I. Oppenheimer, Dating, and Destiny

With the month ending, and having had a few friends having fundraised and walked for “Movember” this year, I wanted to take this time to write up something that had been a talk I gave at a hike a week ago. The response on Facebook in particular was strong, and I suspect that’s because way more people than we’d like to think are a degree or two away from suicide. Meaning: a lot of people either are faced with the temptation of taking their own lives at some point or there is someone close to them who deals with the mental battle. Mostly, of course, we don’t talk about it, and so there is this weird outsourcing of the intimate to, like, therapy and suicide hotlines or something. There’s nothing wrong with therapy or suicide hotlines, but both are bandaids, and neither are long-term solutions for pretty much anybody. Or at least they shouldn’t be.

I read a beautiful and intriguing Michael Meade book several weeks back called Fate and Destiny, The Two Agreements of the Soul. It was the first and only book I’ve read by Meade, who seems to be some sort of spiritual philosopher or guru, which in a lot of cases would have made me scoff and roll my eyes, but so little of this book seemed cheap or prescribed. I watched the Oppenheimer movie in theaters a couple summers ago while dating a woman who’s father, a pilot, had disappeared on a missionary flight. Some sort of abduction, not a crash. They’d thought he was dead and returned to the States only to get word from the government that he might well be alive. Though he still hadn’t returned; they lived every day with the yearning of potentially seeing him again without any kind of guarantees. After the movie, I wrote that I thought Oppenheimer the man was someone who found his destiny (to make the bombs that ended World War II) but also decimated whole Japanese cities and was appropriately haunted by the “patriotic triumphal” response of their extensive violence.

I connect the two now—the dating involvement and the movie—because I think they work nicely (and painfully!) to describe the difference, as I understand Meade’s distinctions, between fate and destiny. The trite phrase we often hear in this regard is “Everything happens for a reason.” I hate the phrase, first of all because it’s often uttered as resignation, and because in the midst of something terrible or someone’s phrase, we just say that as if it’s any kind of help at all. But it’s also fatalistic, though if I ever understood fatalistic it has been in the past three or four years of my life. I’m not at all convinced that the universe, nature, and/or God operates by “reason” or even by cause-and-effect in the same way that humans want to be so. But this annoying phrase, if there’s something true in it, it is that we do, in fact, live in a world where things happen to us and around us that we do not choose or have the luxury of avoiding. If I understand Meade correctly, that is our fate. The circumstances and limitations of our lives. Our destiny is the unique path that we carve out of that in response if we wholeheartedly stick with our lives long enough.

I do not claim to have figured out or arrived at any sort of destiny myself, any more than I think the woman I just mentioned had during our time of seeing each other, but what I am going to describe in this essay is some of my own fate, for better and worse.

II. Uncle Ronnie

When I was in early-to-mid elementary school, not long after my parents bought the only house they have ever owned (they still live there now), my Uncle Ronnie from my mother’s side came out for a visit from where he lived north of Pittsburgh. He was a large and bearded man with black hair, and the purpose of his visit was to put a half bathroom in our upstairs. There were two bedrooms up there in between what became my brothers’ room and my sisters’ room. There were five of us, and I had started out in the finished basement.

This privilege led to no shortage of resentment from my siblings, but it also became something of a curse in the long-term. A summer storm killed our electricity and therefore sump pump—oddly when the same side of the family was visiting, though not Uncle Ronnie, that time—and I awoke in the middle of the night, knocked a pillow onto the floor, and heard a plop! that I recognized immediately was a few inches of water. I trudged through it, alerted my parents upstairs, slept somewhere else in the house for the rest of the night (I honestly don’t remember where, as there could not have been very many options), and then we ripped the carpet out in the morning after vacuuming out the water. That’s the way it stayed, even until now, complete with damaged furniture and moldy air. I did sleep down there again, but not consistently, as I often chose the living room couch or whatever bed happened to be vacant upstairs if a sibling was gone for whatever reason.

