On Hope and Hydras

About a month ago, I sat at the Pint in my hometown of Las Vegas, having a martini and journaling. Hell had descended upon me, and I was frantically trying to decode every facet of my life. I made countless lists of the factors that had pervaded my existence, either by my own hand or through circumstance. Many of these factors, to my eternal dismay, were suboptimal at best and downright horrific at worst.

Fucking hell, I’d thought to myself. What had I done?

Of course, I had expected some amount of disappointment, because such is the reality of checking one’s premises. There’s always going to be things you’ll find that are not ideal, simply by the nature of the task. A life not examined is not worth living, but a life examined is an uphill battle. A battle worth undertaking, vitally so, but a battle nonetheless.

But now, things were different. The impact of this task was much more severe than any of the times I’d checked my premises in the past. Work drama, shady characters, and unaddressed trauma had all reared their ugly heads yet again like the Hydra, and worse, all at the same time. As if that wasn’t enough, I’d also realized with horror that throughout my life, I had just stood there like Hercules trying to defeat the monster with a single sword, cutting off each head one by one, only to have them grow back over and over again.

So how does a self-proclaimed Rational Objectivist™ end up here? Why does the ouroboros of negativity and deceit often persist despite our best efforts? Well, to be honest, fuck if I know why it persists in your life. Your snake is your own, with its own reasons for eating its own tail to its eventual demise. However, I can tell you one concrete truth from experience: you’re the only reason it’s eating its own tail.

This is both good and bad news. The bad news is that you’re to blame. The good news is, you’re the only one who can change this. Great responsibility implies great power, of course.

Hercules does kill the Hydra at the end. He just had to change his strategy. Just lopping the heads off repeatedly was clearly not working. Thus, he had a bright idea, and enlisted his torch-bearing lover Iolaus to burn the stumps of every head as he cut them off, cauterizing them and preventing regeneration of the heads for good. The endless cycle had finally been broken.

People often say that life throws you lemons. The truth is, actually, that life throws you Hydras like sports fans throw hands over their favorite team during a drunken brawl on game night. Multifaceted, multidimensional issues that transpire through your own ignorance and irrationality, or that of the people you’ve kept around in your life. The higher form of existence you’re trying to embody, the more Hydras you encounter. That lemonade you’re desperately trying to make is not going to cut it. Pour yourself a stiff glass of whiskey, ditch the fucking lemon squeezer, and ready your swords and torches alike.

Awareness

The first step is to realize that you’re in a rut. You likely have been for a given time, too, regardless of how smart you think you were being. Humans are creatures of habit, though the habits you choose to maintain are your choice entirely, and your habits are a result of your values.

I had realized concretely that my existence had grown uniformly dull and uninspired. Days chock full of Sisyphean tasks trying to stay afloat amid the vicissitudes of the noisy cityscape that is Dallas, and nights of drunken revelry punctuated with vapid conversation to cope with the aforementioned. Beer, rinse, repeat.

This could not go on. My drive dwindled. I didn’t feel like playing piano or writing anymore, even though I tried my best to. My inner workaholic constantly chastised me for neglect. Still, I fought for this life I had engineered, for it had morphed into a morass of ingrained habits I had deluded myself into believing I was getting returns from. I’d tweak any odd superficial aspect in hopes of fixing shit. I’d eat better. Drink more coffee. Cut back on the booze. Sure, these things helped temporarily, but they did not rid me of the circus I had unwittingly become the ringleader of. All my efforts up till that point had only been the swings of Hercules’ sword, but not the flames of Iolaus’ vanquishing torch.

Thus, after taking a shower as hot as the boiling blood of the Phlegethon and screaming into the void, I embarked on the next step…

Addition by Subtraction

Sometimes, if the math in your life isn’t adding up, the best thing to do is to remove yourself from the equation. So that’s what I did. I decided to saddle up, leave everything behind in seedy Dallas for a bit, and return to my hometown to bask in the tranquility of the Nevada desert.

It was a hard decision. I hadn’t been back in years. My family home is a deserted battlefield upon which unholy wars of great derangement had been waged in the years of yore. But I didn’t care about the past. This was now, and the dust had settled enough, at least where I had been concerned. My room was clean and tranquil, and the deafening din of Dallas a far cry from the newfound quietude I experienced. The serenity of both my surroundings and my solitude alike was just what I needed.

The snake from the Little Prince was right. “It is lonely in the desert, but it is also lonely among men”. I don’t think he’d ever have tried to eat his own tail.

