“I’m unhappy and I don’t know why.”
Raise your hand if you’ve ever said something like this to yourself. Come on, don’t be shy, let’s see those hands.
Several years back, I was seemingly on the right track. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, secured a job at an advertising agency and within a year moved to a happening neighborhood in Chicago with two of my buddies.
I partied hard, resolved to discover all the dives and hot spots around town. I spent my newfound earnings on flatscreen TVs, surround sound systems and video games. I went to every work happy hour, every birthday party, every wedding. I was doing what every twenty something was “supposed” to do in the big city. My life was easy and carefree.
Then it all came crashing down.
I had my first panic attack at age 25. And then another one. And then another one. “Why is this happening to me?” I thought. “I’m a healthy, active individual. Am I sick? Am I unwell?”
“Will I struggle with this for the rest of my life?”
After much reflection, it finally clicked. It wasn’t just one thing that was causing me pain — far from it. It was an accumulation of things. The lifestyle choices I was making. Thinking I had the right job. The right apartment. The right things. The right friends. The right direction.
I didn’t.
I thought I was happy.
I wasn’t.
My comfortable life was killing me.
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In 21st century America, people are more miserable than ever. Approximately 40 million American adults are said to have an anxiety disorder. Opioid abuse runs rampant.
Depression and suicide rates, especially among young people, have risen drastically. In the United States, over six hundred thousand children aged five and under are on some type of psychiatric drug.
Why? Why are we so unhappy?
People live lives that are not their own.
They follow a specific script, hammered into them since childhood. A path defined by authority figures hell-bent on one thing — maintaining their authority.
We are told exactly what to do and how to do it. We are taught that the “American Dream” is the pinnacle of existence. Go to school. Make friends. Go to college. Get a degree. Get a job. Rent an apartment. Buy a car. Get married. Have kids. Buy another car. Buy a house. Send the kids to college. Retire. Enjoy the golden years of your life while reflecting on all you’ve accomplished.
“What’s the problem here?”
Let’s take another look, this time without rose-colored glasses:
Go to school. Not to learn, but to ruthlessly compete with classmates for college placements. Not to challenge authority, but to submit to it. Not to discover how best you learn, but to learn within the confines of the system.
Go to college. Borrow tens of thousands of dollars. Borrow more if you go to graduate school. Incur liver damage and possibly venereal disease over a 4 year (maybe longer) period while playing the role of “mature adult”. All for a measly sheet of paper that says you paid enough money and did well enough on a few exams.
Find a job. Some way, some how, in a highly competitive market, secure employment. Preferably a salaried job in an office with benefits like health insurance and a 401k. “Don’t be discouraged,” authority says early on in your job search. “Rejection is part of the process.” Except then authority gets pissed when it’s taking too long to find said job. And once you do find employment, try not to get fired unceremoniously by saying the wrong thing to an edgy boss or coworker.
Rent an apartment. Not in your hometown, where prices are reasonable. Don’t be ridiculous. Go to the big city, where people live on top of each other in boxes made from the same materials we start bonfires with. It doesn’t matter that you’ll forgo decent sleep for the foreseeable future, what with the noise and the light pollution and the drug dealers one unit above you, or that you’ll commute two hours per day. But hey, at least there’s a bar on the corner where you can pay $9 for a shot of whiskey.
Buy a car. Not a reliable used car, you’re a professional now. Audi. BMW. Acura. Who cares that it comes with a $450 / month payment. You’re working, you can afford it. The sales guy at the dealership says you’ll be just fine.
Get married. So your family might finally not think you’re a sociopath. Oh and the marginal tax breaks. Nothing says “together forever” like getting the government involved. Lucky for them the odds are roughly 1 in 2 you’ll get divorced, and they’ll recoup their money.
Have kids. So people finally think you’ve “grown up”, and so you have something to share on social media.
Buy another car. What’s better than one car loan? Two car loans. Because you can’t schlep the kids around in the Audi. That’s dad’s car.
Buy a house. Not the less-expensive-but-perfectly-valid house on the edge of town. It doesn’t have a breakfast nook or a 3-car garage.
Send the kids to college. More loans and more debt for a marginal (and perhaps radicalized) education.
Retire. Time enjoy the golden years. Except you’re 65 and beaten down by life’s overwhelming repetition. As Paulo Coelho once wrote, “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is LETHAL.” You’re physically limited, if not chronically ill. You’ve got less saved than you thought you’d have, if you’re not still in debt. Time to move to the assisted living home and wait it out.
The American dream is a sham. A facade. A deception. The matrix before taking the red pill. A system designed to keep people in their proper place. To quell dissent and penalize meaningful discourse. To reduce the individual to a cog in an expansive machine. To keep us comfortable enough so we don’t ask questions.
English philosopher and novelist Colin Wilson understood this. “The comfortable life lowers man’s resistance so that he sinks into an unheroic sloth.” I find this to be particularly apropos — the more we accept our fate and the less we resist, the more our very nature, what makes us us, fades into the background, like a bottle adrift in an endless ocean.
How do we escape this life of boredom and repetitiveness and sanctimony?
How do we reject the “unheroic sloth” and the emptiness it carries?
How do we tap into our full potential as human beings? To live a life with purpose, a life with vitality, a life that’s true to us as individuals?
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Stop buying stuff you don’t need
Materialism is an indelible sickness plaguing humanity.
Father Fulton J. Sheen writes, “Advertising tries to stimulate our sensuous desires, converting luxuries into necessities, but it only intensifies man’s inner misery. The business world is bent on creating hungers which its wares never satisfy, and thus it adds to the frustrations and broken minds of our times.”
