“I never knew anybody who was sober.”

There was a time—when I looked back on my elongated and somewhat pastoral youth—that I believed that.

Of course, we only see what we want to see. Or what we’re capable of seeing. Are we riddled with blind spots? Or is the anomaly actually deciphering anything with clarity in a field of view that is created by mind? It’s all illusion. And delusion. Except those few and far between cracks where the light gets in.

To face reality, we get blind drunk. Or, we operate on blind faith. Not that belief is inherently any more obscuring than the blind certainty (and arrogance) of knowing all. And some try that.

In The Iliad, Mercury rebukes Aeneas as “forgetful of [his] own kingdom” He’s wasting time, adrift. Blind to his own destiny.

Aren’t we all?

How could we possibly live lives beyond our wildest dreams if we saw it all coming? Especially those of us who were too busy trying to be Caligula. Or trying not to be. And failing.

Which brings me to Latin.

In my house, Latin was mandated. It didn’t matter that it was a dead language. It didn’t matter that it would doom me to ignorant monolingual American status no matter where I went in the world. “It will teach you to put a sentence together,” my mother would say. And, with some reluctance, I have to admit she was right.

Never mind that my five-year-old daughter can parle mieux Français after a semester at French school than I could after five-years of “studying” Latin.

The draw wasn’t the prospect of speaking the language, anyway.

The draw was Doc.

Doc (aka Dr. Stephen Rosenquist) was the Latin teacher at the bougie prep school I attended in the suburbs of Detroit. With Chesterfield stained teeth, coffee-stained shirts, and cat-claw stained forearms (and ever coiffed in Derek Jacobi’s haircut from the 1976 BBC series, I, Claudius), he was a holdover from John Knowles’ A Separate Peace. Or Alexander Payne’s, um, The Holdovers.

At a prep school, the past needn’t be excavated. It exists on the same plane as the present. In its own way, it’s a kind of Rome. No aqueducts. But you get the idea. The history is inescapable. And Doc fit the surroundings. He moved through them at a frenetic pace, a White Rabbit clad in khakis and a pair of New Balances. At the time, like Holden Caulfield, I felt that “I was surrounded by phonies…they were coming in the goddam window.” Not Doc. Doc was a real one, perched on the ledge, blowing smoke out of the classroom instead of inside of it.

“Colander skull!”

“Sieve Brain!”

“Idiot-fool! You’ve earned the next translation!”

These are just a few of the insults Doc would playfully throw at us after teenage missteps along the Appian Way. And not a cry closet in sight! There was another, though, that he seemed to save just for me:

“You alcoholic coma waiting to happen!”

At the time, that one rolled off of me like the cold Rolling Rock that would roll down my throat on the weekends. It never occurred to me that, like Cassandra, he could be peering into a future that, just perhaps, he was preternaturally qualified to see.

Doc saw something in me twenty years before I could see it in myself.

How could I have possibly known at the time that all the caffeine, the nicotine, and the collecting of discarded animals were sure signs of a sober spiritual master (a magister non bibendi, if you will)?

The thing about the sober world is that it unfolds in real time with the broader (wasted) one. It’s all out in the open. Even the anonymity of the program isn’t an impenetrable shroud. It’s easy to ignore those smoking cigarettes in front of Cafe Tropical on the way to Silversun Liquor until you’re one of them. The burlap bag was over our heads, not theirs.

We only see what we want to see.

And when it came to teenage yours truly, Doc could see it plain as day.

He knew I was an Aeneas, flittering away my young life on some proverbial Mediterranean shore.

And yet, he couldn’t spare me (in the words of Father John Misty) “all [the] pointless benders with reptilian strangers.”

He couldn’t spare me “all the mornings lost to cognitive fug” or the decades of never “seeing whatever talent [I had] being taken to its outer limits through focus and application.” This, the opportunity cost of imbibition my column god, Janan Ganesh, outlines in “A drinker’s case against drinking” published in my beloved pink paper. Prep school is expensive. But likely not as expensive as that compounded hangover.

Nobody can see the light for you. But when I saw it, it was unseeable. As was the realization that Doc was “one of us!”

“Where was he now?” A few months into sobriety, I had to look him up. I had to thank him. To let him know that—by the grace of God—I’d dodged the imminent toxic stupor he foretold. And to tell him what he already knew: that I had struggled along in his class for a reason, that those conversations we had had all those years ago were two addicts in a room chopping it up and all of the magic and healing and perspective-shifting that entails.

But I was too late.

What I found when I tried to look him up was an obituary. He’d passed a few months earlier.

Tempus fugit.

Carpe diem.

Listed in the spare description of his 70 years in Earthly form were his three passions: Academia. Rescue cats. And “the fellowship,” where he helped “unknown numbers of troubled people to wellness and productivity.”

I count myself as one of them.

I remember, 30 years ago, my head resting on my Latin book, Doc chiding me that Caesar ipsum wouldn’t be transmitted “by osmosis.” But some things are. As it turns out there was more life in that dead language than I ever could have imagined.

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When Matt Whyte alludes to living a life beyond his wildest dreams, he means it. Science journalist living in Cooperstown, New York was never on the playing field of possibilities. Until it was. As host of Sing for Science, a podcast that brings together the big names from music with the big names from science to discuss the biggest of the big ideas (theoretical physics, mycology, the psychology of Fascsism, etc.), Whyte skillfully moderates the explanation of the difficult to explain. And yet, when it comes to his own recovery, he says, what he finds in it “defies explanation.” For a guy who has spent many years on the road, he aims for the middle of his, the one that leads to self-esteem via esteemable acts. No shade to the bass or the treble but it’s the balance that really matters. Whyte recalls “the halcyon days” of early sobriety—90 days in, at quarter life, and on tour with his band at the time, Earl Greyhound. Amongst boxes and boxes of tapes his drummer had brought along for the ride was the providentially titled album, You’re A Big Boy Now by The Lovin’ Spoonful. On it, the song “Darling Be Home Soon” effloresces with the lyrics: “A quarter of my life is almost past / I think I’ve come to see myself at last / And I see that the time spent confused / Was the time that I spent without you / And I feel myself in bloom.” Serendipitous (or dare I say scientific) words to describe Whyte’s own transformational journey back from a “challenging lifestyle” (what Joseph Campbell might call “the depths”) to a Self that finds joy in the equilibrial, the “going away” and the “coming home,” and one that blooms and keeps blooming.

What’s your take on “the science of sobriety?”

The phenomenon of practicing acceptance is so central to recovery. When they studied the practice of acceptance in a lab, the assumption was that you would see something in the frontal lobe light up (where other active decision making processes take place). But it didn’t. When you practice acceptance, it happens somewhere deeper in the brain (the amygdala). Think about how the brain has evolved and how it develops as a fetus. It starts at the bottom—at the stem—and grows up to the front. Acceptance provides a kind of foundational support.

There’s a notable line in the Big Book, “Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree there is no such thing as making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic. Science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn’t done so yet.” Why not?

Recovery addresses the root cause of why we wanted to use in the first place. I can’t imagine that a pill or an injection is going to provide that. If I’ve learned anything—especially from my years of using—it’s that there are no shortcuts. It’s either pay now or pay later. It’s a fundamental principle that we all have to live by. As a sober person, I don’t crave being able to drink normally. Life is so much richer without it. I can’t imagine why we would want to reincorporate it.

What’s your POV on the compatibility of science and a higher power?

Spirituality is such a four-letter word to some people. It’s a non-issue for me. I believe we are all connected in a way that science has yet to prove. I don’t think many people can take issue with that. Except for hardcore physicalists. What may be immaterial for some, may be something rooted in physicality for others. For instance, there’s a school of thought emerging that consciousness itself might be fundamental, that electrons themselves have consciousness. If you buy that, it’s not such a fanciful notion that the spirit would survive after death. It’s a really exciting time. So many lines are blurring between these things that were once binary, you know, either you believe in God or you’re an atheist. It’s so much more complicated than that.

What’s your take on the connection between rock and roll and the debauched and degenerate?

There was such a mythology of rock and roll growing up in the 80s. And it was quite thrilling. I read Hammer of the Gods, the really sensational Led Zeppelin biography when I was in sixth grade. That gave me a very unhealthy template. At that age, you deeply connect with music. I’m envious of people who can have that type of connection with music into adulthood. It’s so singular when you’re a kid. I think that’s led people down many a dark road. I remember being a kid and seeing a clip of Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode being interviewed. He was in heroin withdrawal and almost shouting, “It’s not a cool thing to be an addict!” On some level, I didn’t buy it. I loved his band’s music. And the extremity of his experience was quite seductive and stimulating. My guess is that it’s very different for the current generation. The self-destructive rock star has been de-platformed, more or less. That lifestyle doesn’t have the same glamor.

Why do you think it has taken so long to shake that mythology of the drug-fueled creative genius?

It’s pretty well established. It didn’t start with the Beatles and the Woodstock era and the debauchery of the 1970s. This goes back hundreds of years. I was quite taken with the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was this famous Romantic junkie. He wrote “Kubla Khan” which is an incredibly vivid and imaginative use of language. It was entirely new and it still blows my mind. There’s a frontispiece for it that’s something like: “I was taking laudanum for dysentery and I fell into a reverie and this poem came out of it.” There may be truth to it. But it’s certainly not sustainable. Who is to say that stark lucidity can’t produce as vibrant a work as “Kubla Khan?” Clearly, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme—his most expressive work and the most well known expression of sobriety in music—is evidence of that.

If your sobriety had a sound frequency, what would it be?

It certainly wouldn’t be high and tinny.

What does your sobriety mean to you?

Balance. Living a sober life is one of balance. What true balance can produce is far more fulfilling than what I could get from extreme states of being. Altered or not.

What do you do when you come up against a creative block?

Exercise. “Move a muscle, change a thought.”

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

“Don’t do what you want to do and do what you don’t want to do.” It’s a bleak prescription. But if doing what you want to do lands you in a church basement at 27, chances are you need to consider what you don’t want to do.

What’s something you’ve done sober that you never thought you could do sober?

Performing. Period. I had such terrible stage fright. The amount of cocaine I would have to do to enjoy myself was really quite mind-blowing. At that time, I thought that was practical. I would have to get so completely obliterated to play this one gig we had every three or four weeks at Piano’s on Ludlow. And that required a day or two of recovery. My one goal was for my band to get out on the road. And I remember thinking, “How is this going to work if we have to play every night?”

What’s your go-to non-alcoholic beverage?

Anything in a can. I have to be very clear on airplanes that I want the can.

What gives you hope?

When I think about this most recent chapter of my life and the level of unintentional reinvention that has been involved, I find it reassuring. Mostly for my kids. I remember being their ages and being so anxious about what comes next and getting to that next thing. I’ve never been more fulfilled and content, landing somewhere I never pictured myself and doing something I never pictured myself doing. It provides me with reassurance for their futures. Life is a lot richer with possibility than I had once thought. That gives me hope.

Photographs by Molly Whyte

For the addict, the specter of death can be real and ever present. Sobriety gives us new life. Yet we still die. We die “to one life in order to gain access to another.”

One enters one thing (a drunk) and exits another (a sober legend). One arrives spiritually empty. One “leaves” spiritually full. It’s heroic.

When we come in, we are disoriented (from society) and disintegrated (from self). Our right side up is upside down.

Sobriety, with all of its contrary action, is inverting. It’s an archetypal journey that follows the structure of a traditional rite of passage: separation, threshold crossing, and reintegration.

Separation. From the substance itself (abstinence) and “lower companions.” We make a list (or inventory) of resentments and identify and distinguish our part in it.

Threshold crossing. Admitting powerlessness. Offering ourselves to God. “Handing it over” to a trusted guide, a Senex of sorts.

Reintegration. Acknowledging and accepting the shadow part of self (and other). Aligning with “a design for living.” Maintaining a life of service, community, and conscious contact with spirit to remain on that other side, whole.

As Jung observes, “For thousands of years, rites of initiation have been teaching spiritual rebirth; yet, strangely enough, man forgets again and again the meaning of divine procreation.” It seems paradoxical to have forgotten something I never knew, but that’s definitely how it feels.

As Jungian analyst Sallie Nichols writes, “In our modern culture we have almost no such specific initiation rites so that young men have difficulty making [the] transition” from boyhood to adulthood. Joseph Campbell alluded to debauchery, degeneracy, destructive behavior, and the psychological disorientation of youth as being direct results of modern society’s lack of rites and ritual. Throughout my prolonged late adolescence, the disorientation, debauchery, destructiveness, and degeneracy were a perverse source of Peter Pan pride. I knew I was a bad “boy” (or was trying to be). What I had absolutely zero vis on was the seething resentment percolating underneath it all.

In the creation of “the program,” Bill Wilson landed on resentment as “the number one offender.” This insight has ancient antecedents. “‘He abused me, he mistreated me, defeated me, robbed me.’ Releasing such thoughts banishes hatred for all time,” can be found in the 2500-year-old pages of The Dhammapada.

When resentments are released, the ego has the opportunity to reorganize. And with it, a sort of death occurs. The death of the inflated self-image, for example. Or, the death of the grievance-based identity. And the birth of humility.

And almost all of us are born upside down, right, head first?

Saint Peter, the first Pope, “the rock” upon which The Church was built, was crucified upside down because he deemed himself unworthy to die the same way Jesus did. His martyrdom (and his overturned cross) an enduring symbol of humility.