But that was all a few years after the Uncle Ronnie visit, when he started but did not finish the bathroom upstairs. A wall got knocked down where there were initially two closets and water run to a new toilet and sink, but no walls were built around it. And that’s the way it stayed for years. Uncle Ronnie abandoned the project, and I’m sure what was a pretty hefty “family discounted" labor rate but not before he spent considerable time with us, including at least one trip to the Pentecostal church we attended twenty minutes away in another town.

Like my father, Uncle Ronnie “loved Jesus,” so I don’t think it was a hard sell to get him there, necessarily, but he did drive separately, in what I remember was a blue truck with a covered bed. I either got sent over to ride with him, or maybe I volunteered, but either way, what unfolded was a positive memory. He was playing music from a white tape and singing and laughing.

It would be the opposite of the Uncle Ronnie that I mostly experienced for the rest of his life—or at least the part of life where our paths crossed. Uncle Ronnie was often close to, or peripheral, to family gatherings, as my aunt, my mother’s sister, was often included in the activities of my family and the family of cousins (my other mother’s sister’s kids) that we were closest to. Sometimes this meant a family Thanksgiving where he was in the house but in a different room than everyone else. My father often got sent as a kind of placating presence, perhaps a reminder for Uncle Ronnie to keep loving Jesus, even if he didn’t exactly want to interact with the rest of us anymore. With time, I inferred that he was abusive to my aunt and that he had addiction problems with alcohol and pills.

If you want to talk about fate, perhaps I should mention that my parents met in Colorado while mutually working—both had left home, my father from Wisconsin and mother from Pennsylvania, and gone West—at an organization called Teen Challenge. It is, as far as I can tell, an Evangelical recovery facility with multiple locations, one of which my Uncle Ronnie had also been an in-patient at across the country while my aunt was volunteering there. So yes, my parents and my aunt and uncle both met at a chapter of the same organization, and later my cousin Jason—who has now been estranged from our family, with various and occasional mentions of his existence, for some three decades or so—would also give Teen Challenge a try (before taking off indefinitely). My Uncle Ronnie was originally there to try to kick a heroin habit.

The way I have found things out over the years from my family about these things is interesting. Sometimes I have asked direct questions and therefore got direct answers. Other times, I have taken to the Internet. As a child, though, I learned things the way a lot of children learn them. Through immersion, through experience. By overhearing things. Or by reading my mother’s worry.

I do not remember how I learned that my Uncle Ronnie had shot my aunt (in the leg), and that she was still alive but hospitalized, that he had been arrested and was eventually convicted but served a relatively-short sentence before getting out and starting to see my aunt again. What I do remember, probably more than anything else, was that they got back together. Meaning, he moved back into the house where I still take my Thanksgiving dinners most years.

Until Uncle Ronnie predictably started to spiral again, and I learned that my aunt removed herself from the house to stay with a friend. She has always supported herself with administrative work and had friends through some different churches and sought out various counseling through some of those same contexts, and this time when she checked in with my Uncle Ronnie, and he didn’t respond, she sent the police over on an errand, and this time, at the ripe age of 61, he had used the gun on himself.

III. Shane

My uncle’s suicide could not have been more than six weeks before my older brother, Shane, and I were sitting on the back patio—which was really more like a covered backyard kitchen—during my second year of teaching elementary school in Jacksonville, Florida. I liked Jacksonville and especially loved the set-up my three other teacher housemates had, living as we did in a beautiful house rental on a dead-end street, walkable to the beach. Which we used plenty. “Work hard, play hard” had been the mantra of my Teach For America peers. I’d not previously been much of a drinker, but both the working and playing hard was more than catching up to me, and I knew I would be done teaching elementary school—I wasn’t quite closed to the idea of working with older kids, and I had taken a couple steps in that direction—after my second year in the classroom.

