The Big Questions (With No Answers)
For the past year or so I have been suffering from a crippling social disorder. It has ruined a once promising career in earning money by leaching off the social good. It has strained every interpersonal relationship I have. Put simply it dominates every second of my existence.
The sad truth is that I have completely lost the ability to do anything that I do not want to do. I now exist in a transcendent stage, beyond any social norms or biological imperatives. My wants and desires have now become altogether co-extensive with my actual physical and mental abilities. Take something as basic as eating. Most people of sufficient economic means eat when they are hungry. There are some jolly sorts who eat whenever a delicious food stuff is presented. I also have heard tell of a sad class of humans who purposefully do not eat when they are starving in a desperate attempt to conform to a contrived standard of excellence. In contrast to all three categories, I now exist on a plane where neither the biological impulse of “hunger” nor the physical availability of “food” have any impact whatsoever on my eating patterns. I make an entirely intellectual calculation, one which includes factors such as: necessity to wash dishes before or after eating event; extent to which eating will prevent free access to PlayStation controller or mouse; degree to which dog begging for food will impact my overall culinary experience; and of course the availability of my preferred food. The last one is particularly important. If I feel like a steak, but there are no steaks available, I do not have a hamburger. I have nothing. Nothing at all until either steaks become available (note to self: more research needs to be done into why steaks only “become available” when wife gets home from work) or until the wheel goes around and I actually feel like a hamburger. Sometimes I can think myself into wanting a burger. But if I can’t—if I can’t fool myself into thinking that I want something that I do not in fact want—well then there is no food for me. I no longer accept substitutes.
I don’t sleep until I have run out of interesting and exciting things to do, and I don’t wake up until I can think of something that I would enjoy more than sleeping. It has become practically impossible for me to do anything that I do not want to do. I mean, I try to do undesirable things, but I always manage to screw them up. It’s as if my brain is actively sabotaging my attempts to be a responsible person. Let’s say I take a shower—not because I feel like being clean or anything, just because I manage to remember that it has been some socially unacceptable time since my last wash. I get in the tub okay and get the water on (I’m not retarded), but pretty soon I notice that there is no soap. Then I get out and look under the sink and find that there is no soap in the entire house. Now I ask you: is there any possibility that the lack of soap truly escaped my notice before I got all wet? Of course not. I knew, I had to know; it’s a very small bathroom and the empty soap tray is always in plain sight. I’ve known for DAYS that we were out of soap. But because I didn’t “feel” like taking a shower my brain prevented me from acting upon that information. Whatever, so having sufficiently dripped all over a bathroom that will never be clean again, I jump back into the shower and am forced to wash myself with whatever fru-fru body wash my wife uses, which inevitably leaves me smelling like Carson Kressley and carrying a mild skin irritation. Eventually I turn off the water and reach for a towel that is predictably not there, and if you think I’m going to stand in the middle of a “Lake Bathroom” wet and cold and am going to take a crack at brushing my teeth or shaving then you just haven’t been listening. So I find myself living the life of a grown man with full mental functionality who yet can fail at the simple task of taking a shower if his heart’s not into it.
While there is I admit a certain amount of excitement and pride in the ability to intellectualize your life to a point where even the simplest tasks become epically challenging, to really be able to think yourself into a paper bag, the effect on your real life functionality is devastating. How can you hold down a job when you could be flummoxed by indoor plumbing? Seriously, most people who have problems feeding and bathing themselves are put on a secluded campus where trained professionals see that they do not become a danger to themselves or society. They are cared for and people feel sorry for them. Me? Nobody feels sorry for me. Nobody comes to my house with multicolored medications designed to keep me from developing an irrational and violent hatred of the UPS guy who insists on coming after my wife leaves for work, before I wake up, regardless of when those events happen. In fact as opposed to the soothing rhythms of patronizing acceptance, I get constant crap from almost everybody I know. My friends chortle at my “structural unemployment.” My mother vacillates between blaming me for everything and blaming my father for everything (and by “everything” I mean my steadfast refusal to engage in economically viable activities). My poor wife walks around like her real husband is in Iraq, or maybe she’s feeling like she is in Iraq waiting to get shot up bad enough to be killed or sent home—I can’t always tell.