The Hanged Man—an archetypal image from Tarot’s major arcana—is symbolically representative of voluntary suspension, ego surrender, reversal of ordinary consciousness, and transformation through waiting. His hanging there, a rite of passage in its own right.

The allusions here to sober life are rampant. Think: “Pause when agitated.” “Let go and let God.” “Surrender.”

Of The Hanged Man represented in the 15th century Tarot of Marseille, Nichols writes: “he must have felt deeply wronged [and] suffered long before attaining this degree of acceptance…it is easy for us to empathize with the young man’s initial fury and resentment.”

And yet, we also must acknowledge that he put himself there. Like Odin upending himself from the World Tree for nine nights in exchange for wisdom, it’s a voluntary elevation. Embarking on “the road to happy destiny” is elective. The discomfort that comes with it—and it can be ample—is a meaning-making transpersonal choice.

And in a modern world more and more emptied of ritual and coming-of-age rites, meaningful transformation demands that the initiate, initiate.

Many traditional rites of passage were essentially feats of strength. Sure, it takes strength to bear the weight. But it also takes strength to let it go. Here, I imagine Sisyphus, flipping the narrative, and watching the boulder roll down the hill, like, “Oh well, it is what it is.”

I, for one, have never experienced anything quite so forcefully transformative as total surrender.

Sobriety isn’t heaven. It isn’t Valhalla. It’s the journey there. Hang on if you can. And let go.

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“There would be images all around them. Those images would be on the phone that woke them up. An astronaut singing in outer space. A girl riding a wrecking ball. They would light up their pillows as they roused from sleep, and parade, one after another, beneath their fingertips while they used the bathroom. They would be there in the kitchen on the tablet as [they] waited for their coffee to brew, then reappear seamlessly on their monitors in the home office. A jealous husband’s threats graffitied across the front of a house. Goats teetering on a cliffside or at the edge of a highway overpass. Whenever they went out for lunch, the images would shrink to the size of the rectangular screen and hover, midair, a foot above their plates. A tornado of sharks in the sky. While they waited for the U8 or the M29. While they took a piss. A famous woman spraying an arc of champagne backwards over her head into a wineglass balanced on her tailbone. Those images lit up their faces in the dark bedroom when they went to set the alarm. The faces of strangers. The faces of handsome criminals. Avocado slices.” —Vicenzo Latronico, Perfection

“Image is everything.”

Those of us of a certain age most certainly remember this famous slogan, delivered from behind lowered black Ray-Bans by Canon pitchman and tennis great, Andre Agassi.

If you’re like me, though, this statement is less a memory than a psychic tattoo. At the time of that advertising campaign’s running, I was an impressionable pre-adolescent likely watching The US Open with my mother, an Agassi gal all the way.

I wore his Nike Air Tech Challenge 2s. With the hot lava. I had his signature Nike jorts—my skinny legs far from filling the neon lycra lining sewn into the stonewashed black denim. If Andre said it, I believed it. And I also needed to work on my quads.

If you’ve read his fantastic memoir, Open, you’ll realize that the image really was everything. And by Agassi’s own admission it was empty. For one, for much of his career, Agassi hated tennis. For another, his long, acid-washed, feathered locks that I loved (and my father, a Sampras guy, hated) was a wig to mask his hair loss. Agassi recalls that “every morning [he] would get up and find another piece of [his] identity on the pillow, in the wash basin, down the plughole.”

Before the 1990 French Open final, this led him to pray. Not for victory. But for the divine hand that would keep his wig from falling off on live TV in front of millions of fans. Essentially, to remain unrevealed. To ensure that a self one less hairpiece closer to his authentic self would never be on display for all to see.

And he lost.

Years later—heart on sleeve and no hair on head—Agassi captured that elusive French Open title and completed “the career slam,” something his hirsute rival Sampras never accomplished. And he squared his relationship with the game.

In sobriety, we live by the credo “compare and despair.”

But what happens when the object of our comparison isn’t a world-class tennis player, or a model, or a recently promoted coworker, or a writer with more Substack readers? When we measure one version of “self” against an internalized ideal of one? When the ego becomes attached to an unattainable image (persona) of its own “curation?”

As Jung posits, “The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society…a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.” Problems arise when we over-identify with it, losing the ability to decipher the difference between mask and face.

Despite being conditioned by “the culture” and its media to believe otherwise, we can’t actually find a Self in a persona.

We can certainly try. I certainly have. But to borrow from Hamlet, we all end up hoisted by our own petards.

We lose ourselves in the image.

In his biting novel, Latronico describes the Millennial condition as coming of age “with the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating.”

From a Jungian perspective, this is futility on a Sisyphean scale as “The more one identifies with the persona, the more individuality is suppressed.” Constant image tailoring and personal branding is effectively the antithesis of individuation.

I worked in advertising at the dawning of the Tumblr moment, when everything became image. Like Latronico’s protagonists, I could justifiably scroll through hundreds of images per day and call it “work” with little thought to what it might be doing to my brain chemistry.

How could it have occurred to me then that the seeming resistanceless fluidity of scrolling could create rigidity? And that that rigidity would be a source of resentment?

At about 30, I was still impressionable. Too impressionable. Parts of me stunted at the age I was when I started drinking. At that time, scrolling through Tumblr, I came across a list of “15 Things Every Man Should Have,” that (reportedly sober) Virgo paragon of persona (whom I admire tremendously), Tom Ford, came up with. On it—among other things—you’ll find: “A sense of humor, a daily read of a newspaper, [and] always new socks and underwear (throw away the old ones every six months).” And to this day, I am haunted by the possibility that I write these words in a seven-month-old pair of boxer briefs as unread newspapers pile up beside my bed.

Sure, I don’t pop molly anymore. But I still make vain attempts to hermetically rock Tom Ford’s list (and countless lists like it of my own conscious and unconscious creation). Because if I can force my own (visual) identity into a simple construct—any construct—it might mollify the unbearable pain of living out any day at any distance from my authentic self. (It doesn’t).

Advertising clients are always begging for images of authenticity. But isn’t that an oxymoron? Aren’t all images essentially inauthentic by definition? Near representations of reality, sure. Especially when captured on film (maybe even on a Canon EOS Rebel). But never reality.

Reality isn’t capturable. Nothing is. In this fleeting life of temporary joys and pain, all things pass. As soon as we grasp it, it slips through our fingers. It’s gone.

Youth fades.

Hairlines recede.

Our children are like trains that leave the station the moment they take their first breath and never return.

And sobriety is a daily reprieve that renews every morning. One to be “worn like a loose glove.” More so, perhaps, if the glove you have in mind has a Gucci label sewn into it.

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I’m just a lonesome L.A. cowboy, hangin’ out, hangin’ on / To your window ledge, callin’ your name from midnight until dawn / Smokin’ dope, snortin’ coke, and tryin’ to write a song / Forgettin’ everything I know ‘til the next line comes along. —Old & In The Way

I am never alone.

I mean this quite literally. And ontologically. Privacy, vaporized by family. Existential isolation, obliterated by conscious contact with God.

But eleven years ago, I was one lonesome L.A. cowboy.

No family. No God. Just Drew.

Looking back, it’s not that easy to pinpoint when conviviality (or the promise of it) gave way to desolation. I remember, growing up, hearing that “drinking alone” was considered taboo. That kind of moralizing was never going to stop me. And was I really alone if I was passing the time together with Alexander Keith or bloody mary? At a certain point, though, even drinking with other humans was drinking alone. And aren’t cowboys of every stripe (notably) “always alone, even with someone they love?’

That’s something I often come back to when I think about the precipitant (as it were) to my sobriety.

I had run out of love.

I couldn’t really give it. And I definitely couldn’t receive it. And that’s a lonely place to be.

Today, that’s the furthest thing from the case. I live in a house full of love. And it’s gotten markedly fuller since I last wrote (regularly) here. Four humans. 1200 square feet. One bathroom. And a 60-pound dog.

But in that respect, I sometimes feel like an outlier.

This is the era of the lone actor, the lone operator. The chronically single. We’re told loneliness is an epidemic. We’re told Gen Z is a lonely generation. (And also a dumb one, apparently.)

Per usual, I was way ahead of my time. Lonely. And dumb.

At a certain point, alcohol and that aforementioned “next line” had become the source of my regularly scheduled loneliness programming. At the beginning of the night, the plan was never to end up in the bathroom staring into the mirror with a rolled up bill in my hand, my delusionally inflated / deflated reflection my only (bad) company. But that was the oft demoralizing outcome. And it seemed preordained, commanded, and beyond my control.

Sobriety was the cure for all that.

And while I do miss having the bathroom all to myself on occasion, I don’t miss that inflammatory ooze that was the rest of it.

Alcohol consumption rates in the United States have fallen to a 90-year low. At the same time, the U.S. Surgeon General “warns about the public health crisis that loneliness, isolation, and disconnection pose to the American public.”

Are these two trends related? Are people drinking less because they are lonely? Or are they lonely because they are drinking less?

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In response to the World Health Organization’s claim that there is “no safe level” of drinking, Heineken CEO, Dolf van den Brink, said that “in this time of loneliness and a mental health epidemic,” beer’s role as social catalyst was “important to make part of the public debate.” He argues “the relationship between alcohol and health is complex.” Is it really, Dolf van den Brink? Maybe for a normie. But never for me.

And while “belief [that] moderate drinking is bad for health” has risen to new heights, Asahi CEO, Atsushi Katsuki, asserts that “alcohol sales [have been] hit more by screen time than health fears.”

Which brings us back to those who are screen timing more and drinking (and f*cking) less than ever. It’s hard to comprehend that what scrolls past in brilliant blue light on an iPhone is more powerful than what you’ll find in a bottle of Cazadores. But it is. The “continuous high-volume instant-gratification loop” provided by short-form video content and social media delivers “a nearly constant stream of, often small, dopamine hits.” And as those hits compound, the brain craves ever more scroll as it—quite literally—rots.

Given those same screens are deemed the cause of Gen Z being “the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized academic tests than the one before it,” it makes me really nostalgic for a time when it was just the horfing down of nitrous balloons that made us dumber.

I can’t help but think that the through line here is a setting of the mind that has been shaped by addiction—not to the vices of the 20th century but the 21st one. A more powerful substance can always make another obsolete, toothless. When you’ve got the warm embrace of oxycodone ketamine, who really needs a Bud Light, right?

And addiction is isolating. Booze, porn, gambling, TikTok can all lead to estrangement from friends, family, community, and love. Who needs you if I have “my precious?”

In Lacanian terms, loneliness is not simply the absence of others. It reflects a “lack” in being (manque-à-être) that desire perpetually tries to fill.

Isn’t this what the digital vice cartels are so good at packaging and exporting? Lack? They are remorseless peddlers of it. And around it, an “economy of loneliness” has sprung up. In this day and age, connections aren’t missed. They’re nearly extinct. That 31 percent of young men “had chatted with an AI system meant to emulate a romantic partner” portends we all will be soon enough.

The cure for loneliness isn’t togetherness, though.

It’s learning to accept the totally natural human sensation of solitude. In my experience, the power to re-connect to love was entirely contingent on my ability to sit with myself in silence.

The powers that be don’t want you to do that.

They want you in lack.

That way you’ll still go out to buy their beer.

Or, more and more likely these days, stay home alone and chat up their AI paramours.

“That’s the sort of game squash is: remorseless, self-policing and deeply, if quirkily, moral. A squash match is a test of character as well as skill, of will as much as prowess. It calls for a delicate balance between aggressiveness and sportsmanship, hustle and trust. There are many ways to cheat at squash, most of them subtle and often undetectable. The question, ultimately, is not just how badly one wants to win, but what sort of victory is consonant with one’s dignity.” —Laurence Shames

It’s fair to say then that sobriety—like squash—is a delicate balance of “hustle and trust,” right?

“Into action.”

“Let go and let God.”

That’s how we do. Living in paradox. Hopefully happily.

This is something with which many out there seem to be struggling mightily right now, an unmanageable aversion to life unfolding in any shade of gray, to ceding control where there is none to begin with.

Whatever the problem, though, thinking about doing something about it is not doing anything about it. From a Taoist perspective, not doing anything at all is probably way closer to actually doing something than thinking about actually doing something.

“One does nothing, and nothing is left undone.” —Lao Tzu

If alcoholism is indeed “a thinking problem” then perhaps the safest place for an alcoholic to be at any given time is on a squash court.

As one player (and fellow sober stud) once noted: “The thing I love most about the game is that there’s no time to think. It’s the anti-golf.”

On a squash court, there’s barely enough time to react, let alone overreact. Squash provides the perfect blend of doing and not thinking. And if thinking is the opposite of doing then, by the principle of binary opposition, not thinking is doing.

So, I’ve been doing 45 minutes or so most days on a squash court, rhythmically hitting forehands that careen off the front wall and left side wall that turn into backhands that hit the front wall and the right side wall that become forehands again. This cat-like meditation of aggression goes on for as long as I can keep it going. Miss the mark. Start again.

As Carl Jung writes, “Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.” And for whatever reason, for me, this is more likely to happen when meditatively hitting a ball than, say, sitting in a pew or (these days) on a zafu.

In my experience, pouring myself into anything—sobriety, crystals, breathwork meditation, squash—has the same effect. The receptacle is irrelevant. It’s the pouring that matters.