I’d done a couple interviews in other places, and while nothing had aligned yet, Shane knew the lease for the house I was living in was coming up on its end, and he had come over basically to beg me to consider staying in Jacksonville. I suppose the transition had been a lot more difficult for him in part because of his social demeanor but also because he hadn’t moved to the city with a cohort and structure in place ready and willing to orient him. Shane wasn’t sleeping well, he’d practically begged me to use some of my prescribed ADHD pills (I tried to point him in the direction of just getting diagnosed, including a description of how easy the process had been for me). When there were questions about whether or not Shane was even going to work sometimes in that second year, my father had flown down to encourage him (and go with him, on some days).

Shane had, though, by then, a strong lead if not a job offer to start teaching at one of the reputable private schools in town, but his skill, Spanish, was in a lot more demand than my interests in social studies and English. I had no such thing even imagined, but he was putting job descriptions in front of me on the brick bar that had made us all feel so cool when my roommates and I weren’t getting humbled by our students during the day. Our lives, in other words, were nicely dichotomized, and it wasn’t just working and playing that made for the difference; there was also race and socioeconomic class. Shane I had grown up poor or at least lower middle class, but we’d also attended the private boarding school where my father worked, so our lives had consisted of a lot of switching back-and-forth between two worlds. I see that somewhat as a strength now, but then I mainly just wanted out of one world and into the other. And I can still understand that desire now.

So I left Jacksonville, first to a summer in Houston where I had a summer job lined up participating in the training process for new teachers, and then back home to Indiana to continue engaging with the vacuum of scary nothingness that was my future plans and professional path. Option one, i.e. teaching young kids the things that I liked (reading and writing) had mostly been exercised and disappointed by the fact that teaching at such a level was a lot of logistical micromanaging and behavioral struggle, neither of which I really wanted to spend my life doing. Shane still had employment; I had the absence of fighting with kids, at least for a while.

Phone calls with Shane got weird. He’d always had the ability to monologue or to go on new intellectual and political tangents; now he had specific accusations against people like, supposedly, his town’s mayor. There was always a “they” who was out to get him, and my pointing to this as a paranoid tendency was, umm, not helpful. The calls grew less frequent, and he skipped a family trip during the holidays to visit one of my sisters, who was doing the PeaceCorps in Ecuador.

My younger brother, who was trying to kickstart a journalism career in Northern Kentucky, agreed to a spring trip down to see Shane. My youngest sister had seen him most recently; it had not gone well. One big fight, from what I understand. Anyway, my brother and I never took the trip. Or actually we did, but not in the way I intended. We went down there, as a family, to clean up the room he’d been renting from a friend after he completed a murder-suicide at his school on Super Tuesday. He’d been fired in the morning, gone home, gotten his guitar case and inserted a semi-automatic weapon, parked at an insurance company near the school, interrupted a meeting with the school’s headmaster who had fired him, and shot her. Then himself.

I learned about this all after the fact and from various headlines, like most other people in my life, after a friend of mine tipped me off that the shooting had happened and that Shane wasn’t responding to calls or texts. I had tried Shane, too, and with the same result, and so I had logged onto a computer, starting scouring headlines, and found a comments section that tipped me off about the firing. Then a friend I was texting counseled me to call the Jacksonville police, and when I did I was quickly passed on to the detective on the case. He asked me for my identifying information, and then he confirmed for me that Shane was dead.

IV. David Foster Wallace and Suicide

A year-and-a-half after Shane’s murder suicide, and after a year or so of frolicking around Western Europe, I enrolled as a graduate student in the MFA program at the University of South Carolina. One of the first friends I made there—his name was Chris, also a Midwesterner—and I were talking at a social event with other classmates, and the writer David Foster Wallace came up. One of the things I would grow to love about my time as a Gamecock was how literary it all was, a bunch of readers and writers thrown together to read and write, how novel. So while I don’t remember the full thrust of why Wallace came up or what exactly the topic of conversation was, I do remember quickly dismissing anything my friend was trying to say about Wallace. He admired him, or at least something about him, was my read, and that couldn’t be legitimate for God’s sake because Wallace had completed a suicide at age 46 after publishing a number of things that people actually read. How terrible, and who would ever take something someone who had died by suicide that seriously? It seemed gross and unfair, hogging up the scarce publishing spots that are available only to shoot yourself after you got to the dream destination.

