There's Only One Way to Waste Your Life

Soul-contamination, emphasizing the wrong things, and being here for it

photo by yours truly

Whenever I spend even one second too long, caught by some content, trying to push my emotional buttons, I feel it descending upon my heart like dark, heavy fog — not the emotional buttons being pushed, but the recognition that I’m presently chugging poison. So I use my proverbial middle finger and shove it down my mind’s throat to discharge what’s trying to infest my neurons.

The internet’s poisonous nature (as it currently exists) is obvious. You know, the type of internet that hosts its largest slice of activity on social media platforms. Over the last few years, this has become more pronounced. Generally, perhaps because we’ve reached the self-digestion stage of these platforms, and personally, perhaps because I’ve become increasingly sensitive to stuff that contaminates the soul.

One of the most soul-contaminating forms of content is the kind that tries to convince you you’re not good enough as you are, you’re not living up to your potential, you should be further along. There seem to be all these amazing, enviable people who have it all figured out.

Don’t believe it. This is the thing that’s best learned as an adolescent or young adult, but it’s never too late to learn it: the people aren’t happy.

Many are faking it, and some are so numb they aren’t even aware they’re faking it. The ones who are aware and still faking it are faking it because they still believe others aren’t faking it. I know because I faked it for a long time, believing I wasn’t faking it. When I stopped faking it and allowed myself to feel as miserable as I felt, I realized that faking happiness is a special kind of misery. Happiness struck me as less about feeling good all the time and more akin to agreeing with your experience as it is right now.

Recently, in response to the idea that money alone won’t make you happy, I read a saying that said, “I’d rather be crying in a [fancy car brand] than in a [less fancy car brand].” What it means is I’d rather be rich and sad than poor and sad. On the surface, most of us can probably agree. But really, I’d rather be happy than sad, or at least, I’d rather be crying under the open night sky while listening to crashing waves, than in a damn automobile. And what if we take this saying to its extreme terminus, where the sadness isn’t resolved? — “I’d rather overdose in a [fancy car brand] than in a [less fancy car brand].”

We must emphasize the wrong things; we can’t help ourselves. The world wants us to emphasize the wrong things, and the more we do that, the worse it gets. Believe there’s something fundamentally wrong with you, and you won’t righten the wrongness; you hallucinate the wrongness and then keep emphasizing it, like continuously outlining an imagined monster with a marker, until it seems to develop a life of its own.

Being at peace with yourself is perhaps the rarest thing in the world, and yet what would be more available to us all? It’s who we are when we purge the poison and stop guzzling more of it. You at least know it as a faint akashic memory trying to remind you that gravity used to be much lighter. The self-violence that’s encouraged and normalized turns humans into spiritual hunchbacks. You walk as if you’re an uninvited guest, as if you’re a transplant being rejected by the organism.

I’m not blaming the internet for it; the internet is just an awesome amplifier, accentuating the existential horrors humanity has always struggled with. The seed of violence against yourself is planted outside the internet, and social media fertilizes.

There’s one main message being shared in ten thousand different guises: Who you are and where you are isn’t okay; you should be different and somewhere else.

And this message always manipulates you through this sense of existential distress that makes you forever seek something else, and never allows you to be at peace with who and where you are right now.

Show me one person who hasn’t learned to identify themselves as a problem to be fixed. What we appear to be is a process, a becoming, an eternal fluctuation, but we mostly see a problem, because the process hasn’t reached a state of completion. Which is like saying the river is a problem because it isn’t a lake. The completion we seek isn’t found in the process, but as the process.

We’re told to seek completion in the process — be more like this, that, and the other. But it’s obvious that nothing in the process ever reaches an arbitrarily defined state of ‘completion.’ What would completion look like anyway?

Is a tulip most complete when she’s at her peak bloom, or is the tulip complete when she has withered beyond recognition and become one with the soil? Is a human complete when she has achieved everything society deems important, or is the human complete when she’s drawing her last breath? Or is it perhaps something else completely, like having achieved one specific thing? Perhaps you’re complete when you’ve fulfilled your dream of becoming the best cloud watcher in the world.

Are we here to tick preexisting boxes, to live hand-me-down lives, and then feel like failures if we don’t find fulfillment in them? Ticking all the boxes usually creates more boxes. There are plenty of people who have approached their lives in a do → have → be manner, and who have been successful at the do & have, but were dismayed when they found the be lacking.

Yes, doing something you enjoy and having what you need is good, but become too obsessed with it, and you can feel yourself slipping down to hell. And this applies whether you’re doing and having enjoyable things or whether you’re doing and having less enjoyable things.

Lasting fulfillment can’t be found in doing and having because doing and having themselves don’t last; it can only be found in being, which is the only part of the equation that lasts. Whether it lasts beyond this life is irrelevant because, contrary to doing and having, it remains unchanged throughout this life.

The story of the unhappy achiever is so common, and yet it’s still widely considered the main approach to life. Then we have the inverted approach: be → do → have. This is the approach of all the mystics and sages of the world. A change in emphasis.

Many people intuit that without rediscovering your essence/remembering what you are/cutting through illusions, life will always be a shadow of our true life. What does it matter if you’re the king of the shadow world? Existential certainty built on the shifting sand of doing & having isn’t certainty at all. And you can’t build on top of being. Being just is. It’s the unavoidable fact of existence — doubt it as much as you want, because doubting it is just more confirmation.

Now the world, which in our era is largely synonymous with the internet, will tell you that if you don’t do and have the right things, you’re wasting your life. But the sage will tell you that the only way to waste your life is to not be here for it.

If you do and have everything you want and still feel tortured, then it’s not because you’re doing and having the wrong things, but because you aren’t here for it. You’re drunk on your mind — it has poisoned you. The antidote is returning to being.

I’m well aware of the age-old irony when proclaiming nothing is fundamentally wrong with you and then making it sound as if acting like something is wrong with you is what is wrong with you. If that’s something that bothers you, feel free to disregard anything that smells of prescriptive advice. But consider that methanol poisoning is cured with ethanol.

So in that spirit: as long as you’re here, awake, conscious, paying attention to the mind-blowing fact that you exist, you’re getting all the mileage out of this strange ride. In the end, everything will pass, and the only thing that has ever truly mattered is the thing that matters right now and always.

---

If you enjoy my work and want to show your appreciation, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Alternatively, you can show your support with a one-time tip or get some artwork on my Ko-Fi page.

---