Ram Dass talked about playing golf without being a golfer. From my tortured experience on a golf course, you’d have to be as enlightened as he was to do that.

On a squash court, though?

It’s hard to be anything when you have a 1.5-inch rubber ball en route to your face at 100 miles per hour. Am I a squash player in that moment? A husband? A father? A writer? A sober alcoholic? Or am I Jaqen H’ghar? “A man has no name.”

And I think that’s the crux of my spiritual life. It’s when I’m the furthest thing from any kind of label that I find myself actually inhabiting it.

The truth is, I can’t just do the sign of the cross and be “a spiritual person.” No one can. A “spiritual person” doesn’t exist. Because, as Jung posits: “Spirit is autonomous.” All you can do is book the court and hope it shows up to play.

Jung suggests that many confuse contact with spirit as being spiritual, “The persona can even assume a religious form, and in this way the individual may appear to be spiritual without having undergone any real transformation.” Here, I think of those victims and perpetrators of “plastic shamanism” who make ayahuasca their whole thing, attempting (and failing) to make the uncommodifiable a commodity.

Point being, there may be someone out there in a Chipp club tie with a copy of The Economist tucked under one arm and a 125-gram squash racket under the other running spiritual circles around you and me. And alone and locked in with God (and the present moment) in a 32-by-21-foot box, I’m literally running circles around myself. And in the process, losing myself. It’s squash palace. And dojo.

And I’m talking about practice. Not a game! Practice.

Introduce another middle-aged man sprinting (lumbering) and reaching (flailing) onto the court, and the game becomes an apt metaphor for la vie en sobriété.

I can’t run you over. I can’t stand in your way. I can’t go it alone. And I can’t cheat without cheating myself. If I take my eye off the ball, I’m in trouble. There’s nowhere to hide. There’s no escape. And it’s f*cking fun.

As the playwright, Noel Coward, said: “Squash—that’s not exercise, it’s flagellation.”

Good.

Because, I’ve heard that “discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.” There’s precedent, of course. The keisaku. The cilice and “the discipline.” I wouldn’t go so far as to put a squash racket on that level.

A two iron, though?

Most definitely.

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“I know many of you will feel uncomfortable when I say this, but the hippies create the police as much as the police create the hippies. The liberals create the conservatives. The protesters create the John Birchers just as much as the John Birchers create the protesters. As long as you are attached to whatever pole you are representing, the vibrations which you are sending out are creating its polar opposite around you.” —Ram Dass

I’m on my Ram Dass tip today. (It’s the 94th anniversary of the American guru’s birth). And my mind is full of models for how the universe ought to be.

And I imagine, dear reader, that yours is, too.

How’s that going for you this year?

Is the universe bending to your will?

I’m guessing no.

But that doesn’t seem to stop seemingly (almost) everyone from thinking it should.

Such is life in the era of collective narcissism 2.0.

Collective narcissism can be defined as “a tendency to exaggerate the positive image and importance of a group to which one belongs.” It adheres to “a belief that one’s own group (the ingroup) is exceptional and entitled to privileged treatment but it is not sufficiently recognized by others.”

As Ram Das says, “It’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your hell. When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought, examine those thoughts; not just the thing that frustrates you.”

But you can’t tell a collective narcissist that.

Because the touchstones of collective narcissism include hypersensitivity to criticism, siege mentality, conspiratorial thinking, and revengefulness.

Why waste your big, beautiful breath?

And it’s not like it’s a new thing. It was all the rage in the 1930s. And most of us know how that went down.

But, the 1930s didn’t have Mark Zuckerberg. Nor Zhang Yiming.

And the thing about collective narcissism is that it attracts those with low self-esteem and individual narcissistic tendencies, which the products that the aforementioned billionaires built both cultivate and prey upon.

Given that those products are designed to be addictive, it’s fair to say that, today, we live in a culture where people—and young people specifically—are addicted to their own low self-esteem. The self has become yet another vice from which corporate America (or the PRC) to profit. And its grievances require constant attention.

As Ram Dass put it, “you’re too busy holding onto your own unworthiness.” And gazing into it through a front-facing camera.

And this actually matters. Bigly.

Because, today, and throughout history, collective narcissism has some pretty nasty outcomes: prejudice toward minorities, intergroup hostility, and support for terrorism and violent extremism.

And when I look both ways, I see it on the right. And I see it on the left.

But where I don’t see it is in my recovery community.

Now, this is anecdotal. As a proud multi-factor source authenticator and Financial Times reader, I feel duty bound to caution you: beware the totally unsubstantiated claim of the self-published citizen journalist. But f*ck it, here goes: Addiction recovery inoculates sober kings and queens against the ills of collective narcissism.

For one, my collective—which IMHO is the most pluralistic, inclusive group that exists on the planet—isn’t worried about anyone else’s collective. We aren’t better. We just are. And we don’t need your attention. In fact, our whole thing has been designed to exist outside of it.

What happens in the church basements I kick it in is a lot of things, but it sure isn’t a front in the culture wars.

And while we adhere to a credo of “no opinions on outside issues,” I don’t think that’s it.

Nor do I think it’s following one of our many mantras, “get in the middle of the herd.” Although, that helps as a kind of self-orienting compass that diverts away from the fringes.

Fundamentally, it’s that we are actively managing our addictions by increasing our self-esteem, decreasing our self-deception, and developing our intellectual humility, “a positive humility that serves as antidote to destructive belittlement of self or others.”

Is anybody else?

Over the last couple of years, if I had a dollar for every time I thought, “Man, you would be embarrassed by your lack of intellectual humility were it not for your lack of intellectual humility,” I could, like, buy eggs.

In recovery, our humility keeps us sober. And sane.

As Dag Hammarskjöld, one-time UN Secretary General and Nobel Peace Prize winner put it, “Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything.”

Imagine a politician saying anything like that today.

Recovery also offers the gift of getting real. According to one study, 12-step recovery significantly decreased the presence of self-deception over a four-month period.

The addicted brain is accustomed to believing all kinds of bullsh*t to justify the continued using, the bad behavior, and the staggering self-involvement. There’s a rhythm to it, a well worn groove of delusion.

My life before sobriety had a hallucinatory quality to it.

And I’m not talking about coming home from my agency’s holiday party one year to find a 13th century samurai standing sentry in my bungalow’s entryway.

I’m talking about the phantasmagoric notion that I was a great employee at said company. Or a great boyfriend. Or an unredeemable piece of sh*t. The contrary delusions unhappily coexist.

And deception is dangerous. Full stop. As the American psychoanalyst, James Hollis, writes, “how much of our history has been drenched in blood by men who, unable to fight for their own truths, or indeed having none, projected their rage onto others and slaughtered them. All wars are civil wars—men against their brothers.”

Sociocultural studies have found that those pulled to the extremes experience the same sh*t those who get too deep into the booze and drugs do: Obsession. Losing friends. Paranoia. Spending more time on the chasing, and the getting, and the doing than they had ever intended.

When scientists look at the brain of the addict and the brain of the extremist, they see the same neural pathways.

And when researchers in Switzerland looked at “social justice activists,” they found the same heightened levels of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (a.k.a. the dark triad personality traits) as they find in right-wing extremists.

Don’t kill the messenger.

Just remember that what you really can’t tolerate when you look at, say, Donald Trump or A.O.C., is your own reflection in a perceived reality (or delusion) that you co-create with them.

And that’s what most of us refuse to look at. Or are too afraid to.

As Ram Dass states, “What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.”

And from a grand Buddhist perspective, perhaps we’re just a plane of young souls, none younger than the current occupants of the Oval or the masked, sloganeering protestors in the streets and on the socials.

Both of their self-indulgent, apoplectic responses to f*cking everything are so tired. I would say, “get over it.” But I would be misspeaking.

It’s more like, “Get over your Self.”

That’s where the real work is. And that’s what we do in recovery. We “live and let live.” And if everybody else did, I guarantee the world we live in would have way less things to be apoplectic about. Our gift of desperation has a side effect. The gift of levitation. The ability to rise above all the f*cks given to heal ourselves and, in turn, do our infinitesimally small part to heal one another and the world.

Ours isn’t just a path to happy destiny. It’s a road to de-radicalization. And I pray everybody else puts down their phones and gets on the VW bus. Before it’s too late. If it isn’t already.

I just watched the most recent episode of The White Lotus [spoiler-ish alert] and it finds Frank—masterfully embodied by Sam Rockwell—on both sides of a razor’s edge.

In the storyline, the distance from herbal tea and Buddhist living to “You know what, God damn it, I think I might have a drink after all. Could I get a whisky, darling? One wouldn’t hurt,” to a hotel room full of strippers and fat rails to be hoovered up, is measured in hours. Hours.

10 months of sobriety (or 10 years) can evaporate in an instant.

This is a binary with which all of us sober folks coexist.

At any time, it could be over.

Of course, The White Lotus is an intoxicatingly genius TV show. It's darkly comic. It’s dramatic. But as a sober watcher, that’s the realest sh*t I’ve seen this year. I laugh. But there’s another part of me that’s not laughing. And that’s the part saying, “that could be me," which is quickly quieted by the part saying, “that would be me.”

It shouldn’t be. My whole life is preventative measures. My program. My daughter. My marriage. My living amends. That’s my recovery.

But be it me or anyone else, when it ends, it’s over.

Many, many full moons ago, before notching a decade of continuous physical sobriety, I had a couple months under my belt. And I had one little tequila. Just one. And shortly thereafter it was The Ace of Spades on 8 Mile Road, shady dealers, night terrors, insanity, incomprehensible demoralization. All in a seersucker suit. And this went down in a matter of hours.

"Going out" doesn't keep me up at night. I don’t think of it as a kind of scythe wielding reaper, ever watching, ever waiting for me to f*ck up.

Honestly, I don’t give it a lot of thought.

But when I see it on the small screen, I can play out the tape. I remember that I’m a werewolf or I’m Cinderella, dodging full moons and midnights one day at a time.

Point being: When it's on it's on. When it's off it's off. No substitutions.

You can’t be a little bit sober. Or mostly sober.

And while I’m on the subject, if you’re in a conversation with a sober cat and you start a sentence with, “I’m basically sober except for…” the only appropriate conclusion to that sentence is, “Actually, how about the Lakers? You think they actually have a shot this year?”

Do I? No.

There is a daytime. And there is a night time. When one ends the other begins. Yet we project our elaborate, romantic fantasies onto dawn and dusk. As alcoholics, we wish to exist forever in the in-between, to make every hour golden hour.

What if I could control my drinking? What if I could just drink on the weekends? What if I only drink unfiltered Belgian beer? What if I only drink French Champagne with French women in French cities? I’ve filled up notebook after notebook with these fantasies. The only thing that ever worked was annihilating the “in-between” and committing to one side of the binary.

You’re either sober or you’re not sober. You don’t get to be both.

And when it’s over, it’s over. To quote Frank, once you go out, “That ship has sailed.”

It’s fitting that Frank’s deepest sexual fantasy—on which he expounds in his epic episode five monologue in terms that would likely stir the souls and loins of both Freud and Jung—is to be both the subject and the object of his desire at the same time. Or in his words, to be the railed and the railer.

Finding this impossible, he walks away. He tries on sobriety. And then he goes out. Spectacularly.

We’ll need to tune in next week to see where this goes. But, of course, we know where this goes—futile attempts to control the uncontrollable, to be someone else, i.e., the one someone none of us can ever be.

We can never be what we aren’t.

Frank can never be “one of these Asian girls getting fucked by me.”

And I can never be a “normal drinker.” And neither can he for that matter (and perhaps therein lies the punctum of his particular sexual preoccupation).

There's a common refrain among sober folks that the seemingly erratic debauchery was somehow "boring" in hindsight. Whereas the seeming monotony of clarity is vastly more interesting.

What could possibly explain that?

I think it’s about tension.

Not stress. (Though, I have plenty of that.)

It's the tension between what is and what isn't. It's tension on a cellular level, a Big Bang level, a God level, which I'd argue are the same thing.

It's the anticipation of being and not being.

The expectation of the cocaine or the carnal is often more exciting than the actual thing, you know?

The release of that tension—one night in Bangkok—that is captured in the final minutes of last week’s White Lotus is robotic, monotonous, sad. The intensity (or eros) of monologue Frank is gone. And there’s nothing all that sexy about what’s left.

When I got sober, I just wanted to stop drinking, to stop calling “the guy.”

It couldn’t possibly have occurred to me that I was embracing a manner of living that mimics an intrinsic and universal truth—that we either are or we aren’t. All of us. Every living thing. No exceptions.

This is a crazy way to live.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

A common refrain among the newly sober (or those considering sobriety) is, “But if I don’t drink, I won’t be cool anymore.”

In my experience, that’s been false.

The coolest people I know are sober. They’re indifferent to trends, not people. They’re generous. They make my kid laugh. And they are often cool enough to stand up in front of a room full of people and share about just how cool they haven’t been, aren’t, and never will be.

Now, I imagine some may be thinking, how is Hoka-wearing middle aged dad with a sparsely-read Substack going to lecture me on what is and isn’t cool?

Hey, man, I’d rather hear it from Tom Ford (dream Snake Dog Journal interviewee #1) or Lana Del Rey (dream Snake Dog Journal interviewee #2), too.

But I must say: Ten years into sobriety, I’m cooler than ever.

