I’ve been looking for something the last few years. I couldn’t quite describe what it was, but I knew I could find it. Finally, I found the solution in the most unlikely of places. I kept watching a lot of TV shows. Breaking Bad was a dark one, but it didn’t quite hit the spot—I’d plough through the seasons like a researcher looking for something, leaving episode after episode running on the computer in the background while I did other things. I got through dozens of shows. It became like putting on some music in the background.
Now, I’m not the type of man to glue myself to the TV, smoking bongs and eating Cheetos. I often read a book or the internet at the same time as watching a movie. But at the same time, when I get a whim like this I can’t always consciously rationalize why I am doing it. It’s a hedonistic and decadent approach to life, but as you grow older you learn to yield and turn your weaknesses into strengths.
Why does a player like Roosh travel the world on an ever-increasing mission to up his notch count? Why does a wimp get married and “settle down”? Why does a guy go to the gym and bulk up? Why does anyone do much of anything? The answer is to feel alive. It’s only when you feel alive that life is worth living. The surfers and extreme skiers take incredible risks, one wrong move can kill them, but they still do it – To feel alive.
Inspirational – now how to do that in a more mundane setting?
Unfortunately the human condition is buried underneath a mountain of so many social complexes, bad childhood experiences provided by inept adults with all manner of psychological problems themselves. We’re supposed to control ourselves and conform to the way our parents, friends, teachers, lovers and society in general expects us to be. But what does that expectation constitute?
If a 10-year-old boy told his parents he wanted to sleep all day so he could stay up all night partying and playing CDs, his parents would probably freak and lock him into a 9-5 regime. Yet there are plenty of superstar DJs that people love and admire, making a fortune doing just this. Why the hell not? You can do just about anything you want and the chances are that people will love and enjoy what you do, because doing what you love makes you feel alive. When you feel alive, other people who are less “awake” than you are will flock to the spectacle. This is one of the reasons that watching sportsmen in action, even with relatively boring games like tennis and football, is absolutely fascinating.
We spend half our time day dreaming and planning a future that will never happen, and the rest of it doing mundane and tedious chores that make us fall asleep. The point of the movie Flight Club is to live and not to give a fuck. Live in a total shithole of a house, who cares. Punch yourself real hard in the face. I’ve tried it quite a few times. Hit yourself square on the jaw until you see stars and leave a swelling. I tell you, you’ll feel more alive in that moment than you have in the last couple of decades.
Why does the suicidal person put a gun to his head? Precisely because in that moment he feels absolutely alive. In the pits of depression, feeling that his life is a miserable waste of time, putting a gun to his head and gently squeezing the trigger brings him back to life. The tragedy is that he goes through with it and doesn’t see the answer he was looking for is not in death itself, but in simply feeling alive. Punch yourself in the face and you will see what I mean.
I am not recommending self-harm as a permanent therapy to the situation, but it works as a temporary pep. Now, how to feel like that all the time? How to feel one breath away from death, and thus be more alive than I’ve ever been? Here is a thought: 100 people die in the US every day, mashed in horrible car accidents. Now tell me that God, the universe or whatever, really gives a fuck. Your life is a meaningless waste of time. You can be crushed out of existence by a UPS driver who relapsed and hit the crack pipe this morning.
That’s the point of the scene in Fight Club where Edward Norton is just begging for a midair collision. That’s why the movie is offset against his job as an insurance evaluator, all those grizzly dead bodies and tragic accidents—Even Einstein, Edison, Washington, Churchill, all of them a waste of time, mere worms crawling about in the mud.