We are a people consumed with consuming, and it gets worse with every waking moment. There used to be one iPhone that came out each year. Now there are four.
We fixate on how much stuff we have. It is from material possessions that we determine a person’s worth. Not from charitable characteristics like loyalty, respect, or kindness, but from the inanimate objects cluttering their homes.
It’s one thing to save and buy a car so you can pick up your child from school. It’s another to buy your 3rd Louis Vuitton bag because you have an empty spot on the shelf.
We place value on things we don’t need to please people we don’t like.
Turn your back on mindless consumerism.
Give away or sell items that no longer bring you value. Be more conscious of your buying habits — turn off the one-click purchase option on Amazon. Buy sustainable when you can. Don’t wear an outfit once or twice then stuff it in the back of your closet. Learn to appreciate the value of the things you do use, and think twice before replacing them.
Spend money on experiences rather than things. Instead of upgrading your car to the Limited model, take a road trip with your significant other. Opt for a family trip to the Grand Canyon in place of a bigger couch in the basement.
Abide by the recommendation of Pope Francis: “Consumerism has brought us anxiety. Set aside time to play with your children, and turn off the TV when they sit down to eat.”
Be wary of technology
Technology makes our lives easier. Groceries are delivered to our door by pushing invisible buttons on our phones. Cars pick us up at a specific place at a specific time and drive us to a specific destination without the need for any human interaction. We can communicate with friends and family on the opposite side of the world instantly.
But our rapid technological ascent comes with a price.
Instead of facilitating meaningful connection, instead of fostering humanity’s spiritual growth and development, technology distracts us. It blinds us to the simple and obvious truth: the world we live in, the world we’re most comfortable in, are the worlds created by the tech oligarchies. Facebook. Instagram. YouTube. TikTok. Fortnite. The World of Warcraft. Call of Duty.
These are fantasy worlds that reward evils like greed, lust, and envy. These are worlds so tightly controlled that machines can now predict our behaviors down to the smallest detail, all to sell us products that seek to enrich those already possessing the lion’s share of the world’s money and power.
Technology is a tool, and tools can be sharp. If used improperly, you’ll cut yourself. If used correctly, you can change your life and the lives of others for the better. Approach technology like you’d approach a 4-way intersection: with caution. Use technology to improve your life, not dominate it.
Follow your passions
Passions are what make life worth living. Some of my most meaningful experiences are found running on soft trails early in the morning, sun peaking through the trees, my breath in lockstep with my cadence.
As British writer Alan Watts reminds us, “This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.”
Most of us are not engaged with what we’re doing in the here and now. We’re biding our time at a 9–5. We’re trapped in an endless cycle of social obligations and familial events. We’re counting the minutes as we wait in line at the DMV. As we sit in traffic. As we wait to check out at the grocery store.
Is this really the life we thought we’d have when we were young? Is this really the plan until the end?
University professor Joseph Campbell tells us that “we must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
Once we realize the way we’re living is not catering to our passions, not conducive to what drives and motivates us, we have to change course. We have to recapture who we were before society formed us into the unfulfilled mess we are today. Yes, it will be painful. Yes, it will shake things up. You’ll find yourself alone, trudging through the dangerous landscape of the unknown, but you must go. You must.
Our passions allow us to escape the monotony of ordinary experience. They remind us that we are, in fact, alive. That there is plenty of good in life, even though we’re mostly inundated with the bad. Whatever your passions are, pursue them. To the ends of the earth. To be true to our passions is to be true to ourselves.
In the words of Henry Miller, “the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
Be who you are
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once remarked: “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
When you neglect who you are, when you bury your true self deep down, you lose yourself. You lose track of time. You lose track of the world, and your place in it.
This is the root of anxiety and depression.
As existential psychologist Rollo May points out, anxiety arrises from “not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence…Depression is the inability to construct a future.”
Carl Jung, one of the most prolific psychotherapists of the 20th century, remarked that about a third of his cases were suffering from “no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times…This new form of existence [speaking of the modern mass society] produced an individual who was unstable, insecure, and suggestible.”
In short, you’re a shell. A construct. Easily manipulated and controlled, devoid of abstract thoughts and ideas. An NPC* in the real world.
*A video game reference meaning Non-Player Character
Because society demands conformity, because our families and friends pressure us to live and act a certain way, our true selves are shunned and neglected until we can’t even remember who we are, or rather once were.
Colin Wilson tells us, “the everyday world drags us along, like a slave behind a conquer’s chariot. One must learn to sever the rope, to allow the mind to stand still, to become aware of its affinity with mountains and stones.”
Sever the rope.
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Live your life. Not someone else’s. Be the cog that doesn’t fit quite right, that causes trouble and disrupts the system, even if only marginally. Reject ease and comfort and everything meant to keep you from drawing outside the lines.
The odds of you existing, on this earth, in this form, as you are today, are infinitely small:
“Imagine there was one life preserver thrown somewhere in some ocean and there is exactly one turtle in all of these oceans, swimming underwater somewhere. The probability that you came about and exist today is the same as that turtle sticking its head out of the water, in the middle of that life preserver. On one try.”
— Dr. Ali Binazir
Dr. Binazir did the math and presented his findings in an excellent infographic: The probability of you existing at all comes out to 1 in 10^2,685,000. That’s a 10 followed by 2,685,000 zeroes. Basically zero.
Don’t let this miracle go to waste.
Scott Mayer is a runner, thinker, curious observer and certified personal trainer.
Photo courtesy of Keegan Houser on Unsplash