And it’s not my well-honed air of aloofness and perpetual dissatisfaction. That kind of “cool” is closer to what Jung would call “the persona” or “the actor’s mask.” That kind of “cool” is a hedge against the discomfort of being a frightened animal in a polite society. It’s a defense mechanism. And, it’s fake. Oh, you think yours isn’t?

No, it’s my ability to take my proverbial lickings and keep on proverbially ticking. It’s my capacity to ache like I ache and keep on aching.

Fundamentally, cool is about tolerance. Distress tolerance to be specific.

Distress tolerance can be defined as an individual’s "perceived capacity to withstand negative emotional and/or other aversive states (e.g. physical discomfort), and the behavioral act of withstanding distressing internal states elicited by some type of stressor."

Alcohol—and its anxiety-numbing effects—certainly create the impression of dissolving those aversive states.

But if you drink like I drink, eliminating one aversive state with one Cazadores leads to ever more aversive states and ever more Cazadores. It’s like the Droste effect. Look closely and you’ll see me, nostrils orange rimmed with Adderall, newly in love, and crawling—with the help of the nice bouncers—out of the Body Shop onto Sunset Boulevard at 6 am on a Tuesday morning, over and over again, for all eternity.

It was that kind of incomprehensible demoralization that led me to sobriety. But if I picked up tonight, it’s not the shame induced by the things I would probably (surely) do that I would be most afraid of. It’s the yearning. The incessant, oozing, jaundiced longing for things to feel different than they feel and be different than they are. Wherever I was, whomever I was with, whatever I was doing, I was wanting, wanting, wanting. And that’s the furthest f*cking thing from cool there is, whether you’re at The Chateau or living on the sidewalk down the street.

Of course, the womanizing, hard drinking, taciturn archetype of cool shaped by 20th century literature and fashion and film hasn’t aged well. And despite my best efforts, I never really had the constitution to achieve that kind of “cool.” Maybe it was the black outs. Or maybe it was the not being able to shut the f*ck up. Or maybe it was the IBS. I guess we’ll never know.

A lot of what passes as “cool” was actually created by an advertising industry which has a few cool people in it. But let’s be honest. Not many.

For a long time, though, I really bought into what they were selling. As a result, my definition of cool was something like: “Creativity plus carelessness with life. And cigarettes. Might punch you. Maybe French.”

But today, as far as I’m concerned, the higher one’s distress tolerance, the cooler they are. French or not. This, perhaps, should be obvious. The term, “keep your cool” telegraphs the idea of distress tolerance. And “losing your cool,” essentially, is squandering the capacity to tolerate discomfort, at which point things have a tendency to unravel quickly, whether someone is sober or not.

The implication here is that cool is—like all things—impermanent. We can hold onto it. Unless, of course, we hold onto it too tight.

Cool, like sobriety, has to be worn loosely. And, like any fashion piece, it’s all in how you wear it. Uncool can, of course, shine through the most stylish ‘fits.

And it’s not about being comfortable in your own skin. It’s about tolerating the discomfort of even having skin in the first place. And if you can’t do that, even Jil Sander can’t help you. Sorry.

Over the last ten years, I’ve found that craving is the language of distress. It speaks in tongues. And its whispering wantings come in waves. Surfing those waves—or perhaps letting them pummel me into the beach—is the painful path I take to nirvana. I’ll let you know if I ever get there. In the meantime, I’ll simply do whatever it takes to keep that first drink just beyond my reach.

But I’m certain of one thing. If I did reach for that drink, the cause wouldn’t be an inability to tolerate the world around me.

It would be an inability to tolerate myself in it.

I’m in my mid-40s now. Want to know where the cool kids I came up with are now? They’re either totally immersed in their work or they’re totally irrelevant. They’ve either learned to give freely of themselves or they’re still on the take. And miserable. The rest are dead. They couldn’t tolerate the distress. Or wouldn’t.

So, if you’re thinking about getting sober and worried about losing your cool, don’t stress. You probably never really had it to begin with.

Illustration by Alex Lins

Michael Sherman wears many hats. Literally. And figuratively. Producer. Curator. Patron of the arts. And founder and owner of Bow + Arrow Entertainment, where he makes independent films for cinephiles and boasts a track record of launching big-time talents (he produced the first films of both recent Oscar nominees Brady Corbet and Timothée Chalamet, to name two). But the title that means the most to him today is Dad. On the eve of the 20th anniversary of his sobriety, the Baltimore native once dubbed “streetwear Larry David” reflects on his journey from pink cocaine to parenthood, from the very real specter of death to the joy of getting to be an un-flickering guiding light for his daughter, one day at a time. Over the last two decades, there have been roses and thorns. Failures. And victories. He recognizes that things in life that are beyond his control will knock him off his pedestal. How he reacts, though, is up to him. In sobriety, he abides by the mantra, “Let go and let God.” He has the phrase tattooed on his arm, a daily reminder that hanging onto anything with a negative charge is the surest way to ruin his day. Even a phone call. “When I feel like I’m in a no-win conversation, I’ll be like, ‘You know what? Somebody’s calling me. I’ve got to go,’” he says. “And then I just hang up on the person. So, just know that if I do that to you, that’s what’s happening.”

What does your sobriety mean to you?

Everything. Without sobriety, I’m never going to be happy, joyous, and free. It ain’t happening for me. I’m not punching that ticket.

What was the driving force that led you to sobriety?

Pain. Fear. Shame. Ultimately, I wanted to be a dad. I was either going to die or I was going to get my sh*t together and be a dad. And being a dad is the greatest gift sobriety has ever given me. I’m forever grateful I chose this path instead of the other one.

What’s something you’ve done sober that you never thought you could do sober?

My dad died and I didn’t drink. That was tough. The fact that I got through it without even thinking about drinking is a testament to the strength of my program, my friends, my sponsor, my sponsees, my wife, my family. I remember right when I got sober I’d think, “Man, I’m not going to be able to have a glass of Champagne at my wedding?” I got married 12 years into sobriety. At that point, I didn't even think about Champagne. I could care less.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received and from whom?

“Control the controllable.” From my dad. It’s tattooed on me. I’ve really tried to stay true to that in honor of my old man. I’ll be like, “I made this great movie. It’s amazing. It’s going to be amazing.” But I have no control over what happens with it. What I think is great might not be what everybody else thinks is great. I did the best I could. I made the best product I could. After that, it’s not up to me. It’s up to the consumer. And that’s fine.

What’s it been like navigating the film world sober?

Lots of anger. Lots of resentments. Lots of disappointments. But, also lots of victories. Lots of fun. Lots of wonderful relationships. It’s a tricky business.

Given alcohol's well documented effects on productivity, why do you think there continues to be so much stigma re: not drinking in creative industries?

Our industry is filled with people who need validation. Constantly. It’s a lot of egos. But that’s what’s so beautiful about sobriety. You show up with no ego. A lot of people think that if you’re not drinking, you’re not cool. Look at how many people in the business have been to rehab. Look at how many have died from alcohol and drug overdoses. That’s part of it, this belief that coolness comes from alcohol. I used to think I was cool when I sniffed blow every night. But I was literally alone in my apartment at 6 am calling prostitutes just so I could spend some time with somebody because I was so lonely.

What’s the best movie you’ve ever seen about addiction?

Leaving Las Vegas. It’s a really good take on alcoholism.

How has sobriety affected your relationships with the people closest to you?

It’s allowed me to love unconditionally. It’s allowed me to be intimate. Those are things I couldn’t do when I was drinking and using. When I was in treatment, nobody came to visit me. The fact that my family talks to me today, that we have great relationships, it’s made everything better. By far.

Did sobriety change your personal style?

I’ve always done my own thing. I kind of teeter between hip-hop and vintage preppy. I love Bode. But I also love Supreme. I love Rick Owens. But, I also love Starter. You can combine anything you want. That’s the beauty of having the freedom to get dressed in the morning. About three years ago, I went and got my ear pierced and colored my hair. I call it my “midlife nice-is.” I’m going to be 50 this year and I’ve got pink hair. It’s just who I am. I like to stick out in a positive way.

In your mind’s eye, what is the shape of success?

Happiness. Humility. Kindness. Those are markers for success. I don’t measure success by how much money you have. I measure success by how much love you have in your life.

What gives you hope?

The look on my daughter’s face gives me hope.

You’re celebrating twenty years of sobriety this week. What’s your plan for the next twenty?

I got sober at 29. So at 58, I’ll have lived half my life sober. I think that’s a really cool thing. Of those markers in sobriety, 30 days was incredible, one year was unbelievable, five years was great, 10 years was amazing, and 20 is magical.

Photographs by Roman Koval

In June of 1961, about five months before his death, Carl Jung wrote a now-famous letter to Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. In it, Jung equates the insidious craving of alcoholism to “the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness or—expressed in medieval language—the union with God.” This effectively confirms what Wilson and his contemporaries had been saying, that the only remedy for “the alcohol problem” was “the spiritual solution.” At the time, the endorsement of the world’s most famous living psychiatrist was an energizing boon for Wilson and the nascent 12-step movement.

That Wilson and Jung were exchanging letters at all reflects a mutual interest. Both seemingly believed in what the other was selling. And in this case, they were selling the same thing. They both understood that for the alcoholic of the hopeless variety and the human being in general, “Reason alone does not suffice.” At the time, both were concerned with the spiritual degradation of society and the individual. Jung saw a “civilization [whose] spiritual background [had] gone astray” where people “just drift,” their need for meaning going forever “unanswered.” Drifting, of course, is an antonym for walking with purpose. Like the eightfold path or the way of the Tao, Wilson employed the walking metaphor with “the steps.” And in his letter, Jung wholeheartedly agreed that this spiritual fulfillment “can only happen to you when you walk on a path.”

Wilson’s path starts with that first step, admitting powerlessness. The second step, summoning a willingness to believe in something—anything—that might restore the sanity that alcohol savagely rips from the alcoholic. It’s the third step, though, that most resonates on the union-with-God level: “made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” While this God of our understanding reappears in the eleventh step—a step that requests a conscious contact via prayer and meditation—it’s the act of turning over the will to God where the real juice is, where the spiritual thirst gets quenched.

And I wonder…why?

The third step prayer begins: “God, I offer myself to Thee—to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will.” It’s an act of self-sacrifice. And it’s an act of letting go. It’s a letting go of what Jung calls “the downright resistance to the mere possibility of there being a second psychic authority besides the ego.” And it’s an affront, “a positive menace to the ego that its monarchy could be doubted.” It’s an attitude, a posture. This step is not about belief. It’s about relief. And the “re” in relief implies a precursor, a turning back, a return to a previous state.

What exactly is that previous state? And how exactly do we get there?

To answer that question, I looked to Jung’s lectures on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, a 16th century Spanish priest and one of the OG Jesuits. The Exercises are a kind of Inquisition-era spiritual bootcamp and a precursor to the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Whether Wilson pulled the material from the collective unconscious or by coincidence (Wilson claimed to be unaware of the Exercises at the time of writing down the 12 steps), his “design for living” has inspired many Catholics to rally around the similarities. Namely, Father Edward Dowling, who Bill Wilson called “the greatest spiritual figure who has ever come into my life." Dowling believed the steps and the ascetic Exercises were intrinsically linked, stating “all the teachings of Our Lord boil down to two cardinal ideas: one negative, the denial of self; the other positive, the initiation of and union with Christ."

And there’s that word again. Union. Jung said it. Dowling said it. Not belief. Not adherence to the creed. Not devotion. Instead, it’s about the merging, the offering of self to the other, the return. As Jung wrote of God, “we neither make Him more remote nor eliminate Him, but bring Him closer to the possibility of being experienced.” And union, by definition, is as close as one can get to another.

In the Exercises, this is deemed to be man’s reason for being, to defy “our biological notion that men’s purpose lies within themselves,” to accept a view in which “man is created for a specific purpose and end.” That purpose, essentially, is to hand your will over to God. And to many alcoholics in recovery, that should sound familiar. In his description of the Third Step, Wilson writes, “hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our director. He is the Principal; we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His children.” Here, I wonder if Wilson is describing the birth of a new man or the birth of a new consciousness. And I also wonder, is there a difference?

The Fundamentum opens with the words, “Creatus Est Homo” or man is created. But this is not the Book of Genesis creation. Nor the evolutionary spark. It’s a psychospiritual realization. As Jung writes. “If we understand this “Creatus est homo” correctly, then we tell ourselves that we are something that has come about, a product, that we are anticipated. We were there and did not know it. It was “known,” only we do not know who knew it.” What Jung seems to be describing here is a kind of coming online, a new awareness that God has been, in effect, waiting for you to return to Him.

This isn’t “the pink cloud” recovering alcoholics talk about. This is the transition from purposelessness to a single-minded purpose. “Thy will, not mine.” It’s the positive and the negative that Father Dowling was talking about. It’s an indifference to anything but that which “helps us more towards the end for which we are created.”

As the Third Step Prayer concludes, “take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of thy Power, Thy love, and Thy way of life.” The stripping away of obstacles that we experience in steps four through nine is initiated in the third step. It’s the deal we make. The quid pro quo. You do this for me, and I’ll do this for you. And this, I believe, fundamentally is what the 12 Steps or the Exercises are designed to do: to help us keep up our end of the bargain.