I’ve had a few dramatic successes in my life, but I’ve also had more than my fair share of fuck-ups. Half the time I feel like I am going through the motions and fucking things up on purpose. Why is this? What I am getting out of failure? Al Pacino explains it well in “Two for the Money” :
You’re a lemon. Like a bad car. There is something… there is something inherently defective in you, and you, and you, and me, and all of us. We’re all lemons. We look like everyone else, but what makes us different is our defect. See, most gamblers, when they go to gamble, they go to win. When we go to gamble, we go to lose. Subconsciously. Me, I never feel better than when they’re raking the chips away; not bringing them in. And everyone here knows what I’m talking about. Hell, even when we win it’s just a matter of time before we give it all back. But when we lose, that’s another story. When we lose, and I’m talking about the kind of loss that makes your asshole pucker to the size of a decimal point – you know what I mean – You’ve just recreated the worst possible nightmare this side of malignant cancer, for the twentieth goddamn time; and you’re standing there and you suddenly realize, Hey, I’m still… here. I’m still breathing. I’m still alive. Us lemons, we f*** up all the time on purpose. Because we constantly need to remind ourselves we’re alive. Gambling’s not your problem. It’s this f****d up need to feel something. To convince yourself you exist. That’s the problem.
Bring Yourself To Life
So where did I find my answers? In the TV show Hannibal. Season one is a bit of a rambling affair, but season two really kicks in. Why do we love that character so much? He makes such a spectacle of the most brutal and disgusting killings, not only by preparing delicacies from his victims, but also leaving the bodies as a spectacular tribute. Hannibal is incredible because he has embraced life. He is absolutely comfortable with who and what he is and he carries out his “work” with the most brilliant, calculated, and conscious precision. He is alive and he allows nothing and no one to hold him back.
Society and especially the raising of children is all built around restraint. In order to function as a unified body of people we all need to think in a similar way. If it becomes normal to chop people up, display their bodies as tributes and serve their liver on a bed of saffron rice, what will become of your average city? The same holds true for sex as well as murder. If men and women embrace their lustful tendencies and plunge into wanton fornication what will become of society?
Fight Club challenges social norms. Why shouldn’t we have an underground club where we beat the shit out of each other and embrace our inner demons? We are trained to consider these kinds of urges as distasteful at best and at worst horrific—but are they really horrific or is that just the way we’ve been programmed? Hannibal seems to take a contradictory approach in that he nurtures and embraces his inner demons and encourages others to do the same.
Hannibal has obviously gone over the edge to retrieve his soul. He’s alive but he is also a damaged unit. AND YET: In his conscious and fully-embodied state he has something we all want. He feels alive. Thus, he looks down on those around him as pathetic sleepwalkers. Hannibal has no fear, either of himself or those around him, or of the grotesque acts he performs. He might end up in a struggle either physically or psychologically or both, but he performs with such clarity because his sense of living ensures victory is more or less assured.
Much as the Navy Seals go into battle “already dead’” so they can overcome the fear of dying, we must go into life already dead, so that we can feel awake. It sounds like a paradox but it’s not. Of course we don’t have to chop people up or go crazy with violence or fornication. That can most certainly assist a person to wake up, but much like a drug it makes you fall into the pits of your own soul. What you must do instead is stare those dark aspects in the face. Embrace them, without allowing them to pull you right in—easier said than done. Mostly we hide from our true selves, because our true self is absolutely frightening.
Society says that our true selves are unacceptable, but it’s only a moral code. Those codes have been broken many times. How alive would you feel in such a moment ? How many people would kill themselves, just to feel a little more alive? I wanted to do just that at times and I have a 9mm and 1000 rounds of ammo in the cupboard, but just embracing the concept makes me feel so alive as to assuage the urge. You can go right to the edge and look off the cliff without jumping, and get pretty much the same result.
The point I found from Hannibal is that I don’t have to go over the edge to feel alive. Like a surfer in a barrel, I simply have to embrace all the facets of myself and ride the wave of inner demons. I learned to feel alive doing the most mundane bullshit and of course as I do this, I progress into far more interesting and fascinating pursuits. In order to do this I had to look deep within myself, and as Hannibal does confront the very depths of my own demonic existence. The question is whether its possible do that without becoming a monster. So far, so good.
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