We are raised on lies. We are told that we can be anything and do anything we set our minds to. We are constantly rewarded and positively reinforced. We are told that we are special. We always win, as we’re sheltered from failure. We are never taught to reward ourselves, our spiritual, intellectual selves, our being. We grow up and learn the hard truth about the world we live in. Those who cannot handle it either escape the world through various outlets to feel that reward, that childhood sense of gratification, or they check themselves out completely.

Our current paranoia-driven overprotection and over-management of our future generations is setting them up for a life of failure and disappointment. This trend has worsened with each generation leading up to ours, as we’ve moved further away from blue collar manual labor, where we stretch our will to its limits and act out of self-preservation, and into white collar office buildings and cookie-cutter suburban homes, where we barricade ourselves in giant boxes of wood and brick and glass, sheltering and protecting ourselves from reality. Confined to these living, breathing coffins, we become increasingly paranoid, neurotic, anxious, and depressed. We mask these problems with pills, pills that the manufacturers don’t know the full gamut of their effects, good or bad, pills that our ancestors probably never needed and probably never wished for.

Unlike our ancestors, we don’t know what it’s like to push ourselves to our limits, to come close to death, to fully experience life. The closest we ever come in this manufactured world is when we drink ourselves into oblivion, when our hearts are broken seemingly beyond repair, when we wake up on the bathroom floor the morning after mixing alcohol and pills in the quest to feel something. We try to get a taste of life by running away from it.

Our willingness to barricade ourselves into this plastic-wrapped world of paranoia is driven by one of the greatest of all fears: death. When we, at the same time, are terrified by the unknown, how could we possibly be afraid of the one thing that we know is certain? There is one explanation that I believe to be true, and that is, those who fear death are only afraid because they have not yet lived. The difference between those who are driven by self-preservation and those driven by fear of death is that the former act to protect the life they already posses, and the latter act to delay the inevitable in order to find a life worth preserving. The tragedy is, those who run away in fear run into a darkness more aphotic than death, where they will never find the life they were looking for.