And while this isn’t a devil’s bargain, it is protection from the Devil himself. As Jung writes in that same letter to Wilson, “an ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil.” The Devil? Are we really going there?

Indeed, we are. The devil, according to Jung, is real. He was not a proponent of privatio boni, or the notion that evil is simply the absence of good. In the letter to Wilson, he wrote, “I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world, leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition.” This spiritual need, again, the need for union. Those seeking a spiritual (or spirits) experience with the bottle, find something else—annihilation. As Jung writes, “if the drives exceed those limits, that paves the way to unconsciousness: so into a lower state of culture, a destructive state, and that is the devil—because the devil destroys all.”

The Fundamentum, The Exercises, and The Steps aren’t just a call to God, they are a hedge against the Devil. For me, the devil has always been the purview of televangelism and Mama Boucher. On the other hand, Kendrick Lamar, one of the greatest spiritual teachers of our time (and one who eschews alcohol and drugs), conceptualizes the Devil (or “Lucy”) as an ever present, all-demanding list of temptations. Lucy will “give you no worries,” “fill your pockets,” “want your trust and loyalty,” and won’t “slack a minute.” That lower state of culture Jung references, according to Lamar, is everywhere, all the time. But, Lamar is a devout Christian. I’m not.

I struggle with Christianity. I struggle with the communion cup of it all. But as Ram Dass said, “To say that Christ is the only way is a certainty. We are all the Christ and it’s the only way. I just tell people, focus on Christ, not on Christianity.” This is an invitation into non-dichotomous thinking. And what is that if not an invitation to a spiritual experience?

I had one. On Epiphany, 2015, I was “struck sober.” However, upon further reflection, I remembered it didn’t quite go down like that. Twelve days earlier, I had (so random) found myself at Christmas Eve mass at Mount Carmel Church in Montecito, California. For the first time in my life, I fell to my knees and prayed for God’s help, God’s relief. And, twelve days later, I got it. For many years, I felt that that was God choosing me. But it’s more than that. I could say, “God gave me everything.” But, more accurately, it was me who gave God my all.

We hear about sober people “finding religion.” But what we really find is more intense than that. It’s religiosity. It’s not Christ’s passion that matters. It’s our passion for Christ. Or our own non-denominational version of Him (or it). Jung grasped this from an early age. Reflecting on his childhood, he understood there was a right way and a wrong way to access God, “that this grace was accorded only to one who fulfilled the will of God without reservation.” In Alcoholics Anonymous and the Exercises, it’s less about God than the relationship with God. The power isn’t in God choosing us. The power is in us choosing God, electing to take “spiritus contra spiritum” one day at a time.

When I first got sober, there were two questions that haunted me. How will I eat sushi without a big Sapporo? And how will I have sex? With anyone. Ever again.

Like many folks—addicts or not—I had relied on alcohol as a kind of courage lubricant in the sex sphere. Without it, I was painfully self-conscious and reserved. With it, I could be a f*cking freak. Or that’s—at least—what it would have had me believe.

Until I got sober, I had never had sex with a new partner for the first time without being under the influence of alcohol. I couldn’t imagine initiating the act without it. In an effort to avoid that awkwardness, I thought it would be #monkmode and a life of celibacy for me.

I was wrong. But looking back, I wish someone had said, “Actually, in all likelihood, you will have less sex with fewer partners. But you will have sex. And it will be more satisfying. And you’ll feel less guilt and shame about it afterward.”

After somewhat scientifically surveying dozens of sober folks, that seems to be the case. For most. And these were folks who—before sobriety—liked to get drunk to get down. About 80% of respondents claimed they were “always” or “almost always” under the influence when they slept with a new partner for the first time. Perhaps this is just a force of habit. I imagine the general population might be more prone to being under the influence when hooking up than when doing just about anything else. As William George, director of University of Washington’s George Lab (that studies the influence of alcohol on sexual health behavior) writes, “sex is rewarding, and alcohol has salutary aspects; there is a reason why the two activities have been joined through most of human history and known prehistory.”

A lot of addicts, of course—when awake—are always at least a little f*cked up, whether they’re f*cking or the farthest thing from it. For them, always or almost always might apply to things other than sex. Like watching the Lakers. Or driving to work. But for those who weren’t wasted all the time, the relationship between alcohol and initiating sex with a new partner was deep if not totally inextricable.

Reflexively, the alcohol-sex link must be chalked up to the link between alcohol use and disinhibition, right? Conventional wisdom posits that alcohol’s aphrodisiac qualities (if it has any) are related to the disinhibition mechanism. However, evidence supporting the disinhibition concept is “modest” and it can be perceived as a “far from well thought out pseudoexplanation.”

Furthermore, “inhibition” (or any of its synonyms) weren’t words that came up in the survey. Curious, perhaps. But in 2025, inhibitions that are “culturally inculcated” or “externally imposed” are fewer and farther between. For many, there is less to be sexually inhibited about now than there has been for the past several hundreds of years of western, Judeo-Christian history. See: d*ck pics, for one.

William James, the so-called father of modern psychology called inhibition “an essential and unremitting element of our cerebral life.” Inhibition might be defined as “an individual’s tendency to limit behavior leading to adverse outcomes.” Gone awry, of course, such limiting behaviors can verge into the territory of neuroticism. And neuroticism itself is “a risk factor for heavy alcohol consumption, alcohol-related problems, and binge drinking.” Sometimes the tail wags (the hair of) the dog.

A more contemporary reading of inhibition might view it as a goal rather than a process, i.e., people don’t “do” inhibition, they don’t "use inhibition to suppress a target response.” Instead, the purpose of inhibition and the strategies employed to arrive at it (strategies perhaps compromised by the pharmacological effects of alcohol) is actually achieving one’s goals. Such a definition might seem anathema to a culture that often perceives inhibitions as an impediment to the achievement of goals. That makes for a good Hollywood plot line. But inhibition—like ego—gets a bad rap in a rampant consumer culture where we’re indoctrinated to “always be closing.” As one respondent reflected, drinking has the capacity to “turn on the confident sales pitch” version of ourselves. The choice of words, “turn on,” does not go unnoticed here. It’s about living out an idea of sex more than a lack of inhibition. As George writes, “an individual’s sexuality after drinking is mostly a product of their beliefs about alcohol and sex, beliefs based on previous personal and vicarious experiences as well as culturally acquired schemas.” In short, after drinking, people behave how they believe they’re supposed to behave after drinking. They turn it on, living out “self-fulfilling prophecies about what is expected from alcohol as an excuse for out-of-character behavior.”

“To thine own self” be damned. Even the mere presence of alcohol—without even ingesting it—makes people see potential sexual partners where there might otherwise have been none. What behavioral psychologists call “alcohol expectation theory,” the rest of us call “beer goggles.”

In practice, “turning it on” to secure a new sexual partner might actually be in conflict with our actual nature. From an evolutionary standpoint, the goal of sex is to mate at the highest standard. It makes sense to choose wisely. And this is especially true for women who—if made pregnant by a questionably DNA’d degenerate for nine months—would be incapable of procreating with a better mate for the duration. And life is short.

Alcohol, of course, helps many suffer fools lightly. Without it, as one respondent mentioned, they “think twice” about who they’re going to invite back to the crib. From an evolutionary perspective, abstaining from alcohol seems to push people from short-term to long-term mating strategies. In other words, moving away from “hit it and quit it” encounters (primates do this) or one-night stands with unavailable fuccbois (primates do this) in favor of experiences that require “investment” and “exchange” (primates do this, too).

This aspect of discernment or intentionality is reflected in the 75% of respondents who claim to have fewer sexual partners in a given year of sobriety than they did before getting sober. It’s fair to say that sobriety makes many more selective: ideologically, aesthetically, and Darwinianly.

Also, it’s likely that sobriety is a gateway to committed, monogamous relationships. Practicing alcoholics often don’t make the best life partners. Trapped in a narcissistic feedback loop, many lie and cheat and steal and put using ahead of all relationships, sexual or not. Given the majority of respondents claimed to be in committed monogamous relationships, it would seem there is a positive correlation between sobriety and monogamy. Especially for sober men, over 70% of whom reported being in monogamous relationships. (This is slightly higher than the national average according to the Pew Research Center).

One thing the survey did not account for is the possibility that some people have no sexual partners at all. For some, no sex could be more satisfying than any sex. For others, a fear of intimacy, social awkwardness, or body shame—once subdued by the pharmacological effects of alcohol—might lead to difficulties with sex (or the desiring of it). As one respondent stated, “I never realized how much I relied on substances to engage sexually. Without them, I find it hard to even think about it.” Sexual anorexia, “a concept that refers to the compulsive avoidance of sexual nourishment and intimacy,” could be a real danger in sobriety if the denial of “pleasure” associated with abstinence from drugs and alcohol mutates into compulsive self-starving of “the pleasure of relationships, dating, loving touch, and genuine connection with others.”

While sober people are having sex with fewer partners, they are also having less sex period. Only 20% of respondents claimed to have more sex in sobriety than they did before. 50% of men report having less sex. Women, 70%. This might be explained by factors that can affect all people—monogamy, raising children, the pandemic, stress, aging, etc. Or, sober folks might be missing the libido bump derived from “modest consumption up to a blood-alcohol level of around 0.08 percent.” While 66% of singles reported having less sex in sobriety, only 50% of those in committed relationships reported having less sex.

The sex they are having, though, is generally perceived to be more satisfying. And some reported actually remembering it being a factor. Only 16% of those surveyed found sex to be less satisfying in sobriety.

While drinking and sex are frequent bedfellows, they aren’t necessarily happily compatible ones. For men, “chronic high alcohol consumption is linked with impaired erectile functioning and associated sexual dysfunctions such as erectile disorder, hypoactive sexual desire, and either premature or delayed ejaculation.” For women, “heavy alcohol use is related to impaired sexual functioning, including lowered sexual interest, desire, and satisfaction, as well as lack of orgasm and lubrication and painful intercourse.” Has an unsexier paragraph ever been written? Certainly not by me. And that’s just the biological factors.

Of those surveyed, 60% of respondents reported experiencing “less” negative thoughts or feelings like shame or guilt about their sexual experiences in sobriety. 20% responded “about the same.” And only 16% responded “more.” It’s possible this is the result of having less partners and less “casual” sex in sobriety. “Feelings of embarrassment, loss of self-respect and sexual regret are common” after a hookup. Furthermore, “relative to romantic partnerships, casual sexual experiences are associated with more negative emotions, such as negative affect and guilt.” Thoughtfulness, presence, intentionality, and consciousness—words typically associated with experiences spiritual rather than sexual—appeared multiple times in survey responses. Across a variety of genders, sexual orientations, and relationship statuses, sobriety seems to imbue sex with something akin to a spiritual experience. And that seems to be the best hedge against feelings of guilt and shame.

In conclusion, for those who do choose a life of sobriety, their sex lives will likely change. Significantly. And for the better. Change—per usual—is life’s only constant. For many, sobriety is a spiritual practice. And that practice applies to all facets of life. Even sex. Or perhaps, especially sex. At the risk of stating the obvious, the most significant difference between sex before sobriety and after sobriety that the survey captured regarded the percentage of people who never slept with a new partner without being under the influence. Before sobriety, that number was zero. After sobriety, that number is 100%. From a data perspective, there is no greater possible divergence. And, it would be interesting to see where else in sober lives—outside of the sex sphere—the degree of the change would be that significant. Even sushi and beer. Upon further reflection, an iced green tea did on occasion do in a pinch with a spicy tuna roll taken at my desk at the office. And it still does. Even at Sushi Gen. Or perhaps, especially at Sushi Gen.

As far as portents go, I’m not really sure what to make of a random copy of Sartre’s No Exit landing on my desk at Snake Dog’s downtown Los Angeles HQ. I thought we were living in a post-literate society. Why would a f*cking book appear on my desk at all? And why this old-ass French one? And why now?

One not to risk ignoring harbingers of any kind, I read the play. It’s a scant forty-seven pages, many of them quite funny. Three folks, post-life, trapped in an exit-less room for all eternity. No eyelids. No sleep. It’s “life without a break.” With ugly furniture.

But the play definitely brings up some sh*t. As many of my fellow Angelenos can attest, the beginning of 2025 felt eerily similar to the existential slog that was 2020. Fear. Masks. Conflicting public health information. Schools shuttered. Meetings and classes migrating back to Zoom. And getting busy Zillowing far-flung real estate like there’s actually any way out of this.

The impulse to isolate to some faraway place is strong. But Copper Harbor, Michigan can’t save me. Neither can Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Only you can. As Sartre writes, “alone, none of us can save himself or herself; we’re linked together inextricably.”

And yet, the Zillow fantasies almost always fling me further and further from my IRL community. Isolation masquerades as liberation set on two acres with cedar shingles and a Japanese soaking tub.

Hell might be “other people,” but we’re the best we’ve got. And a couple weeks of throwback pandemic-era mindf*ckery reminded me of that.

It’s the same tired old story. 1) Meet discomfort. 2) Go to escape.

That’s the addiction cycle, the assigning of value to a mirage. Anywhere must be better than here. A Zillow listing lets us project a discomfort-less existence onto a house. When we survey the subway-tiled bathroom, most of us don’t imagine having Norovirus in there. It reminds me of that first drink. It was always so full of promise. It was never, like, “Cheers, in eight hours I’ll be licking cocaine-laced lint out of the flipped-inside-out pocket of my rarely-washed canvas jacket.” I, for one, always imagined myself ending up somewhere much closer to the top of the world at the beginning of a night out.

