u/GregHauser

I’m sick to death of heaven. 

I’ve created a pleasurable bubble for myself because I hate my job and I need some counterbalance to look forward to. I need backlogs filled with video games to play and movies to watch. I need a list of books so long that I’ll never get around all of them even if I had 100 year reading run. But it got old fast. Video games are boring, movies are boring, tv shows feel more like chores than entertainment and serve as background noise to fill the silence, give me anything to listen to than that, it’s too much, it invites awful thoughts of past failures and future calamities so vivid that real life is obscured and life takes on a fantasy/memory dynamic that cannot fully reckon with conditions as they are. Life is performed in a haze where everything is half real, interpreted through the lens of the past. 

The bubble is maintained, not for its pleasurable qualities but its familiarity. It feels like me, yet poisons me in the same breath. My attention span dwindles, the escapes as addictions beg for more: more spectacle, more dopamine, more fun, but there is no more to be had. The yearning is such that nothing quite touches it. The craving reads like thirst but no amount of consumption brings satiation.

Diminishing returns set in and you want to stop because you’re consistently disappointed and you feel stuck and you don’t even remember why you’re scrolling through Youtube watching your 5th short wondering what the hell you’re doing and why you can’t stop, then you click on the 6th and 7th shorts because, again, you can’t stop. These websites are so addictive. You say no more and they say “just one more” and you confuse the latter for the former as you’re the one who wants one more, and that’s why you can’t stop. You blame yourself but how can you, simple working class person living a normal-ish life in an outlandish time, how you un-addict from something that is specially engineered to be addictive. I didn’t think about it until recently but we carry our digital addictions around with us, in our pockets, like packs of cigarettes. The phone is the pack and the apps are the cigarettes and we smoke em if we got em because what else are we supposed to do when our phones pings a notification and our brains mentally salivate, ready for the next hit of dopamine and novelty. 

This is supposed to be heaven, frictionless pleasure on demand, anywhere at anytime in your pocket. But heaven is boring. If everything is easy, if I don’t have to earn my pleasure and just consume it in readymade packages like Skittles or Pringles or algorithmically specialized individual packets made to deliver enjoyment as sensational pleasure, then it becomes abundantly clear that something is missing. But what’s missing, for me, isn’t in achievement or impressing someone or securing some future position, it’s in embodied action that doesn’t promise anything (even pleasure), which includes creating art and being with other people. I may create something and struggle; I may hang out with a friend and not have a good time. But both require something of myself, a kind of immediacy in-the-moment awareness that isn’t available in consumption, even in video games. Action, of this kind, tones down the pleasure craving’s intensity and the addictive spell loosens, I have some breathing room to create and explore without knowing whether it will lead somewhere or have some big payoff or feel fun. Ironically, direct living on earth feels better than heaven because earth contains uncertainty and that uncertainty satiates better than pleasure. 

I’m sick to death of heaven. 

I’ve created a pleasurable bubble for myself because I hate my job and I need some counterbalance to look forward to. I need backlogs filled with video games to play and movies to watch. I need a list of books so long that I’ll never get around all of them even if I had 100 year reading run. But it got old fast. Video games are boring, movies are boring, tv shows feel more like chores than entertainment and serve as background noise to fill the silence, give me anything to listen to than that, it’s too much, it invites awful thoughts of past failures and future calamities so vivid that real life is obscured and life takes on a fantasy/memory dynamic that cannot fully reckon with conditions as they are. Life is performed in a haze where everything is half real, interpreted through the lens of the past. 

The bubble is maintained, not for its pleasurable qualities but its familiarity. It feels like me, yet poisons me in the same breath. My attention span dwindles, the escapes as addictions beg for more: more spectacle, more dopamine, more fun, but there is no more to be had. The yearning is such that nothing quite touches it. The craving reads like thirst but no amount of consumption brings satiation.

Diminishing returns set in and you want to stop because you’re consistently disappointed and you feel stuck and you don’t even remember why you’re scrolling through Youtube watching your 5th short wondering what the hell you’re doing and why you can’t stop, then you click on the 6th and 7th shorts because, again, you can’t stop. These websites are so addictive. You say no more and they say “just one more” and you confuse the latter for the former as you’re the one who wants one more, and that’s why you can’t stop. You blame yourself but how can you, simple working class person living a normal-ish life in an outlandish time, how you un-addict from something that is specially engineered to be addictive. I didn’t think about it until recently but we carry our digital addictions around with us, in our pockets, like packs of cigarettes. The phone is the pack and the apps are the cigarettes and we smoke em if we got em because what else are we supposed to do when our phones pings a notification and our brains mentally salivate, ready for the next hit of dopamine and novelty. 

