When pursuing a creative venture, be it painting, music, comedy, whatever, you’re entering into an dark cave of the unknown, and the only thing lighting your way is this desire in your heart to bring something beautiful into the world. Most people, myself especially, walk in fear. You stumble as you walk, tripping and falling, running into rocks hidden in the shadows. You stop in your tracks and ponder going further, you turn around and begin to walk quickly back to the entrance of the cave before something stops you and forces you to turn back. You may do this several times before you hit a point in that cave where you notice a single, tiny ray of light at the other end. Your careful steps become a relaxed stride as you move forward, the light seemingly becoming brighter, and the brighter it gets, the quicker your stride becomes.

Dashing towards the end of the cave, you find that it is no longer dark, that it is as if you’re venturing through a sunny green field, the bright yellow sun radiating above, the sound of movement surrounding you. Before you know, you are no longer in the cave, and you are not surrounded by the sunlight, but from the light emanating from your creation. The energy from the light sends you forth into another dark cave, but this time, with far more light and a much more confident stride than before.

I am a hopefulist: I’m not pessimistic enough to be a realist, I’m not ignorant enough to be an idealist, and I’m not impractical enough to be a dreamer. I am driven by the hope that observing and exposing reality as I perceive it will allow me and others around me to work practically towards a more ideal reality. The key to my effectiveness as a hopefulist is my perception. If my perception is skewed, then my reason will not appeal to the minds of my audience and spark emotion in their hearts, and all will be for naught. But I do believe in my mind and feel in my heart that I am on the right path, for otherwise I would not commit my thoughts in writing. I can only hope, after all.

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.

(Background: I was asked by a gay guy on a forum what defines sexuality, both personally and socially, from a straight’s perspective. The following essay was my response.)

I think one’s sexuality is defined not only by what they desire sexually, but what they desire emotionally. Both desires pass a threshold of, let’s say, “neutrality” before they reach a level in which your sexuality is defined by them. For example, a straight man can love his friend, just as a gay man can love his straight male friend, but neither of those emotions pass the threshold where they would romantically be involved.

The physical aspect of sexuality is much trickier, because all humans can be sexually stimulated by a wide range of physical pleasures. For example, if you blindfold half of a room full of people of both genders and all sexualities and have the non-blindfolded people stimulate the blindfolded, chances are the gender or sexuality of either party, being unknown, will not make a difference in the level of stimulation the blindfolded receives.

Now, it’s the psychological factor that makes a huge impact, and I believe this largely comes from society. While I believe biology has a GREAT impact in ones sexuality (I never woke up one day and decided, I’m going to find women sexually attractive), it would be a lie to say that society/environment has little or nothing to do with it. In short, I think society’s anti-gay attitude is more of a self-preservation thing than anything else, with no real valid argument. It’s pretty much, “I don’t want these people coming in and taking over my territory. I don’t want these ‘abnormal, inferior’ people to be my equal.” See also: the history of blacks in America.

The impact society has on sexuality is as clear as day. Ask any older gay man about growing up and waiting forever to come out. These days, kids are coming out in droves in their teens. Why? Because it’s far more accepted, far “safer,” much more in the spotlight, talked about all the time, etc. etc. It’s becoming a norm. There’s no doubt in my mind that gay marriage will be legal one day. Homophobia will always remain, just as racism will. It’s the “us versus them” mentality that is as old as civilization.

With all that, if you were to remove the blindfolds mid-session in my previous experiment, those “mismatched” couples, depending on their comfort with their own sexuality and how much they buy in to society’s propaganda (and this comes from both gay and straight society), they may react negative (anger, guilt, aggression, fear, doubt, questioning, etc.), or think, “Meh, it’s just sex.” That’s really all there is to it. A straight man performing homosexual acts with another man cannot turn him gay, because when all is said and done, he has no desire to pursue a romantic relationship with that person. Can a straight guy do this (have sex with another guy)? Absolutely. Can a gay man have sex with a woman? Absolutely. The necessary parts are in place. Now, the question is, is the desire, will, and motivation (beyond simple curiosity and just getting your rocks off) there? The answer is driven by one’s sexuality.

A revelation came to me while letting nature take its course and reading The Relaxation Response, a book whose premise states that we all have a built in mechanism, the relaxation response, which can allieviate a great deal of physical and mental problems we experience in our lives, from anxiety and depression to intense physical pain. The foreward, which I am currently reading, talks about the difficulties experienced by the doctor who discovered it in his attempts to make this knowledge widespread. It occured to me why this happened: American consumer culture.

Privation, which leads to desire, which leads to suffering (anxiety, depression, inferiority, etc.), is woven directly into a capitalist society. It is from this desire that business thrives. If you’re not happy with the way your current life is going, someone stands to benefit from it: drug companies, cosmetic companies, alcohol companies, you name it. There’s always something more to fill the void. You can always improve your life if you have the money to do it.

What does that mean, then? Are those in poverty doomed to a life of suffering? Hardly. True happiness lies within the self, the present self, the self which we currently perceive as lacking. This idea, this internal spiritual wealth, is the archenemy of a capitalist society. If you’re happy with what you have or with who you are, what does big business have to gain?

The popularity of medications for anxiety and depression is a sure sign that something is wrong, something larger than what is most readily apparent. This suffering is woven into our culture. We are brought up to believe that, in a broad sense, things can or will get better. The desire for something–anything–supports this belief. How many different toys, gadgets, or articles of clothing were meant to complete you?

Accepting the idea that life will only be as good as it is right now is one key to liberation. If you’re a pessimist, this very thought strikes terror deep within your heart. Obviously, only a pessimist will fine pain in this idea, because that means the future will be filled with suffering. I will remind my fellow pessimists that suffering comes from desire, and desire is wanting something outside of the present moment. Accepting that life will only be as good as it currently is forces us to make the present moment worth experiencing. Fully enjoying the present moment will bring forth a bright future, because when the future becomes present, it will be worth experiencing.

Accepting our limitations is also liberating, yet this is not the easiest thing for consumers to do. In our American consumer society, we are always looking outside of ourselves for satisfaction. We are envious of the beautiful, rich celebrities. But we are envious of them for the wrong reasons. What we should admire about them is the fact that they focused on their own potential to get them to where they are today; they accepted their limitations and used their own abilities to their greatest extent. What big business and the media (who makes money from selling advertisements) wants you to admire is their material wealth, but what we should really admire them for is their own internal wealth of knowledge, self-acceptance, and perserverance. Our capabilities are limited, but our capacity for that which we are capable of becomes limitless when we fully realize these capabilities.

We are all capable of at least one ability, the ability to break free. It’s not something that can be made, bought, or sold. It’s something that already exists, and it exists within each one of us. If we take the time to put down our magazines, remote controls, and various other technological gadgets, we can find that inner peace. It is critical, in this convoluted train wreck of a world we live in, that we peel away all the unnecessary layers of desire that we have placed upon ourselves and dig up the light that we have been conditioned to bury. And, if I may be more hokey than I have already been, we need to learn how to say “no” to the outside world and “yes” to our inner selves. We have the power to redefine the American way, if only we could become a large mass of focused individuals who have fully realized our own inner ability.

And yes, I got all this from five minutes on the can.