In Sartre’s window-less, exit-less room, its attendant, the valet Garcin, teases his prisoner, “So you haven’t yet got over your—what-do-you-call-it—sense of human dignity?”

Seeking escape, I could lose mine over and over again. Seeking escape always led to the windowless room. The Swiss existentialist, Medard Boss, wrote, “addiction, whatever its form, has always been a desperate search, on a false and hopeless path, for the fulfillment of human freedom.”

The exit isn’t there, y’all. The “desperate search” for freedom results in anything but. “The lifestyle,” as it were, is ultimately so constricting that its antipode is “a newfound freedom.”

And, sure, Zillow is innocent enough, right? Unlike alcohol and drugs, it can’t lead to hospitals, jails, and institutions. Can’t it? Honestly, it probably already has.

The “desperate search” is a key component to a myriad assortment of second machine age dopamine reward systems. Think: LinkedIn, The New York Times app, Tinder, TikTok, Pornhub. What do they all have in common? The fallacy of escape. And how’s that going? Which study on the link between online life and increases in instances of depression, self-harm, and suicidality shall I quote for you?

And that’s what any attempt at escape from the “quote-unquote real world” hath wrought so far. And the accelerator set is just getting started.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic—for the 97% of Zillow users who aren’t actually buying anything—every house on Zillow is a prison, at best. And a death trap, at worst.

I would be remiss not to point out that some people I know—and thousands I don’t know—lost f*cking everything but the clothes on their backs during the LA fires. That’s the kind of liberation from attachment I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Something about entertaining dissociative real estate fantasies while the newly home-less search the same site for shelter feels a little indulgent.

And the reality is, most of us aren’t going anywhere.

The vast majority in Los Angeles can’t afford to. They’re stuck with the AQI they get. And the government they get, too. They don’t have the luxury of performatively musing on moving to Portugal and listing all the tech companies that they will now never work for on LinkedIn. The tone deafness of that kind of entitlement—when 2/3 of Americans say they are living paycheck to paycheck—is open to pre-qualified c*nts only. But that’s just one man’s Zestimate.

Here, I propose an alternate story. 1) Meet discomfort. 2) Go to connection.

Instead of running away, run to. Run to your family, your friends, your lovers. And you often won’t have to run far. They’re in your city, your neighborhood, your house, like, the one you actually live in right now. And they’re next to you in bed while you Zillow a better bedroom three thousand miles away. You can put your phone down. Liberation, it turns out, is not looking for the exit at all.

I lost my dad last month.

Or, did I lose him in June when I sat right across the room from him, staring into his pale blue eyes and couldn’t find him?

Or was it in January—after the fall—when he could no longer operate a phone and I could no longer reach him and he could no longer reach me?

Dementia, like alcoholism, is a progressive disease. A disease that takes everything. Your relationships. Your freedom. Even your fear of death.

The confusion is contagious. Bearings are lost. Fixed things, unfixed. It’s not so much the loss to be “so sorry for.” It’s the losing. After all that losing, the loss is a gift.

For me, the most difficult thing about my dad’s death has been looking at my own child and understanding that the one person who felt about me the way I feel about her is just…gone.

Sifting through old photos, I was struck by the way that he looked at me, this soft gaze of reverence and joy. I couldn’t see it then, of course. The natural and developmentally appropriate narcissism of the child wouldn’t or couldn’t allow it. My focus was elsewhere. As it was supposed to be. I was pre-programmed to get mine. And more of it.

That’s something most grow out of.

But the alcoholic doesn’t. The alcoholic carries on with the narcissism of the child, the self centeredness, the entitlement.

As such, for a long time, I made my dad my problem.

I had a problem with his authority. A problem with the quality of his protection and provision. And I was half right. I did have a problem.

If I took the low road, he didn’t put me on it. How I longed for that not to be true! But alas, the alcohol problem is a problem of perspective. And the truth hurts.

When I got sober, I healed myself. And in healing myself, I healed him. I healed us.

I felt into the wounds of his childhood, removing myself from the center of our story. There, I found a liberating grace in the recognition that we aren’t more entitled to our pain than our parents are to theirs. In this new story, we were together in this, not apart.

It’s because of sobriety that I got to make my amends.

In sobriety, business is taken care of, not left unfinished. I can let him go knowing that nothing was left on the table.

It was only because of sobriety that I felt his unconditional love for the first time.

And I came to the realization that it had been there all along.

And it’s still here now. The rare permanent thing in an impermanent world.

I cannot emphasize this enough: The single greatest gift of my sobriety was squaring our relationship on this plane.

The testosterone-mired interplay between fathers and sons is cunning, baffling, and powerful in its own right. What are we to make of the father figure, the patriarch, the man of the family? It’s challenging. We all have our daddy issues. Good, bad, present or not, as Jung writes, “the father is decisive in the destiny of the individual.”

My dad wasn’t perfect. Who is? He had an explosive temper. And that was his tragic flaw. He yearned for closeness but created distance.

He drank gin martinis. And we all know how that can go. Until dementia, of course, took those from him, too.

But he was a gentleman. He was trustworthy. He was generous. He was modest. He was good for a laugh. For a long time, I assumed everybody was. And then life showed me that he was actually the outlier.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve come to the belief that there is a verison of our parents that we can’t see until they are gone. All of the stories shape our sight. What we see when we look at our parents is the furthest thing from objectivity. It just really isn’t a pipe.

I was so lucky to have had a dad who had my back, who always supported me. Not everybody gets that. And sobriety has given me the gift of getting that, too.

For a long time, I believed that I shaped myself in opposition to my father. It was the tension, the conflict, the contrast with him that made me, me.

And I see so clearly now how wrong I was—that the things that I like the most about myself, he had, too.

Years ago, I got to tell my dad, “I like who I am. I like where I’m at.”

And I’m blessed to have had the opportunity to thank him for that, long before the long goodbye.

All of us—sober or not—are connected. We share instincts, archetypes, symbols, and a pull to the divine. And when we don’t, we feel empty. Like, empty empty.

From birth, we are individuals formed in the context of a collective. A nuclear family. Society at large. You don’t become you in a vacuum. The act of becoming is interactive. (What? You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?)

No sane man is an island.

And that’s why you’ll find the word “unity” emblazoned on many a recovery chip.

But that’s not the whole story.

Flip over that chip and you’ll find the words “to thine own self be true.”

As much as sobriety is about coming together, it’s also about the alchemical concept of Separatio.

Alcohol and drugs, carved out.

Play things, play pals, and play pens that no longer serve us, sliced away.

Resentments, butchered.

This process is a kind of individuation, of course.

It’s self-actualization 101. And according to the influential American Jungian analyst, Edward Edinger, that kind of autonomy “can be achieved only by a separation from unconscious identification with others.”

These “others” are your parents. Siblings. Extended family. And so on. Some rejection of these figures—their beliefs and ways of being—is universally required for attaining selfhood.

Other “others” are cultural. The principal. The president. The pontiff.

We have to reject them, too.

As traditional institutions weaken in terms of influence and reputation, individuation, theoretically, should be easier than ever.

But it isn’t.

In fact, it’s stickier and more nebulous as we self-organize into cultural coalitions founded on affinities, associations, and “likes.”

Nobody chooses to be raised in a conservative evangelical family. Or a neo-Marxist atheist one. That’s simply karma or fate. But it’s easier to rage against something when you’ve had no choice in the matter.

What happens when the family in question is your “chosen” one? What happens when you change? And you will. “To thine own self be true” is a moving target.

What do you do when your chosen family becomes more oppressive than your biological one? When affinities, associations, and “likes” become identities? And those identities become dogma? 

What started out as getting together with likeminded people—to shotgun a few beers in your boat shoes at the fraternity or snort a little ketamine in your platforms at a warehouse party—can mutate into something unconscious, unquestioned, and unexamined. With self-elected gatekeepers doling out ideological purity tests resembling CVS receipts. And you’re still in. But you feel out.

Who the f*ck are you then?

Nobody.

This is what Edward Edinger called “the danger of psychic identification.” And these identifications “must be dissolved because an awareness of radical separateness is a prerequisite for individuation.”

But damn if it’s not scary to walk away.

Because we justifiably fear abandonment. 

We fear alienation. 

But we will never find security by abandoning our true selves. 

And our identifications may be the very source of our alienation. To be whole, we have to separate from people, institutions, and ideas that no longer resonate with our true selves. In effect: a little alienation might have us feeling a little less alienated.

The fewer identifications, the better.

There’s the Buddhist logic for this of course, i.e., removing an attachment has intrinsic value.

And there’s a neurobiological argument for this.

As the brain develops in childhood—and throughout life—it removes associations it doesn’t need, improving processing speed and efficiency with the “pruning of synaptic circuits.” In simplest form, synapses are connections. And you can have too many of them. The brain targets and eliminates the weak ones. Separatio. 

Silicon Valley sells us on the idea that max connectedness is a max value proposition. And yet, the more “connected” we are, often the more anxious, isolated, and depressed we feel.

The truth is, less isn’t more. But it is amazing.

And that applies to friends, too.

As Jung wrote in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, “emotional ties are very important to human beings. But they still contain projections, and it is essential to withdraw these projections in order to attain to oneself and to objectivity. Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint; something is expected from the other person, and that makes him and ourselves unfree.”

If you have to self-censor or self-limit or self-gaslight to be friends with your friends, your individuation process has stalled the f*ck out. And that means it’s time to get the f*ck out. 

When you step away, detach with love, cut ’em loose, whatever, you don’t just liberate yourself. You pay that forward. When you grow, everybody grows.

Does it hurt? Of course it does. But I’ll take pain over pandering, disillusionment, and anxiety every time. It’s addition by subtraction. It’s a trust fall into intimacy and authenticity. And isn’t that what everyone actually wants?

Drake once said, “I’ve been losing friends and finding peace. Seems like a fair trade to me.” And while I have to wonder if he still holds that sentiment after his old friend Kendrick Lamar separated him from his career, reputation, and dignity, I can relate on the peace front.

In a famous scene from Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, Jack Twist tragically says to Ennis Del Mar, “I wish I knew how to quit you.”

For many, those eight words encapsulate life’s essential struggle, whether external or internalized.

But, not for me. 

I might not know how to quit Zyn. But I do know how to quit you.

Today, I’m quick to cut. And I keep my blade sharp. Because there’s no company that’s worth putting between me and me. That’s lonelier than being alone.

If you read the news, you know America is in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. And it disproportionately affects young people, one in three of whom report feeling lonely nearly every day. Maybe it’s the prolonged exposure to social media. Or maybe it’s the helicopter parenting. Or maybe they’re just terrified of the consequences of simply being themselves.

As Jung writes, “loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”

All communities are exclusive. Even “inclusive” ones. And if you have to think or speak or be or act a certain way or risk ostracization, then you aren’t really in one. Even the most authentically diverse, equitable, and inclusive community the world has ever known has one requirement for membership. Don’t have that and you’re out. Until you’re in again. And you’re always welcome to “keep coming back.”

When it was the most popular program on cable news, I tuned into Tucker Carlson’s show exactly once.

The night he interviewed Kanye West. RIP.

It was disturbing. It was dystopian. It was disheartening. It was dynamic. In short, it had all the hallmarks of compelling reality television. Just two Housewives, chopping it up.

I’m not a fan of Carlson. Never have been. Probably never will be.

And it’s not just the content. It’s the sanctimonious delivery. It’s hard to believe that anyone—let alone 3 million or more nightly viewers during the show’s run—would like being talked down to in such a manner. But I guess everyone has a kink.

I don’t care that he has been physically sober for over 20 years. Carlson is the epitome of personalities-over-principles pomp and pompousness that now color the deranged political conversation—on the right and left—in the United States today.

I have shingles, by the way. I’ve been laid up for days. So, in the last week, I’ve already watched Dune (running time 2 hours 35 minutes), Dune 2 (running time 2 hours 46 minutes), and Oppenheimer (running time 3 hours). While my skin killed me, I killed time. And I was desperate to kill more of it.

So I tuned in to see what the red-hatted, self-described hillbillies and salmon-slacked squash-playing set were up to at the Republican National Convention. And I basically watched the entire thing (running time interminable).

Sometime before Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock appeared on stage—yeah—out comes Tucker Carlson, all blue-of-blazer and punchable-of-face. The stylistic cognitive dissonance of this unholy trinity needled my Libra brain with the same merciless violence that herpes zoster has been needling my skin.

And here’s some of what he said:

“Lawmakers [are] stepping over the prostrate bodies of their fellow citizens OD’ing on drugs to go cast votes to send money to some foreign country. Yeah, actually. We’ve lost more Americans from drugs in the past four years than we lost in World War II. Yeah. Our bloodiest war, more than we lost in World War II. Does anybody care? It is pathetic. It is pathetic. And do you hear a single word from Washington about doing anything about it? We know where the drugs are coming from. We know the supply route. The US military spent billions bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail. You don’t see our Commander-in-chief suggesting that we use our military to protect our country, or the lives of its citizens. No, that’s for Ukraine. And it’s too much, actually. It’s too insulting. It’s too insulting. It’s a middle finger in the face of every American. It’s a very clear statement, which is unmistakable. And that is, ‘We don’t care about you.’”