Oddly, I would come around to Wallace, though less in a literary sense than an appreciation for what I would learn about who he was and what he was struggling with. I would try to read him multiple times, including his Bible of a magnum opus, Infinite Jest, but just couldn’t quite through those page-long sentences pieced together with other marathon sentences. Instead, I—true Wallace fans, go ahead and cringe—would later fall for his “This is Water” graduation speech along with the David Lipsky take on Wallace in his 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, followed by the movie version, The End of Tour, in which Wallace comically confesses his infatuation with Alanis Morissette.

I can reflect all of this now knowing fully that my perspective has changed a lot since my conversation with Chris due to other experiences that occurred even after Shane’s and my uncle’s tragic deaths. Starting with, weirdly enough, an event at USC (the real one, not the spoiled children). Part of the deal in enrolling in that program had been teaching three slots of freshmen composition a year, and so one February day during my second year in the program, I tasted a little bit of what the students, faculty, and staff at The Episcopal School in Jacksonville must have experienced when Shane had brought violence and terror and blood to a nearby room, resulting in their being locked down, just as we locked down in on campus in Columbia when a university-wide text message had been sent out: “Shors fired.” Yes, the most important word in the two-word sentence had been misspelled.

Most of us inferred the situation correctly anyway. I was sitting with three or four of my students, and we were discussing research papers, though those conversations would quickly shut down as something larger presented itself into our lives that day. We took to social media to fill the gaps in our imagination about what might be happening, but before too many rumors could spread, we got another text message that released us from the lockdown, classes now optional for the rest of the day. We would learn that a murder-suicide had occurred in the school’s public health building. A science professor had been killed by his ex-wife.

V. My Cousin, Todd, and My Birth Year

In the coming years, I felt an inclination to visit some family graves that I’d never been too before, starting with a cousin, Todd, that I’d never met. Perhaps he was most on my radar because an uncle of mine hadn’t attended Shane’s funeral with his wife (my aunt) and kids (my cousins). It was insinuated that he couldn’t quite handle being there, and that the reason for that was because his son had died by suicide. The year of Todd’s suicide? 1984, the year of my birth. I believe Todd was 16 at the time, and after a girl had broken up with him, he had pulled his vehicle into a garage and just let the fumes run.

VI. Thanksgiving and Fate

The real cemetery memory from my excursions, though, was the trip I made to see my grandparents’ graves. I had known them and attended my grandfather’s funeral, but not my grandmother’s. And what I really remember about the end of their lives was about land. They’d had a beautiful, partially-wooded, multi-acre piece property that we gathered at (for Thanksgiving, oddly enough, as well as other occasions) when I was growing up. My grandfather, who had navigated his own mental health challenges throughout his life (“nervous breakdown” was the phrase used for after he lost his first farm post-Great Depression), and he’d eventually sought out shock therapy of all things. There was also another of those family-whispered-about incidents wherein he, my grandfather, had bloodied the back of my uncles, one of them so much so that he took off. To this day, if you would talk to my sister’s brothers—they mostly dropped out of our lives due to a conflict with my mother and her sisters about the time my grandparents were ailing—you would get a very different version of my grandfather than my mother and aunts would tell. Their version mostly aligns with the grandfather that I experienced: timid, a writer of poetry and inviter to tractor rides, chewer and spitter of dip as he watched things like Wheel of Fortune in the living room during the evening. But there was also the time I saw him berate and slur at a nurse after his stroke.

My grandmother, meanwhile, developed a series of dementia symptoms—there are family disagreements about what the appropriate diagnosis might have been—and when both she and my grandfather were institutionalized for constant care at the end of their lives, their paid-for farm that they couldn’t quite sell in time was confiscated by and eventually sold for practically nothing by the nursing home. The person who bought the property put a lot of work into the house and eventually sold it again for more than $400,000 than it was bought for after my family lost it.