Of course, the reason why men in white jackets haven’t yet come to take me away is that the societal consensus is that all of my problems can be fixed with the universal panacea known as “willpower.” Fundamentally the problem is me and therefore I am supposed to fix it. Sure, I can get some help from Pfizer once they figure out how to make money off of “Long term functionality disorder.” Since I live in Manhattan, society will allow me to see a shrink or two who can tell me that all of this is happening because my father resented having to take care of me, and so I resent having to take care of my responsibilities. However after I spend pay check after pay check of my wife’s money sitting on couches and popping pills the solution will still come down to me summoning up the will to “buckle down” and do things I don’t want to do because I have to in order to function and survive. Unfortunately that is an unsatisfying and shockingly useless answer.
First off, to quote President Bartlet, “What are the next ten words?” Anybody with a bullshit degree and a minor understanding of human behavior can surmise that summoning up the willpower to do hard or distasteful things is pretty important for all of us that will not win the lottery. But when you ask “how” one finds that willpower, or what one does when they find their willpower lacking … nobody has an answer for you.
People do things that they don’t want to do for two reasons: force or fear. When you don’t want to wake up in the morning, you do it anyway either because you are forced to (as in a parent screaming at you from the doorway) or because you fear the repercussions if you do not wake up (as in boss firing you from job). One of the key aspects of being an adult is that “force” is removed from the equation. Unless you are a slave, a soldier, a prisoner, or made a really bad choice on your wedding day, nobody can force a rational adult to do anything. Put another way, “The only thing I have to do is stay black and die.”
With force out of the equation much of the social tapestry is held together by fear. People are afraid of all sorts of things, and for large swaths of the day they act and react based on their relationship with fear. Work is an easy example, but you can also see fear at play in your average party. How many times do you show up across town at an event for somebody you don’t like or even know, just so your real friends don’t start thinking of you as “the guy that never shows up.” We go to things we don’t want to go to all the time just to try to increase the chances that people will show up when it’s time for our own birthday. Fear works on the micro level of acquaintances being smashed together in a bar and on the macro level as well. My dad used to say that they only reason we allow there to be poor people in this country is to keep the middle class in check. The older I get the more obvious his statement becomes. Even when you allow for the dragon-like hoarding of your average capitalist, there is still more than enough money floating around in this country to make sure that every person has a warm bed and a full meal. However, if there was a true social safety net today, how many people wouldn’t show up for work tomorrow? The American dream of making enough money that you can wipe your ass with it is nice to put on postcards, but the real catalyst of the American economy is the fear of being cast down with the sodomites, as Warden Norton from Shawshank might say. The vast majority of people work not to give themselves a better life, but to keep themselves out of the living hell that is a trailer home in Kansas.
Without fear society as we know it would fall apart, but what happens if just an individual loses fear? Ostensibly freed from the conventions of what one was supposed to do, a person could be open to doing truly great things with his or her life. Without constantly worrying about what could be lost, one could have an entirely different appreciation for what could be gained. You’ve got to think that some of the greatest minds of all time were people who were removed from any sense of worry about the social conventions of their time. Only then could you dare to question if Earth was flat or whether God existed or just what does Marcellus Wallace look like. If one was able to intellectualize themselves and the world around them greatness might truly be in their grasp.
Of course, if they reached for greatness and came up just short they might find themselves running naked through the streets trying to buy a bar of soap for dinner.
I mean it’s got to be a razor-thin edge right? For every one great achievement that is recorded in our history books, there have to be ten other dudes that ended up in debtor’s prison, or tax evader’s prison, or homicidal maniac’s prison. You can’t just opt out of the glue that holds our collection of disparate interests together and not pay a heavy price. In the truest since of the phrase, I am talking about people with a social disorder. By definition they are anti-order, anti-social. There is no warm and happy home where anti-social people are taken care of and felt sorry for. Society must needs isolate these people, and if they act up too much, we literally banish them.
It has taken me a long hiatus from Quadlings, two hospitalizations, and three plus pages to finally phrase the dominant questions correctly: How do I siphon off the advantages of status and money that only society can confer without actually following the accepted path to status and money? How do I achieve basic functionality in a society that is based on rules and values that I do not acknowledge or share? If I can not do either, then is there any real difference between me and a person who is suffering from a clinically approved psychological disorder, and if there isn’t, where the hell are my drugs?
Hopefully there are answers out there. If not, well, I’d hate to be my UPS guy.