Yikes.

Brushing aside the Russian propaganda bit in which he creates a Putin-flavored binary between helping Ukraine and helping addicts, it does provoke some questions: 

How much is an American life worth?

Would any politician ever answer that question with anything but “priceless?”

How much is the life of an American addict worth?

I’m not on board for turning the war on drugs into a hot war against Mexico even if I do think the cartels and the purportedly cartel-backed politicians like Enrique Peña Nieto, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Salvador Cienfuegos have a well-deserved precision strike missile coming to them. At least karmically.

Carlson, on the other hand, seems to be advocating for taking that $175 billion in military aid from Ukraine and converting it into $175 billion of military force to bomb the sh*t out of fentanyl (courtesy of the red, white, and blue). And he’s far from alone on that one. 

Last year there were enough lethal doses of fentanyl confiscated in California to kill the entire global human population. Twice. Good luck with that.

What Carlson’s Trumpian ring kissing, Biden Harris baiting, and bad faith rhetorical device here also misses is that fentanyl itself doesn’t cause addiction. 

The United States makes up 4% of the global population but accounts for 27% of the world’s overdose deaths. Let that little bit of American exceptionalism settle in. Naloxone vending machines are an actual thing now in red states and blue. It’s not a stretch to say that life in this beautiful country, God bless it, is a cause of addiction. 

As renowned addiction expert, Gabor Maté writes, “under certain conditions of stress many people can be made susceptible to addiction, but if circumstances change for the better, the addictive drive will abate.”

It’s likely the “conditions” and “circumstances” on our side of the border are inherently more deadly dangerous than anything coming over it. Fentanyl, like any other addictive substance, is relatively harmless if there isn’t a market for it. The problem is on the demand side.

Put it this way: If fentanyl is the bullets, America is the AR-15.

What if that $175 billion of exported military might Carlson is referencing was used to make a change to the setting, to meaningfully alter the “circumstances” and “conditions” that make America not great, but desperately f*cking addicted?

How far could that money go toward preventing and treating the trauma of childhood abuse at the root of so many addiction stories? How far could that money go to giving American (mostly) males a newfound sense of purpose and pride? How far could that money go to help meet the most baseline needs of the Americans most likely to lose their jobs, their housing, their food security, the custody of their children, etc., that would instantly make them the most likely to succumb to the perils of addiction? Because some of those prostrate fellow citizens Carlson mentions weren’t addicts before they ended up on the street. For many, the street comes before the addiction does. 

I recognize this might all be an overly simplistic binary. I mean, look at who I got it from. I’m no economist. But I do understand the concept of opportunity cost. And $175 billion could buy a lot of triage on the prevention front alone.

Bipartisan legislation like the Fentanyl Eradication and Narcotics Deterrence (FEND) Off Fentanyl Act that passed earlier this year is a start. (It’s also a mouthful. And FEND is giving D.A.R.E. which notably (and obviously) didn’t work). 

Addiction is as intersectional as it gets. Those numbers Carlson references disproportionately affect Black men, for one. And America’s ongoing mass casualty addiction crisis doesn’t seem to be coming to an end anytime soon. 

Does anybody care? 

It’s a little perplexing to me that the conspiracy theory white supremacy guy formerly of Fox News is the first high-profile person I’ve ever heard even bother to ask. I suspect that many of the people that perhaps rightly dismiss and disdain Carlson without a second thought are the exact same people who—without a second thought—step over the bodies of their neighbors on their way to sip orange wine at brunch.

And perhaps that’s the most dystopian thing of all. 

On TV, Tucker Carlson can rally the Russophile wing of the GOP by feigning empathy for those suffering from addiction in our streets. While IRL, a lot of my privileged, “progressive” peers can’t be bothered to rally themselves to even try.

“The aim of all life is death.” —Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

This week I found myself on Spotify, scouring the catalog of the late Townes Van Zandt (who would have turned 80 last month had he not succumbed to death-by-detox at age 52) looking for something all of us—at least according to Freud—are after. 

Annihilation. 

And Van Zandt is the embodiment of it.

Nobody laid waste to Self and boundless creative talent quite like Van Zandt.

Arguably the greatest American songwriter ever, this was a guy who was known to shoot rum and Coke intravenously. He also offered to sell the publishing rights to all the songs on his first four albums for twenty bucks to buy heroin.

While he sang about waiting around to die, Van Zandt didn’t. He chased death. And sadly, captured it. The melancholy and music he left behind invites us to die, just a little, vicariously, along with him.

There’s a misconception that addicts of the Van Zandt type live like they are never going to die. Far from it. They live like they are definitely going to die. And they often do. They ride the rails alongside Death, drinking and drugging with it, getting high on the proximity to it. It’s a romance so beguiling. And the higher the stakes, the bigger the thrill. The more tension between life and death, the sweeter that release.

This is the same tension at the foundation of great art.

And it’s the same tension you might find in every living thing.

The tension between two poles—one fighting to survive another craving release—has been going on here on Earth for about 3.7 billion years.

As Freud writes, “The inanimate was there before the animate…the tension then aroused in the previously inanimate matter strove to attain an equilibrium; the first instinct was present, that to return to lifelessness.”

The manifestation of that instinct in us (the death drive, or Thanatos) presents as what Jacques Lacan called “a nostalgia for a lost harmony.” 

We long for some blissed out moment before the tension between life and death ever existed. We long to return.

And the addict seems to long harder.

Today, in some ways, it’s too easy to survive. 

The likelihood that you or I won’t get through the next 24 hours is probably lower than it’s ever been. My Volvo has seven airbags. Violent crime is down in Los Angeles. And I don’t have polio. My grandpa had it. Twice.

The fact that three out of four young people aren’t “fit to serve” in the military doesn’t hinder our strategic deterrence. Drone warfare and precision-guided remote weaponry make it possible to fight wars without pulling our young people away from their Fortnite and “fourth meal.”

We are sick. Yet we survive.

Silicon Valley has produced ever more addictive ways to briefly quell the discomfort of living with always-on on-demand dating, gambling, pornography, outrage, that takes us fractionally closer to some kind of demise.

But in the absence of real threats, we find ourselves creating false ones. As the Succession meme goes, “I feel like if I don’t get to do this, I feel like that’s it. Like, I might die.” We fill up on cortisol, suffering every little extinction that isn’t actually coming. There is no “if…then,” Kendall. There’s just “then.” Don’t get distracted.

The real professionals get that, of course. They go to lengths even greater than Van Zandt’s to brush up against death. See: in vogue substances fentanyl and flesh-rotting xylazine. 

And we need not underestimate old reliable alcohol’s power to annihilate.

According to the CDC, alcohol related deaths in the United States increased 29% in the last five years. Deaths from alcohol-specific causes in the United Kingdom are almost 33% higher than they were before the pandemic.

Those seeking that intoxicating return to nowhere, to nothing, are getting massacred out there.

The blessed ones seek out healthier ways to die in life. “Relieve me of the bondage of self.” What is that if not a kind of call for oblivion? In sobriety, we strive to starve the false self of every lie it needs to survive. In that ultimate act of defiance—surrender—we dare to find more life than we ever found dodging death. We don’t seek out substances to make that life-death tension bearable. We accept it. We embrace it. And on its razor edge we find a fourth dimension.

This is also the promise of a really good meditation practice, a cessation of suffering linked to the temporary interruption of Self and its incessant wants. In the Tibetan tradition, “complete knowledge” can be something only attained at death or at the literal liberation of the consciousness from its human form. In Dzogchen, in death’s best case scenario, they escape delusion, burst into rainbow light, and leave only their hair, fingernails, and toenails behind.

Life itself is a partial suicide. It’s the death of death. And despite there being only one possible outcome, it’s still a gamble.

Oblivion and oneness are two sides of the same coin.

Heads you die.

Tails you die. 

It’s how you toss that coin that actually means something.

Good luck.

Last week, I found myself at an afternoon mass at the beatific-and-brutalist Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. Long story.

Listening to the homily and flashing peace signs at my fellow congregants, I wondered: Could I do this? Could I become Catholic? Or Jewish? Or Buddhist? I’ve already “found religion” in one sense.

Does it matter that as a child my idea of “faith” relied on the gyrations of George Michael in torn jeans and mirrored aviators? Or that “religion” had something to do with R.E.M. losing theirs? Or that at our house, we didn’t practice Christianity, we practiced Christmas?

All I have to do is read the right esoteric books, not the “basic” ones like The Bible. And find the hippest sangha or shul in town. And brush up on my Latin or Sanskrit. Because I’m a purist. And decide which religion is best for my “personal brand” right now. It’s really a lot to think about. And therein lies the problem. 

One minute I’m quietly meditating on the words of the prophet Isaiah and the next my mind is out of the f*cking building. My pressing thoughts overwhelmed whatever spiritual experience I might’ve been having. My connection to a higher power dropped as quickly as it came online.

In microcosm, this experience echoes what 20th century Catholic writer and philosopher, G.K. Chesterton, called “the suicide of thought.”

(I’ve been reading classic apologetics. Zero contempt before investigation.)

And while Chesterton takes it all the way (“There is no validity in any human thought.”), there’s something else in his intellectual anti-intellectual treatise, Orthodoxy, that I grasped onto:

“Mysticism keeps men sane.”

And Chesterton isn’t alone on this one. Carl Jung, who had a bit of a thing for Catholicism himself, summed up the deep practice of it, thusly: 

“Man’s consciousness was created to the end that it may (1) recognize its descent from a higher unity; (2) pay due and careful regard to this source; (3) execute its commands intelligently and responsibly; and (4) thereby afford the psyche as a whole the optimum degree of life and development.”

Unlike Chesterton, Jung wasn’t trying to hurry anybody off to weekly mass. He was simply stating that the practice of Catholicism—with its rites and symbols—was delivering on primal human requirements.

And today’s science backs that up. Evolutionary psychologists posit that at one time spirituality provided something critical for our survival as a species. The fittest brains had the capacity to believe in some crazy supernatural sh*t. And evolution chose those brains to continue on. Lucky them.

Thousands of years later, the brain still wants fairies, sirens, burning bushes, and bodhisattvas. It wants the hero’s journey. But we’re giving it memes and infographics, toxic “takes,” and a 24-hour news cycle. It yearns for holy sites. The rupestrian churches of Matera. Uxmal. But we give it websites. I’m well aware of this. And yet I still find myself looking for something in my iPhone when I should be looking for God.

And, I’m not alone. 

The rapid introduction of convenience technologies has made things that were once personal, impersonal. Take dating. The makers of Tinder and Hinge are currently being sued for transforming those searching for intimacy, partnership, and eros, into “gamblers locked in a search for rewards that [the apps] make elusive on purpose.” 

The opposite of connection (eros, partnership, intimacy) being, of course, addiction. (The writer Johann Hari makes this argument in his watched-11-million-times-over TED talk).

As Jung writes in Man and His Symbols, “Modern man does not understand to what extent his 'rationalism' has placed him at the mercy of this subterranean psychic world. He freed himself from ‘superstition’ (at least he believes so) but in doing so he lost his spiritual values to an alarming degree. His moral and spiritual traditions have disintegrated and he is paying for this collapse with a disarray and dissociation that is rampant throughout the world.”

And we wonder why the global #mood is so f*cked right now?

With much of the world’s knowledge accessible via the phones nestled in our back pockets, we have become obsessed with knowing (logos). With its unreasonable attachment to reason, the (dis)information age has taken from us the equally critical human desire to be known (eros). 

Today, what we believe totally defines us. And yet, we don’t really believe in anything. 

Instead, we confuse preferences with beliefs. We believe a million banal things instead of one absurd thing, as if believing something that’s easy to believe has any inherent psychospiritual or biological value whatsoever. If the assertions of Chesterton, Jung, and contemporary neuroscience are true, then aligning yourself with a brand, joining a political party, or—perhaps most embarrassing of all—engaging in a fandom doesn’t cut it.

Maybe you’re a Jaquemus girlie or a member of the DSA or deep in the Sailor Moon fandom but chances are none of that is scratching that persistent, existential, mystical itch. 

And these faux beliefs are often deeply held with the self-seriousness of Charlton Heston delivering the ten commandments. At least that motherf*cker had the word of God. All I’ve got is the word of Drew.

As Jung writes, “What was once 'the spirit' is now identified with the intellect. It has deteriorated to fall within the limits of thought egocentric."

This self-centered “thinking problem” (well known to those recovering from a drinking problem) isn’t just confined to stale coffee stenched church basements anymore. It’s everywhere. The spiritual malady has spread. I’m not sure what normies were like in Depression-era America when our current understanding of “the alcoholic” was developed by a couple of guys in Akron, Ohio, but I’m certain more of them were involved in some kind of organized religion than my current cohort of tattooed heathens.

This decline in participation in organized religion—and the connection to community that that misses—is a clear marker of a growing culture of addiction.

And I 100% get the decline.

There are plenty of good reasons to reject organized religion in its current form. Corruption. Hypocrisy. Sexual abuse of children. Religious violence. Misogyny. Homophobia. Conversion camps. Shall I go on?

For those who have been traumatized by any of the above—and for those who can’t support these institutions in solidarity with them—the barriers to entry are beyond understandable.

But just because you can’t walk through the door, doesn’t mean you’re not starving for ritual, thirsting for symbols.