I went to my grandparents’ grave several years after their death and on Thanksgiving morning. It was a damp day, and I had not been sufficiently warned about the vastness of this particular cemetery. The only clue I had about where they were buried was that there might be a tree nearby; there were hundreds of trees. Thousands upon thousands of graves. I figured there was practically no way I would find the graves, but I started wandering around and trying to kick leaves out of the way so I could see the graves that were in the ground. I wandered aimlessly for twenty or thirty minutes before noticing that I would suddenly not far off from a gas station. I moved toward it, trying to re-evaluate my obviously-flawed plan. I would pee in this place, I told myself, and then I would come back out and give the mission another twenty or thirty minutes, move back in the direction of my car, pat myself on the back, and get the heck out of there. Join my family for the meal.

So that’s what I did. And then, right before I was ready to leave, there they were. My grandparents’ names: Homer and Lilian. Except it wasn’t just two graves; it was three. Who was the third? A great-uncle of mine I’d never met. A man who was known in my family history for two main things: 1) helping build the home that would eventually be taken away and 2) sexually abusing children. My mother would tell me later that day about an exchange of letters she had with the man’s ex-wife. The woman had divorced him when they’d hosted a child relative, and she’d seen him come downstairs from where the child was without any clothes on.

I’ll never forget that moment of pushing away the mud and leaves enough to see my grandfather’s and grandmother’s names in the ground right next to my great uncle’s first of all because I had no business finding the stones in the first place. It was luck or fate, nothing else. I could have spent hours more looking and never come across those; that’s, frankly, what I “deserved.” The second reason I’ll never forget that day was because of the visceral and emotional and psychological experience I had of seeing those three individuals’ names together. Just this sense that this was my lineage, my family, my ancestry. This is the raw materials from which my own life had been made. It wasn’t a great feeling, but it was a fact. It was as real and true as the dirt beneath my feet.

Am I thankful for it? Depends on which day of the week. On the last Thursday of every November? Sometimes. Can I embrace it? With many cussing-outs of the God or Nature who made it that way. Lots of middle fingers at and urinations all over it. Most of which I think I’ve earned and do not blame myself for. The hard part is that it’s just not fair to take it all out on a world that is impossible for way too many as it is.

VII. Ernie

The father of my nine-year-old niece, who was about my age, recently died. It was not a suicide but rather a weird police interaction that he had, before which he swallowed some drugs to avoid getting in trouble or whatever, and the result was a heart failure (I’ve also witness him eat a ton of sugar) that killed him. He was a man who had a drug problem, obviously, but he also had a violent switch and had been incarcerated multiple times. Obviously there was much about him to be frustrated with, but he’d been in our lives long enough for me to have also experienced some points of connection and seen some of his virtues and attempts to try to find something other than the “fate” he’d been given, which was a mix between Indiana urban poverty and West Virginia rural poverty. Oddly enough, my Pennsylvania family also has West Virginia roots, and while I wasn’t able to get through the current U.S. Vice President’s book about Appalachian culture, I did Tara Westover’s read Educated and Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, and I think both of these attempt to describe a scene that is at least peripherally-connected to the family experiences I am pointing to in this essay. I also can’t help but connect all this to the so-called Trump phenomenon.

As I think should be the case, I cannot help but think about my niece if I am going to think about her father. Their lives, and fates, were intertwined. And the truth is, the three of shared a living situation for a while. Which is to say, there was a time a few years back when Ernie was not doing well, and he was spending too much of his time and energy at my sister’s house, mostly not productively. As a single mother, god knows she had enough to think about without having to try to get Ernie’s shit together. That was true for me, too, but for a brief period in time—I knew he didn’t have many other intact, supportive relationships and almost certainly not the funds for long-term, institutionalized care—I decided to take a turn. He was strung out on my sister’s couch one night, and I informed him that he was coming to my place, that he would not be coming back any time soon. He was facing additional legal troubles, so he would be facing those—and getting sober—while living out of my extra bedroom.

