, but even Ol’ Fred-e-reek claimed amor fati was the greatness formula. I think he was overly obsessed with what makes someone the supposed cream of the crop, but I digress. You can only stumble away from your fate if you’re constantly drunk—the loss of motor control makes it impossible to run. Lately, I’ve been taking in the senselessness of our telenovelas with only a hint of pessimistic philosophy in my perspective. Especially in regard to my own drama. It’s all nonsense! And there’s nothing wrong with that inherently. Nevertheless, I can’t claim rock-bottom-detective-turned-part-time-bartender-level despair anymore with that lack of existential depression. And lack of tallboys. Not saying I’m beyond emotion. Far from it. Because of all the mindfulness, I’m more aware of my restlessness and over-reactivity to various types of passing phenomena than ever. It’s annoying as shit if I’m being honest.

If we’re talking generational trauma, I’ve got it in spades, and it particularly likes to manifest in my daily behavior as sudden and intense rage. There are feelings of dissatisfaction as well, but it’s more like background noise. TV snow instead of blue skies behind the mountain. Bottom line, in my day-to-day I should be letting way more things roll off my back. My back must be in a bowl shape, though, because I’ve had more than one instance this year of me throwing up my arms in a cabbie’s face over a fucking honked car horn. It’s childish, for fuck’s sake. The Buddha would say unskillful. I shouldn’t have any should nots, but I should not be full of adrenaline the moment my fires of annoyance are stoked a little more than usual. I should not be instantly ready and willing to pull over to pull a stranger’s throat down to where his asshole is over something about as consequential as a fucking parking ticket. I’m acting exactly like my dad when it gets away from me like that, which makes the whole affair feel all the more like an embarrassing failure. Losing my temper over pointless shit has been the bane of my existence ever since I first noticed how often it happens. My sadness is harder to pinpoint because you can’t really tell if your father is taking his melancholy out on you when you’re a kid—but you can definitely tell if your dad’s pissed. Realized as I was typing that sentence that not everyone’s dad was so outwardly expressive when enraged. Reasons for lack of self-worth are a little easier to locate because simple neglect can lead to that. Self-esteem is not something that just grows on its own, it has to be meticulously and knowledgeably cultivated in children with the same intensity that a grilled cheese salesman from the parking lot of a Phish concert who looks like an unwashed Chewbacca brings to doting on their marijuana plant seedlings when they’re in their early stages.

I don’t know enough about the struggles of either of my family trees to say we have a long history of either misery or madness, but this is the definitive list of any knowledge that might point toward some possibly inherited mental health problems: My mother and grandmother on her side have suffered from lifelong panic attacks; I’d also heard her grandfather had some difficulties with alcohol but there were no details, unfortunately; one of my cousins is schizophrenic; another has admittedly struggled with alcohol, but not drugs. The crown jewel of trauma is on my father’s side, though. My father’s father was a physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic to the point it forced my grandmother to get a divorce in the 1960s to protect herself and her kids. This was in a decade when the D word was severely frowned upon by every single one of your friends and neighbors. People are also particularly forceful about conformity down in the Deep South where this all took place. Folks just do what they’re told down there in the Delta. Pathetic if you ask me, but no one ever did. Southerners will throw a sacrificial lamb under the bus in a second just to save face, and they’re also gullible enough to believe pretty much anything they read in the papers. Even though my grandfather brutally abused them, my grandmother, dad, and aunt were the ones who received the backlash from their community members. Back then, Caucasian men had the high ground regardless of the situation.

When it comes to developing my low emotional intelligence, I’m on my own facing it. I’m a neurodivergent loner who’s got more emotional homework left to do than some Adderall-snorting jabroni that has a future career in finance and identifies with Patrick Bateman. I’m being hyperbolic, but it still wouldn’t hurt to approach the problem of unresolved trauma with more seriousness at my disposal than a few salt grains. I’m home, home on the range… Where the deer and the antelope play… Where people are not! Because I’ve been forgot! And honestly, I like it this waaaaay! I think you can have love for your family and also acknowledge they did not adequately prepare you to cope with a myriad of your unpleasant mental states. I’m basically like an alien to them in terms of how dissimilar our personalities are, so you can’t blame them. With ADHD, I don’t know for sure that it even would’ve helped if any psychological training had taken place. A former lover of mine has ADHD and received such support when they were younger. Now they’re a neuroscientist making six figures in their mid-20s, but I don’t want to be assumptive and say there is necessarily a correlation. Maybe they would have made it regardless. Only one thing is plain: My brain is like Kaneda’s bike in terms of being difficult to handle and speeding all over the place. That the universe mercifully gave me a last chance to sober up and I took the opportunity and ran with it is my only saving grace. I’ve also since watched countless YouTube videos of spiritual masters delivering incredibly useful lectures on Enlightenment and how to attain it. I think that helps reminds me of how the person I want to be behaves. I don’t have the entire answer to who that is yet, but if you wait on that to suddenly appear you’ll never start putting your boot to the shovel of creating permanent change. I’d like to try to transcend the earthly plane in my lifetime regardless of whether or not it’s already armageddon. When peeking behind the curtain is the only game in town, you might as well play it. Right? Money is never on my mind, only freedom from my pain and suffering. I know that if you’re trying hard in the ineffable realm you’ve already missed something vital because letting go by definition must be effortless, but everyone has to start somewhere. I know I want to be kind and compassionate, not always on the verge of going apeshit. That’s enough to get started, I reckon. If it weren’t for benevolent souls like my former AA sponsor, Alan Watts, Ram Dass, Thich Nhat Hahn, Eckhart Tolle, and several others I wouldn’t have been able to maintain my course through the hard parts of the path back to my naturally blissful state. I’m only a handful of years down the road at this point, and I haven’t been lucky enough to meet a master face-to-face, but the medium by which I’m taught to reach a higher state is irrelevant to me as long as I can be shown the way.