Over time, I was only reminded how necessary it is to be alone. I already knew this. I’d been alone most of my life. Sometimes lonely, sometimes not. But always alone. This is, in fact, reality for even the most extroverted among us. We were born alone, we think alone, and we’ll die alone too. Lonely is a feeling—the internal angst and yearning for proximity to another being—and a genuine feeling, too. We need people who we love and can trust around us. But proximity does not imply that one can jump out of one’s body and mind and fuse with another’s. The moment we feel the need to do this and attempt the impossible, we lose our sense of self one grain at a time.

Upon being alone and subtracting the influences in my life in Dallas, I learned, with great horror, that I had inadvertently done this, and that’s why I felt like a piece of sticky tape that had been worn out and lost its adhesion. Majority rule might be collectivistic and thoroughly immoral, but that does not invalidate its overreaching power. And when we chip away at our sense of self, we become complicit in a particularly deadly cycle, a Hydra that is perhaps the hardest to conquer…

The Eternal Recurrence of the Mundane

Nietzsche talked about amor fati, or the concept of “being in love with your fate”. He asked, if upon your deathbed, you were doomed to live your life as you did, all the good, the bad, and the ugly, over and over again, would you want to? Realistically speaking, most people would answer no, because statistically speaking because of the universal law of entropy, life sucks a lot more than it doesn’t. Destruction is infinitely easier than creation.

But as I see it, the problem here isn’t entropy, neither is it that we are doomed in the deterministic sense. The issue is that while we have the rationality and free will to choose what cycles we wish to maintain, we often do not take the time to actually observe and consciously make these decisions, and the current era of eternal distraction makes it even harder. You can’t read the ingredients on the can if you live inside it, after all. You’ll start to believe that the banality of your existence and the assorted philistines contained within it are all that make up your world, and worse, maybe all that you deserve.

The way out of this loop is considering the can itself an illusion. Of course, reality is not an illusion. A is A. However, the way you have chosen to live in reality is. To end this eternal recurrence of the mundane, I recommend the practice of healthy dissociation. Garden variety NPCs and their ilk of abject retardation love to say such a view is delusional, and as they represent the majority, you might be inclined to believe that their insistence on mediocrity as divine truth is sane and informed. But what they call delusional is merely a lack of imagination. Your life is not a monolith. It’s a set of decisions, which you are free to make at will.

We are all Hercules. Any path we take, we will encounter a Hydra. Some of the Hydras we encounter were hands we were dealt by things of circumstance, like our parents or place of birth. But through life, it’s your choice whether to go into battle with a particular Hydra, or simply walk away to find and fight another one. Choose wisely, fight intelligently, and you will see the rewards of your efforts. After the sword kills and the fires purify, what’s left over could either be a Pyrrhic victory, leaving barren, scorched earth behind, or a holy war, leaving fertile ground upon which hope and possibility can blossom. Emptiness will always follow, but the nature of such emptiness is in your hands, depending on the battles you have chosen to fight.

The Torchbearer’s Dilemma

Hercules is the one who went down in legend for defeating the Hydra, of course, but little is said of Iolaus and his torch. Without him, completing the task would have been impossible. It’s always the final throes of any quest that are the most difficult to overcome. This is because those lasting decisions require not only bravery and brawn, but also introspection and intelligence.

Wielding the torch for me meant facing the harsh reality that I had been living in denial of my true nature. The life I had crafted was chaotic, full of people walking in and out of my doors, though in reality, I’m quite introverted and sensitive. My interests are esoteric and varied, yet I had pretended to be content with bread and circuses for entertainment. I loved silence, yet surrounded myself with noise. My past is rife with trauma and pain, yet I had walked around pretending to be happy and that everything was fine, and worse, let my pain come out sideways on the people around me. Realizing all this as well as why I had been going about changing myself in this way was very hard, but necessary for my growth.

I stood to lose a lot by addressing these areas, yet an infinite amount to gain. Keeping the Hydra alive and maintaining the false existence was easy, convenient, and familiar. Just cut off the heads whenever they appear to keep the monster just about manageable, and everything will be fine. Or so I thought. However, the monster never strays from its nature, and it would’ve never stopped wanting to consume me whole. It needed to die.

Now, as I sit and write this, I feel as if a weight has been lifted off of me. The future, no longer a source of fear and dread, but a blank slate of possibility. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

For whatever dilemmas you might be facing, I wish you strength, courage, and wisdom alike. Life is too short to entertain that which doesn’t serve you and negates your soul.