So he did that; he listened. As he got sober, he started contacting his lawyer, started brainstorming what assets he had that he might be able to liquidate in the short-term, started going to mandated recovery meetings as he awaited his proceedings. I think the court was surprised and impressed by his sobriety, and they gave him some grace in the decision they made regarding his case. House arrest, but not more prison. He started working some shifts as a laborer outside of my apartment as well (this was an exception he was able to get from the house arrest), and he started watching his kids from more than one woman on the weekends, including my niece. With the basic necessity of housing taken care of, in other words—I charged him for rent, but pretty minimally—some of the other parts of his life started coming together a little bit. It was taxing me, though, and at the five-month mark of the arrangement, I told him he needed to start working on finding another place, which he did.

He and I didn’t see each other very much after that, probably because there had been a sobriety slip during the end of his time in my condo that resulted in me getting locked out one night wondering if he was dead (I slept at my other sister’s house that night), and I would occasionally hear of the ups and downs of his life. He had, I should admit, tempted death on a number of occasions, so when I was told he was hospitalized because of the incident with the cop and swallowing drugs, I figured he would find a way to make it like he usually did. Except he didn’t this time. He died.

And when I went to the funeral gathering, his daughter ran around the place with the other children in attendance. “Why are you here? You weren’t his family,” she observed, correctly in a sense. Ernie had often irked me by introducing me as his brother-in-law, which he was not (though of course he sort of was in the informal way that poor people understandably try to take “shortcuts”). But after my niece said that at the gathering, she thought about it for a moment, and seemed to correct herself in the same way I just did. “Well, I guess you did live with him.” Yes, and these things bind me to him, whether I like it or not.

VIII. We Need Way More Than Continued Breath

I am a person who has sought out “help,” sometimes because I thought it was what I was supposed to do (like the summer I sought out “grief counseling” after Shane died and was then pointed, over and over again, to my repressed anger by the skilled counselor who saw me for several weeks) and other times from self-interest (like when I asked for an internship because I thought more access in D.C. would lead to my awesome life) and other times when I genuinely needed help like when I told a counselor about the suicidal scripts that kept playing through my head in the months before turning thirty (and after a break-up while scraping for rent every month). Almost the exact same thing would happen a decade later as well.

While there have been moments of breakthrough and reprieve during sessions with my half dozen or so counselors, my many experiments in alternative body healing modalities, the support groups, the religious settings, the self-help books, the mens’ groups, the people who have tried to speak into my life, and even the psychedelic ceremonies, one of my conclusions from trying as much as I’ve tried over, I don’t know, 15 or so years is that we still mostly don’t know how to help people who get to points as dark as most of the ones I have described here. Lots of band-aids, little healing. Lots of feel-good attempts, few people who really…umm, find a life?! And by finding a life, let me be clear that I think there’s huge chasm between existing, having breath go in and out of your mouth or nose, and living. Feeling alive. Wanting to live, to wake up to be yourself.

And I must say that at least from my perspective, with all the people who struggle with the question of whether it might be better to just end it all, the language and initiatives of “awareness” and “prevention” rarely feel like enough. My best option is a hotline, really?! Will they be able to help me find work that I enjoy and in which I can rise, housing that’s safe and affordable, a significant other I can love and be loved by, and friends—a community, even!—who both know and care about me? I highly doubt it. But that’s the real antidote to suicide, finding a life, not just deciding not to kill yourself today. But you have to continue to breath today in order to find a life tomorrow! True enough. But some people keep breathing for so long without, seemingly, ever finding a life. And that’s damning on the whole, not just the individual.

IX. Individual Actions We Can Take

I don’t write this essay with the illusion that I have the answer or answers, so much as a hope to pose the problem in a way that is more genuine, more serious. Falsely weakening the challenge, as we seem wont to do for a lot of issues, does a disservice to the sufferers. I will try to say some things anyway about what might take people who question their existence in the direction of LIFE, though I will do it from both the individual and collective perspectives because I think both are important.

