The world feels really fucking overwhelming sometimes.

Leaving work, driving down the back roads to my house, it just hit me like a fucking truck. Just this feeling of life itself crashing down on top of me. Thinking about how unnecessarily hard we as people make everything; how in trying to do good for each other we end up taking away what’s most precious of all. This overwhelming feeling that in our chasing of stability, of stimulation, of control, of health, of long-lives, and security, we have lost touch with what provides lasting happiness and fulfillment. The inclination of the human being is to seek stability and security, that much is clear. But what is stability without happiness? What is the point of a roof over your head and food in your belly if the purpose of these things, continuing to survive, only serves to take you to a job you don’t like that has taken over your life? What if what you do all day is jump through bureaucratic hoops that were arbitrarily placed, pass superficial pleasantries with people you know don’t care about you, and overstimulate your brain with television, video games, and social media every night in a desperate attempt to convince yourself that you are not the most miserable sack of shit on this planet. That there is in-fact someone who is worse than you at something. It doesn’t seem unreasonable at this stage to realistically consider whether or not you want to continue doing this. As David Foster Wallace said, it’s not that the man jumping off a sky scraper isn’t afraid of dying, it’s that he can’t imagine going on another moment feeling the way he is feeling. What a nice mellow topic to think about on the drive home from work right? Maybe it’s the side effects talking from these industrial strength steroids that I’m on for this “head cold I’ve been nursing” that’s really bronchitis trying to turn into pneumonia that started two days after having my first real pain-free run in over two months after which I once again allowed myself to entertain the possibility of running this half marathon in October that I’ve been registered for since April because I really wanted to give myself something tangible to work towards, really wanted to just stand at the finish line and point to my time as the seconds tick by on the over-sized digital clock and say “that. I did that”. Was that really too much to ask? Apparently it was because now, now with another week off my feet no amount of hoping and dreaming will make me feel like it’s possible for me to run that race. Anyway, maybe that’s where all of this is coming from. Or maybe not.

A better question than “why am I feeling this way?” is “how is everyone else not feeling this way?” How do people continue living their lives, going through all the superficial bullshit, when there are these huge fucking problems staring us in the face? How are people accepting this as “the way things are”? Call me a pessimist, but maybe if we didn’t have so much fucking television to watch, so many sporting events going on all the time, and people spending countless hours a day absorbed in social media, augmented reality video games, and role-playing games we’d have a population of people that could think for themselves; a population of citizens who were conscious consumers and shapers of the world they live in. Talk about a world of docile bodies with which big businesses and corporations can do what they like. Like holy crap.

But I get it. I live it too. I go to work, present as generally happy, go about my business, and leave at the end of the day, play my fair share of video games, watch the Mets 3–4 nights per week, watch porn more often than I’d care to admit, and I keep up with the dystopian circus that is US politics right now. I eat over-indulgently, and exercise as a means to relieve stress, to feel useful, and to counterbalance the over-indulgent eating so that I can maintain a “healthy” body type. Rinse repeat. I do these things because it’s way fucking easier than sitting with the total, overwhelming helplessness that fills me up every time I don’t. I mean what’s the alternative? To sit here and think about how fucking awful we are to our planet? to the animals that become the food we eat? to each other? To think about how few people on this planet are truly happy and how many of them are chasing happiness through the societal dictum of “buy, consume, buy more, consume more… ad infinitum”? No thanks, and hey look there’s a sale on vacuum cleaners on Amazon right now… I have been meaning to replace my old Hoover with a…