This is supposed to be heaven, frictionless pleasure on demand, anywhere at anytime in your pocket. But heaven is boring. If everything is easy, if I don’t have to earn my pleasure and just consume it in readymade packages like Skittles or Pringles or algorithmically specialized individual packets made to deliver enjoyment as sensational pleasure, then it becomes abundantly clear that something is missing. But what’s missing, for me, isn’t in achievement or impressing someone or securing some future position, it’s in embodied action that doesn’t promise anything (even pleasure), which includes creating art and being with other people. I may create something and struggle; I may hang out with a friend and not have a good time. But both require something of myself, a kind of immediacy in-the-moment awareness that isn’t available in consumption, even in video games. Action, of this kind, tones down the pleasure craving’s intensity and the addictive spell loosens, I have some breathing room to create and explore without knowing whether it will lead somewhere or have some big payoff or feel fun. Ironically, direct living on earth feels better than heaven because earth contains uncertainty and that uncertainty satiates better than pleasure. 

I’m sick to death of heaven. 

I’ve created a pleasurable bubble for myself because I hate my job and I need some counterbalance to look forward to. I need backlogs filled with video games to play and movies to watch. I need a list of books so long that I’ll never get around all of them even if I had 100 year reading run. But it got old fast. Video games are boring, movies are boring, tv shows feel more like chores than entertainment and serve as background noise to fill the silence, give me anything to listen to than that, it’s too much, it invites awful thoughts of past failures and future calamities so vivid that real life is obscured and life takes on a fantasy/memory dynamic that cannot fully reckon with conditions as they are. Life is performed in a haze where everything is half real, interpreted through the lens of the past. 

The bubble is maintained, not for its pleasurable qualities but its familiarity. It feels like me, yet poisons me in the same breath. My attention span dwindles, the escapes as addictions beg for more: more spectacle, more dopamine, more fun, but there is no more to be had. The yearning is such that nothing quite touches it. The craving reads like thirst but no amount of consumption brings satiation.

Diminishing returns set in and you want to stop because you’re consistently disappointed and you feel stuck and you don’t even remember why you’re scrolling through Youtube watching your 5th short wondering what the hell you’re doing and why you can’t stop, then you click on the 6th and 7th shorts because, again, you can’t stop. These websites are so addictive. You say no more and they say “just one more” and you confuse the latter for the former as you’re the one who wants one more, and that’s why you can’t stop. You blame yourself but how can you, simple working class person living a normal-ish life in an outlandish time, how you un-addict from something that is specially engineered to be addictive. I didn’t think about it until recently but we carry our digital addictions around with us, in our pockets, like packs of cigarettes. The phone is the pack and the apps are the cigarettes and we smoke em if we got em because what else are we supposed to do when our phones pings a notification and our brains mentally salivate, ready for the next hit of dopamine and novelty. 

This is supposed to be heaven, frictionless pleasure on demand, anywhere at anytime in your pocket. But heaven is boring. If everything is easy, if I don’t have to earn my pleasure and just consume it in readymade packages like Skittles or Pringles or algorithmically specialized individual packets made to deliver enjoyment as sensational pleasure, then it becomes abundantly clear that something is missing. But what’s missing, for me, isn’t in achievement or impressing someone or securing some future position, it’s in embodied action that doesn’t promise anything (even pleasure), which includes creating art and being with other people. I may create something and struggle; I may hang out with a friend and not have a good time. But both require something of myself, a kind of immediacy in-the-moment awareness that isn’t available in consumption, even in video games. Action, of this kind, tones down the pleasure craving’s intensity and the addictive spell loosens, I have some breathing room to create and explore without knowing whether it will lead somewhere or have some big payoff or feel fun. Ironically, direct living on earth feels better than heaven because earth contains uncertainty and that uncertainty satiates better than pleasure. 

When I think about the 80s,I think about dusty gravel parking lots at dusk behind sleazy venues where businessmen slip in the back door, a woman on each arm for the night, not for company but to show off, affirm manhood, and confirm that he is the type of person he should be but not necessarily the one he thinks he is. 

I imagine a white Oldsmobile Cutless Supreme with gold trim, door open with light grey interior and shag carpet. I imagine night spots with neon blue and pink lighting illuminating clubs filled with permed people dancing to mid-level disco pop, the kind of fusion that exists when the past decade won’t die and the new decade is confused about its identity. I imagine blurry skyscrapers twinkling in the night sky, offices lights illume randomly and give the buildings a toothless grin aesthetic. 

The 80s feel like wood panels, thick carpets and thicker glasses; banker’s suits, suspenders and Formica palm trees; cigarette smokey restaurants, leisure suits, and chest hair; cheap TVs in dive bowling alleys where lonely men go to be alone around other people. 

The 80s feel like the start of real commercialization where I as the average person could become somebody, like a businessman who parks in dusty parking lots outside sleazy places with women he doesn’t know and doesn’t like so he can feel like somebody.