First, for individuals. Everyone seems to agree that human beings need purpose, they need to express their gifts, and I agree with both of those, though it can be a helluva dilemma, and not all that surprising, if someone who wasn’t loved well as a child is somewhat disconnected from those things. Or is too sensitive to rejection to want to express them. Or maybe is expressing them but not making money from that and then there is the whole material part of our lives that we reject only to our own detriment. If we’re going to eventually find a life I suspect it’s going to include getting paid decently to do something we don’t hate. Maybe it will also be a very meaningful contribution to society, all the better if it is. But at the very least, I don’t think we can take on work that we hate for indefinite periods while also liking life.

This probably seems obvious, and it’s basically the same with relationship. Yes, of course we need them, even as some traumatized people try to go it alone. I think we are a world full of people with diagnosed and un-diagnosed PTSD—one of a few labels I’ve racked up over the years and choose not to medicate for because I don’t think I should have to anesthetize my pain in order to find a life in spite of it—running around and bumping into each other, perpetually rubbing up against each others wounds and then blaming the other person for it or running the hell out of there before anyone can realize what it is that causes us to act the way we act.

Granted, I’m aware that much of what I describe regarding my family isn’t “normal” necessarily, and that some people have families and end up with friends who’s emotional temperatures aren’t all numb or too hot and as such learn quite naturally to regulate their bodies and their lives. I don’t think the rest of us are imagining or completely wrong when we look out and feel like some people just sort of glide through life, nailing every challenge as it comes and growing into bigger ones.

But I also think there are plenty of other people whose families are as wounded and shadow-y as mine are. Whose wounds may be different but whose ways of dealing with those wounds are dysfunctional enough to produce some of these same results. So how do people who are so easily-triggered from past wounds that are probably very real disconnect from the relationships that so wounded maybe not completely but at least enough to begin forming attachments that can encourage instead of devastate? This is one of the crucial questions here! There is a dimension switch that has to happen, a doorway that must be walked through, but we tend to overestimate what it takes for someone to really be willing to leave behind the familiar in order to take on the unfamiliar. And what the body will feel that it has been set up not to for decades if they really try to make the change.

One of the frustrating things about the Instagram remedies and the latest book and even a lot of therapy is that the interventions are almost all cognitive. They aim at our mind. For god’s sake, I have done the dumb gratitude lists, and there’s probably a time for that, but also there’s plenty in this life that I don’t feel grateful for. Which I think is connected to our bodies and subconscious, not just the thoughts in my head. I think the deeper problems that human beings deal with are physiological and something like spiritual, though I think we need to be careful not to just loop that word into meaning religious (right-wingers) or psychological (left-wingers). What I mean is that there is a dimension of our lives, maybe even dimensions of our lives, that are somewhat elusive. Confusing.

The easiest way to know what I mean without tipping my hand in too many religious or political or psychological directions and thus losing some audience is to simply say, consider the mystery of your dreams. They mean something, right? They come from somewhere, don’t they? And yet, as soon as you start to nail down with too much certainty what they mean and where they come from you risk reducing the mystery to appease your mind. I think there is great promise, then, in the current studying of psychedelics but also, and maybe more importantly, the attention that’s being given to somatic practices. What I’ve experienced in yoga classes, for example, is far from nothing. These are interventions that are at least trying to get to the deepest parts of ourselves (that are often driving the ship), and I’m sure there are others, too.

Peter Levine is onto something, then, in his book, Waking the Tiger. I think he takes the complexity of human bodies and lives way more seriously than the average clinician, at least in part because he starts with our animal-ness, something a lot of Westerners have been trying to deny for hundreds of yours.

X. Political and Cultural Considerations

Some statistics: roughly 50,000 Americans die by suicide per year. More than twice that, about 105,000, die by drug overdose. Both of these types of death (appropriately) get categorized as “deaths of despair.” I am not the kind of person who gets overly-obsessed about an identity disparity to the extent that you’re supposed to stop caring about the minority who is affected by something, so make no mistake, it is a tragedy every time a woman dies by suicide or overdose, and any deaths of despair cultural or political intervention should care about that, too. And it is an empirical fact that about 80 percent of suicide deaths are men and 70 percent of overdose deaths are men.

