This is a companion piece to The Real Drug Addict of SLC.
Utah schools do not come equipped with philosophy courses, at least not the ones I attended. There’s no Platonic Academy. No Lyceum. The closet I got was lunch-break-hacky-sack with the goth exchange student (it’s not a phase, Mom!) I didn’t formally study any philosophy until college, but boy did I love to take philosopher’s quotes out of context (still do.)
I know that I know nothing.
Socrates
I wasn’t drawn to philosophy for any grand or romantic reason. The goal was to get out of attending church. If some super-smart, long-dead person could convince me that getting up on Sunday morning to attend service was ethically wrong…well, truth be damned. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a bad strategy when I discovered that the bishop of my church was a lawyer with a philosophy degree.
He called my bluff. The truth was…I didn’t know what to believe. I tried Mormonism, I did. I read The Book of Mormon front to back. I read The Pearl of Great Price, The Doctrine and Covenants, you name it. None of it resonated. At least once a month, someone would be up at the church podium weeping. The spirit of the Holy Ghost had moved them to tears. What was wrong with me?
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Nothing was wrong. Not really. I was perfectly fucked up, just like everybody else. The problem was my undeveloped brain couldn’t comprehend that. It was easier to be different—to believe I was just broken. That way, I didn’t have to blame myself for anything. Everything was God’s fault, the depression’s fault, products of my environment, you name it. I didn’t have to be responsible for my actions.
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
Jean-Paul Sartre
It took years of being a self-absorbed drug addict before I could see the light. In fact, I saw too much. I couldn’t keep playing dumb. I knew I was responsible for my choices. But whenever that realization hit, I would smoke, snort, and/or drink my way out of it.
Until I physically couldn’t.
Until I was extricated to a treatment center on the other side of the country where I had to pee in a cup everyday and listen to alcoholics repeat slogans and prayers at each other from church basements.
Sunday service all over again.
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
Søren Kierkegaard
But for some reason, this time was different. I was praying again, but I was only praying because my sponsor told me to. My atheist sponsor. My sponsor who criticized religion and read postmodern philosophy. It didn’t make sense, but I was also out of options.
So I did what he said. I prayed every day. I read The Big Book front to back1. I read The Twelve Traditions, Twenty-Four Hours A Day, you name it. This time, things resonated. Life got better. I went from someone who could not be trusted around an unattended purse, to someone who was in charge of managing an entire sober house.
A beautiful ending.
If only my brain weren’t so stubborn.
Ultimately, I wasn’t satisfied with the “because I said so” approach. Why did doing what people told me to do work this time? Why didn’t it work when I was a kid? How can I trust that it’ll work in the future? Where’s my compass—my north star?
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates
As a newly sober, well-respected citizen, I dove back into college. Physics. Philosophy. My unhealthy relationship with drugs had been replaced with a (probably just as unhealthy) relationship with academia. I read Being and Nothingness front to back. I read The Nicomachean Ethics, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, you name it. I wanted to figure it out—for myself, once and for all—what to believe. Where was the ground truth I could rest on?
Ultimately, what it came down to was simple: If I had the power to create the problems in my life, I had the power to solve them. There’s no rule book. No stone tablets. No inverse-square law of morality2. Life would be much easier if there were, but it would also be much more boring. To live is to create. To live well is to create the person you want to be.
It is up to you to give life a meaning.
Sartre
That was the key for me—what I couldn’t comprehend when I was younger—that we’re all out here trying to figure it out. No one single person has the answer. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s something I have to do alone. I couldn’t do it alone. I see the kind of person I want to be in others. A loving husband. A good writer. An attentive friend. A mentor. I emulate how they live, figuring out what works for me and what doesn’t.
Life is an experiment.
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Now that’s a pretty good quote, but let me do you one better:
We aren’t counting all the stories in the second half, right?
Despite what Kant will have you believe.
“Nothing was wrong. Not really. I was perfectly fucked up, just like everybody else. “
I found the book “Yhe Spirituality of Imperfection” by Ernest Kurtz to be a wonderful read on the subject.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/96307/the-spirituality-of-imperfection-by-ernest-kurtz-and-katherine-ketcham/
Love this, Matt. All of it. And wanted to restack at least a handful of quotes. I think I'll choose this one:
"Ultimately, what it came down to was simple: If I had the power to create the problems in my life, I had the power to solve them. There’s no rule book. No stone tablets. No inverse-square law of morality. Life would be much easier if there were, but it would also be much more boring. To live is to create. To live well is to create the person you want to be."
Thank you for a beautiful, resonant read.