Welp. This definitely explains why I quit cannabis cold turkey out of the blue last month. Just woke up and was like “I’m good.” It was my favorite way to escape until I stopped wanting to escape and I wanted to build a world around myself that I don’t need to escape from.

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working f

The artist and the addict both wrestle with this experience of exile. They share an acute, even excruciating sensitivity to the state of separation and isolation, and both actively seek a way to overcome it, to transcend it, or at least to make the pain go away.

Enter: a drink, a lover, a habit. Addiction replaces aspiration. The quick fix wins out over the long, slow haul.

At first, these adaptations make it possible to survive. But eventually, the methods you used to feel comfortable and safe rendered you increasingly defended, shut down, prone to escapism, resistant to reality, anxious, avoidant, neurotic, narcissistic, depressed, hopeless. This is true because when you function through a series of defenses, fantas