A letter to the broken-hearted dregs at the bottom of everyone's attention; I promise this won't solve your problems.

 

A letter to the broken-hearted dregs at the bottom of everyone's attention; I promise this won't solve your problems.

Here’s the open secret that no one talks about when it comes to depression, addiction, and chaos.

Discourses about the solution to curing addictive behaviors, self-destructive tendencies, and chaotic self-sabotage cycles center around one core principle that’s undeniable; you are powerless.

No matter how you frame it or how unwittingly aware or unaware you are of it.

Your powerlessness is not something that’s up for debate, or scrutiny. It’s a universal, unequivocal fact. Nothing is under your control, so it is not reasonable to expect that anything will go according to your expectations. Anything at all.

And so we circle back to the real question: how does this tie in to any of the destructive habit cycles we mentioned?

The connection to be made here is that every addiction that spirals out of control, every pursuit of relief or escapist comfort, is driven by an internal need to exert control on your external reality; a reality that refuses to conform. Trying to bend those unsavory fact into what you want them to be. It's not for nothing that the word " reality distortion field" was coined

While your cold and harsh reality may be that your opinions, although true, are unpopular, or that you’re relatively dwindling away into insignificance, you can still maintain some degree of control and “be somebody” in a video game.

You can project your own self onto the movie’s protagonist and attain a sense of catharsis as the hero accomplishes his mission, or succeeds at his endeavor, even while you fail at every turn in life — despised, shunned, abhorred, and a whole bag full of synonyms that signify nothing but being unwanted and alone.

You can listen to a song and find the lyrics to be describing your emotional state in a way that's better and more accurate than you could ever articulate.

And the same is true for every drug-fueled fantasy, sustained on a high that’s propelled by alcohol of mind-numbing pharmaceuticals. 

You can pretend. In another world.

The truth is that reality is not only messy. There is absolutely no rational reason why you can be certain that anything will go according to your will, even if it does at times. Occasionally.

Everyone on earth has an ego. And the thing about competing interests and a shared ecosystem is that conflict arises, and power struggles are an inevitability. And unless and until dominance is conceded, and one entity accepts it's subordination, a status quo of war will persist until neither or either prevails.

Once you've made peace with this fact and have come to terms with it and accept this, the outcome becomes clear. You can choose to live in someone else's world, where most of your dreams - no matter how noble and selfless and sublime and significant they are to you - are torched to an early grave. Where the strong survive and the weak despair. And in that lonely, cold, unforgiving winter desert of isolation, perhaps the only solace you'll find is the one that exists within the confines of your imagination, the realm of the mind. Where things go the way you want them to go. Where people treat you how you want to be treated. And not how they perceive you.

So it's only natural that we get addicted to escape, a momentary reprieve, a side quest, an idyllic detour that that takes you off the dirt track, veering into oblivious bliss or blissful oblivion, whichever posion with a cherry on top you prefer.

A way out to while away the hours that don't belong to you in any material sense of the word. To take back control that you so desperately crave and are innately predisposed to desire. Your perfect life, one that only exists in the abstract, devoid of any tangible existence. No realer than smoke in the wind. A wisp. Not even corporeal. No imprint.

Once you make peace with the fact that those who've wronged you or inflicted some form of harm unjustly won't get their comeuppance in this life; that if there's no one to force them to apologize, then that is how the state of affairs will continue, that grievances won't be redressed, nor will you be getting a fair hearing, at least not in this life, is a sobering idea, and a dangerous one. It can either liberate you to care little or not at all, or completely wreck you to the point of no return.

Sure, you can let it go. For the greater good. For some reason that's greater than your self. But the gaping hole shall remain, a wound that festers and bleeds, an incision that cuts deep, covered and masked with fake smiles and empty gestures, but nonetheless never healing.

And it is this void, this lack of recourse to some worldly authority to fix things for you, that drives you to the edge of self-destructive, mind-numbing escape. To the vaporizing highs of hallucinogenic smoke, where it's all mellow and warm. To the intoxicating dizzyness of pill-induced dreams. To the swirling fantasies that upend at the bottom of a bottle of  liquid lava. To the alluring lights and fights of an eventful game, where the infinite loop of climbing a ladder of virtual achievements is enough to keep you sated for days.

What's the way out, then, you ask?

From this inferno of woe and sorrow?

For anyone who's actually bothered to read Infinite Jest, a book by a writer who studied the modern condition well, beneath similar thought spirals, who ironically took his own life at 48, the answer, it seems, is participation.

Not winning at life.

Not some miraculous and altogether cliche comeback from rock bottom, but a spectacular attempt at failing, knowing that you will.

The answer is to make peace with failing, until death takes over.

To fail, not because you're promised success at the end of every fall. But because not everyone can win. And to live is to participate.
Or else you might as well be dead.