And a Silicon Valley sanctioned plant medicine journey or a $5,000 trip to Burning Man isn’t going to cut it. I know some fools who think it does. And trust me, whatever it is, they don’t got it. Their try-hard spiritual materialism oozes deep superficiality. They seem to be painfully searching for something a lot of practicing Jews find at Shabbat dinner every Friday night.

As Jung writes, “millions of people have lost faith in any kind of religion. While life runs smoothly without religion, the loss remains as good as unnoticed. But when suffering comes, it is another matter. That is when people begin to seek a way out and to reflect about the meaning of life and its bewildering and painful experiences.”

Nobody ever thought their way out of an existential crisis. Or a miscarriage. Or a parent dying of dementia. Thinking isn’t—and has never been—a cure for pain.

For me, in rare moments of grace, believing has been.

But whether I can make that belief “official” is another matter. I do much prefer the humility of belief to the hubris of atheism. And I’m down with Christ consciousness. But for some reason, I’d just rather it be served by Ram Dass than one of the 96% of American priests who haven’t been accused of sexual abuse. And I sure as sh*t ain’t putting these private lips on that very public communion cup. It’s just a leap (of faith) too far.

So, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it my way. And there it is, “my way.” That epiphanic reminder that my ego—the source of all my suffering—is even bigger than the church. A 1.4-billion strong church that might be one of the only things out there with the mercy to make that ego just a little less powerful than an all-powerful God. A 2,000-year-old church that—despite its many well-documented sins—might still have just enough mysticism in it to keep even me sane.

The first weeks of the new year found Elon Musk catching flak for his drug use and the associated “cringeworthy” behavior witnessed by the poor people who have to work for him. His response: “Whatever I’m doing, I should obviously keep doing it!” As if his absurd money should be the only measure that matters.

Sure, Musk has been brilliant enough to revolutionize the automobile industry and put rockets into space. And yet, he’s still a moron.

If you have the capacity for non-binary, holistic thinking, you can let him be both. A genius. And a moron. You don’t actually have to choose a side.

But these days, a lot of people feel compelled to take a side on everything. Musk included. He’s just one of the many seeking a simple answer, a definitive “actual truth.” 

As if the truth is ever definitive or simple. As if there are two distinct sides to everything. 

It’s no coincidence that we find someone like Musk prattling on about a “woke mind virus,” having chosen “a side” in “the culture wars.”

I don’t know about a woke mind virus. Or an anti-woke one for that matter. But there’s definitely another WMV going around: weak mind virus.

Weak mind virus is marked by dualistic thinking, a rejection of nuance, and an inability or unwillingness to define “right” versus “wrong” absent of “context” (i.e. everything is binary except the only binary that actually matters). The above ingredients come together like a twisted intellectual Long Island iced tea. And they’re just as obliterating.

Weak mind virus has been synthesized by a culture of addiction. A culture of self-indulgence, powered by a media designed to spike your dopamine with more outrage, more memes, and more provocation. Here, the medium is the message. The transmission is the transmission. 

The information peddled is addictive. Thus, the information is toxic. Hence, the information isn’t making you smarter. It’s fragmenting you. And it’s killing your relationships. Just like any other addiction to any other substance.

But when you’ve got weak mind virus, you don’t care. You’re just out looking for a bigger hit of how f*cking right you are.

And you can always find lower companions to affirm your righteousness. If weak mind virus is anything like alcoholism, take it from me, it’ll only get worse. You’ll have to dig ever deeper to find people who still f*ck with you. 

Weak mind virus tells you everyone is out to get you. That nothing is fair. That you know better than everyone else. That the best way to cover up the aching emptiness in the middle of your chest is to be provocative. It tells you that you’re actually really a nice guy.

Those suffering from weak mind virus are more susceptible to propaganda, psychobabble, and pseudoscience. It’s no coincidence that Alex Jones of Info Wars and Gwyneth Paltrow of Goop peddled the exact same miracle vitamins. The “deplorable” at a rally chanting “Stop the steal” and the faux revolutionary / future investment banker at a rally chanting “Globalize the Intifada” may not see eye-to-eye on too much but they do share a total disregard for the potential IRL consequences of their trendy, bad-faith ideologies and a penchant for “signaling” with politically-charged fashion accessories about their heads and necks.

One thing that struck me in the early days of the current Israel-Hamas conflict was how much calmer some people on the ground in both Tel Aviv and Gaza seemed than some of my safe-and-sated American social media acquaintances. Literally, WTF. Hysterical privilege (or privilege hysterical): yet another symptom of weak mind virus.

Additional symptoms of weak mind virus include oblivious entitlement, contempt before investigation, and moral relativism. And it seems to affect the MAGA right and the ideologue left, their elected officials, and their chosen media stooges—with their many memes and infographics—in equal measure.

This is all stuff a 12-step program can actually help vaccinate against. I don’t see a lot of my trudging buddies in recovery having a hard time defining right and wrong. We live and die by a code. Sharpening our minds requires being open to the possibility that we’re wrong about everything. That’s why there’s only one hill we’ll die on. No matter what.

It seems like so many others are ready to die on all of them, though. And for what? 

Consumed by consumption and trapped in a culture of hedonism where everything—the way we eat, the way we date, the way we read, the way we watch—is designed to be addictive, it seems some people have stopped developing emotionally. As we say in recovery, “you stay stuck at the age you were when you started drinking.” Same goes for scrolling. These digital natives are f*cked.

For those suffering from weak mind virus, even expertise is problematic.  That’s why they’ll happily sign off on the platforming of idiots. Idiots being agreeable and non-threatening as long as they never contradict you. Anyone who does? “Problematic.” Some on the right find expertise “elitist” and some on the left find it “oppressive.” And who will you always find scapegoated at the confluence where fringe right meets fringe left? Yes, you guessed it, Elon and friends, the original “oppressive elitists” themselves, the Jews! Honestly, can y’all be any more basic?

And that unassailable infallibility applies to your emotional reality, too. It’s “unacceptable” to think or feel what the weak minded don’t. (Or can’t. Or won’t.)

That’s why the anti-cancellation-culture and anti-doxxing narratives on the right and left, respectively, share the same underlying architecture: 1) I am entitled to say and do whatever I want and 2) You are not entitled to hold me accountable for it.

In recovery, taking accountability is at the core of everything we do. And it’s actually profoundly liberating.

Musk, of course, could have responded, “I’m sorry that my behavior disturbed my employees. I’m definitely going to examine that.” Instead, he responded with a laundry list of how correct he is to have disturbed them. But in a binary culture where intrinsic rightness always trumps basic politeness, why would he give a second thought to the impact his behavior has on others?

In 2024, the only thing more powerful than a belief is an addiction to one.

From a psychological development standpoint, most humans grow into their ability to really engage in non-binary thinking at the end of adolescence (i.e. their early-to-mid 20s). And Buddhists have been leveling up on this front—making room for more than two realities and attaching to none of them—for thousands of years.

But adults suffering from weak mind virus on social media? Not so much.

Could there be another reason they aren’t maturing? That they aren’t actually self-actualizing? 

Maybe it’s not just our culture of addiction. Maybe it’s because all the drugs are f*cking with their brains.

A recent study conducted by Johns Hopkins University found that cocaine may cause brain cells to cannibalize themselves. Cocaine use rapidly ages the brain. And over time, it impairs your attention, memory, and ability to make good decisions.

But, if you really deserve it (like Elon apparently thinks he does) then it should be celebrated, right? You should be lauded for all of your instincts because they’re “yours,” and everything “yours” should be accepted unconditionally even if it’s blatantly hedonistic or unhealthy for you, your fellow man, and the planet. Like Musk sums it up, “If drugs actually helped improve my net productivity over time, I would definitely take them.” Never mind who the cartels had to carve up to get them here if your stock keeps rising.

So, if you use cocaine—ever—I’m not interested in your opinion on anything. 

Snorting cocaine while fighting for the plight of the oppressed with your IG activism? Seriously? The cocaine trade infamously racks up tens of thousands of brown bodies every year. If you get gacked out of your mind every now and then, you are clearly demonstrating that you are totally comfortable doing harm if it makes you feel good.

Along those same lines, if you work in fashion and drive a Range Rover and cosplay as an anti-capitalist radical on the internet, data shows you’re 99% likely to be a f*cking idiot.

So, while the morally-challenged empathy failures dabble with ketamine and tantrum like toddlers all around me, I take solace in the words of David Lynch, “What a great time to be alive if you love the theater of the absurd.”

Of course, I could be wrong about all of this. WTF do I know? What the strong-minded understand is that the real power is in the not knowing. And there’s even more of it in accepting the not knowing. Radical acceptance requires a powerful mind. And that’s actually revolutionary.

Believe me. Weak mind virus is not a terminal thing. You can heal. I have.

Where to start? Stop scrolling. Meditate. Get some talk therapy. And consider the core precepts of Taoism, literally “the middle way,” and a brilliant path to be on at that. Be compassionate and loving. Be straightforward within and without. Always take from yourself to aid others. Be equanimous and of whole heart in all of your actions. Or don’t and be a c*nt. The choice is yours.

There is a saying bandied about the new age, men’s self-help podcasts, and executive leadership retreats:  “Where attention goes, energy flows.”

Put some real attention on romance or money or spirituality and watch it pile up. In my experience, there’s certainly some truth to this. The act of work—any work—often begets more work.

Wherever you put that attention, though, never put too much of it on yourself. Ask anyone in recovery. That begets nothing good. Self is one of the only words in the English language that’s an antonym of itself. It’s ego and its opposite. It’s a target too umbrageous to hit. It’s all crossfire in the dark without an NOD in sight. The attention must go elsewhere. Anywhere but self. But damn if it isn’t always finding its way back there.

In this regard, I’ve found that creativity is either my savior or my destroyer. If my creativity isn’t being used to make something, it’s being used to take something apart. And that something is invariably me. My creativity gives no f*cks. It’s an equal opportunity destroyer. It works weekends. And it’s taking you down with them (me).

If only I were a nihilist hacker. Or a sadist. Or a CEO. The target of my creative destruction could be anyone but me. Instead, left to its own devices, and without a project, my creative brain will use its ample power of persuasion to persuade me that I f*cking suck. If I am not focused on battling the blinking cursor, I’m the one who is going to get it. And I’m going to get it bad.

The work—this work—is my only hope. It’s this voice (the one you’re reading now) or that voice.

I can spend a few hours on this column or a few hours on vehement self-flagellation. For me, there is no limbo state. It’s one hell or the other.

Sometimes I wonder if the drinking ever really did silence that voice. Or did it just fill the proverbial ears with ethanol-soaked cotton balls? Too drunk. Didn’t follow.

My critical brain has been extensively (and expensively) trained. It’s been enabled by all the Descartes bullsh*t. Thinking over feeling. White collar over blue. Rational over mystical. Capital over everything. Who am I not to judge?

I distinctly remember the computer lab at the Saarinen-designed prep school I attended in an affluent suburb of Detroit—a glorified glassed-in hallway lined with Apple IIs. The future had a pretty small footprint at that time. And those computers weren’t just for hitting the Oregon Trail. They were for processing the words of your great American novel. In fifth grade. In the 80s and 90s, a school like that seemed far more interested in churning out poets and their publishers than engineers and computer scientists.

To be Fitzgerald or Bradbury or Steinbeck. That was it. Jobs? Ballmer? F*ck them. Who cares?

It’s pretty clear now how that went for us liberal artisans and our (formerly) monied backers. I needn’t look any further than that school I attended. It was founded and built by a newspaper man. The schools of the future will be built by the tech titans who killed the newspaper man off.

Later, when entering the workforce after four years at drinking camp, my Charmin liberal arts degree in hand, I figured out a way to get paid for my critical thinking, to be judgmental AF for a couple of bucks. First as an automotive journalist and later as a copywriter working in advertising. Of course, coming up with ideas is a big part of the job. But siphoning off the good ones and discarding the bad ones in real time, it’s that gift that gets you promoted to management. We’re not out here doing “adult coloring.” If you’re in a taste profession like advertising or fashion or film, it’s not really your job to just “make stuff.” It’s your job to be hypercritical of every f*cking detail.

But the critical thinking doesn’t stop when you punch out. It just keeps on going. With no guardrails in place, the kind of pixel-perfection applied to my work gets applied to me, by me. The analysis and skepticism and pressure-testing, like a black hole devouring galaxies. For a long time, I had no idea this was even going on. It’s no wonder I had to polish a bottle of Bordeaux every night after work. And that was on the tame nights. If you suffer from the creative thing and the alcoholism thing, watch out. I’m lucky to have escaped that conflagration before it was too late. But how many great ones have been torched by those twin flames?

What I’ve finally come to realize is: Some fires just can’t be put out. Ignore them and they burn out of control. Pour alcohol on them? Even worse. There will be casualties. The life of the creative in recovery is basically forest management. Get out there and set some controlled burns. Give them the right fuel. Feed the bottomless addiction pit some spirituality. Feed the creativity the work.

Beyond creativity, are there any other ways to contain the flames? Meditation, I guess. Once you get past listening to your mind make a case against your very right to exist, meditation is chill. But there’s nothing else quite like art, is there? Yes, creating is hard. It can feel like walking through life with your d*ck out. Some of the best people to ever do it despise it. But that didn’t stop them from doing it. And it’s better than self-immolation, anyway.

Words by Andrew Smart