Do I think that as a whole work matters more for adult men more than for women? Yes, I do. Men need to feel useful; work is some of what makes them feel like they are needed and contributing. Yes, real skill-building in emotional regulating is good to some extent, too, though preferably starting young and in the presence of other boys and men—not from some school program that’s telling them how they’re supposed to feel and speak and what they should think.

I deeply appreciate Richard Reeves’ 2022 Of Boys and Men book and regularly-updated Substack, but one slight disagreement I have with his arguments is his push for more men to take on more roles like elementary school teaching and nursing (he calls them HEAL jobs). I think it’s fine for any man to decide to teach or be a nurse or a social worker, if that’s what he wants, but I don’t think it’s any kind of biological accident that men mostly don’t choose those things, or at least without allowing for the environments themselves to become more masculine. There’s also the issue of status and financial provision, both of which he needs in a dating environment (no matter what feminist take some women may have about their own careers, in the dating world they want men who make more money). We want to feel useful, yes, we want to find a contribution, and we want to feel like a man in doing all of it. And there is nothing wrong with any of this, anymore than there is for a woman to have her own professional preferences. I am pro-women working, too, so long as a woman wants to be working. None of this should be about creating false choices.

Meanwhile, as the data stacks up about the mental health issues that things like Facebook and iPhones have created in so many people, we seem all but ready to fully-embrace an AI-driven future without having asked the kinds of questions that need to be asked. How much more dignified creativity and building are we going to take away from people? And what are we doing to replace it with?

If this isn’t about choosing a gender to support, it’s also not about Capitalism or Socialism/Communism. We need markets—incentives for people to start the business of their dreams—and we government programs and investments. Most of all, we need humane thinking and collaborating. We don’t have unlimited resources or the ability to just subsidize everything we could ever want, but we can be way smarter and more accountable than we are with every dollar that gets publicly spent with the goal of improving human lives with the spending. Keeping transportation, housing, healthcare, and food costs down has to be a priority. I would add education in there, too, but I think right now there are a lot of legitimate fights occurring about what kind of education. And some consensus probably needs to form first before we know exactly how to build this out, other than with lots of diversity and choices.

We’ve also built places without enough consideration for establishing the kinds of communal connections that people need. Everything matters, and we’re doing way too much of it in ways that aren’t conducive to human well-being, at least partially because we keep trying to mechanize everything, including ourselves.

Outside of government, but related, many of the most competitive professional domains involve long periods of testing and building trust in trying to get “in” to a circle that might eventually provide you enough security so you can focus on your specific type of creation, but what about in the mean time? Hardly anyone admits this, but this all works fine or even great…if you start from a position of resources and the learned etiquette to know how to act in these settings. If you don’t, well, often you get left out or you can’t afford to stop your life in order to enter the proving ground for long enough to get in. We need to embrace a collective responsibility for getting people on life paths that will provide people with real livelihoods while also not expecting some people to just stay stuck in menial entry-level jobs for the long-term. People should always be getting developed, and the responsibility for that should be shared. Some retail work is probably always going to be with us, but those who don’t love it should mostly be moving on from it after high school and college. The elite institutions that do so much lecturing on “inclusivity” need to get way better at living it, not in some kind of trivial HR quotas way but in the sense that what we need is a life of yeses for people with consequential differences, not the exhausting world of no’s that we have sadly settled for at the moment.

Honestly, having watched my niece grow up (or even the resting and playing of my two cats!), the Silicone Valley engineers and Washington, D.C. politicians and even school administrators could do a lot better by just stopping and really observing children. We need more playing and singing and dancing and way less clicking on computers and endless meetings and paperwork. As it operates now, these things are making way too many people miserable when there are alternatives all around us that actually light people up, if we would just allow them to.