Don't Go to Therapy, Get in a Bar Fight Instead (shit draft v2)
I've been having the strangest issue recently. Every Friday after getting off work, I head to the bar for a chill night and a few drinks, but before I know it, I'm behind the wheel of my car doing 90 and blowing past red lights. I can barely see anything because it's dark out and I'm wearing sunglasses, and there's a violent whirlpool of Columbian powder roaring in my eardrums. I vaguely remember pulling into the parking lot of the Borgata in Atlantic City, but the rest of the night cuts out. The next morning, I wake up in bed half naked with a few singles tucked into the back of my underwear, and my head feels like it's being whacked from the inside by a midget with a dull hatchet. I check my phone; there's 10,000 dollars missing from my checking account. Fuck.
Really the problem is modern society; humans used to live in quaint rural hamlets with a beatutiful view of rolling green hills of pastoral countryside. They lived in rustic stone houses with a crackling fireplace and hand-carved wooden furniture. Women had flowing blonde hair tied up under a white bonnet and wore a big billowy blue dress. They churned milk by hand to make delicious cheese and spun thread to knit into trousers for the young children. In the meantime, men taught the boys to drive a plow shirtless across the field, no sunscreen required. Going to church on Sunday was required by law, and skipping resulted in jail time or public flogging. Everyone knew their neighbors and they all celebrated holidays together, getting drunk on mead and eating bricks of cheese. Were people even depressed back then? Maybe they were, and it was just discouraged to talk about it. Maybe they only talked about their feelings in those medieval Catholic confession booths.
I should really give in and finally start going to therapy. But isn't therapy a little bit strange? Should I really pay 300 dollars to sit in a room for an hour with a guy wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a turtleneck sweater, who has a PhD in a field called Bipedal Rumination? Do you really need 12 years of school to talk to someone about their problems? Surely therapy and, say brain surgery or aerial dogfighting aren't exactly in the same wheelhouse of complexity. I'm extremely thrifty to the point of stealing towels from the gym to wipe down my bike or car, so instead of going to a therapist why don't I talk to my buddy or my pastor?
So I give my buddy a call to deliver him a surprise trauma dump. Unfortunately, he's playing world of tanks the entire time and I can hear him cursing and muttering every time he dies, and he's barely listening to the recollection of my late night coke-infused odyssey to the land of wine-dark felt and swift-footed financial disaster. I would call my other buddy, but he's juggling two jobs and a one month old newborn who screams like daffy duck, and he absolutely does not have a full hour to lend a kind ear to a hedonistic degenerate.
I guess I'll go talk to my pastor instead. It seems like a great idea because a pastor gives counselling to the same multi-generational parish which he/she is embedded in over the course of decades. Did you know that a pastor believes when he meets God, he'll give an account of the fate of every person in his parish? He has a heck of a lot riding on your wellbeing, and he's bound to be quite invested. In fact, this seems like the exact same service as seeing an actual therapist. The shared faith acts as the 300 dollar payment does with the licensed therapist, it's essentially the cost of entry. Also, if you walk into a church, you'll see the parish singing songs about Jesus and they all seem happy, like a little bit too happy. Most people who go to therapy seem at least mildly depressed. Should people just convert, or at least pretend to convert, to get access to free therapy?
There are a few differences though: a pastor or a friend is more likely to a) give actionable advice, and b) hold you accountable to that actionable advice. A therapist doesn't do that, they're not a life coach. Also, if they did give someone advice and it went horribly wrong, they've now opened themselves up to a lawsuit. Therapists make a lot of money, like a lot of money. So do ER surgeons. Do I give a shit that the guy who just saved my life after a high speed crash is also making a small fortune from the operation? Maybe. Maybe I don't even care; this guy just saved my life. But it does change the dynamic and put little gremlin thoughts in my head. Is this guy gonna leave the office and go to a ritzy nightclub in West Village, get a table and bottle service and motorboat one of the bottle girls?
A large percent of people that are fucked up right now, are fucked up becuase of a bad habit that they either can't shake, or are actively in denial about. A friend or family member is more likely to hold them accountable, and give them some amount of brutal honesty. It's really easy to fuck yourself up by say, sleeping 4 hours a night, drinking 50 shots every weekend, or abusing weed and prescription drugs. In that case maybe someone should say, "Hey dude you should really stop being such a fucking degenerate." Is a therapist even obligated to voice some version of that statement? If everybody listened to Jocko Willink and lived like a super soldier, the therapy business would probably contract sharply. But do people even react to advice like that? "I didn't know that smoking an ounce of weed every day was causing my inability to function as a human being, thank you so much!" But isn't it irresponsible to have a license to help people, and when speaking to someone who recounts extremely detrimental habits, you make no attempt whatsoever to clean them up? It's kind of like filming a nature documentary of koalas getting brutally mauled by hyenas in the outback.
If we're being brutally honest, once someone gets to the point where they're actively fucking their life up, the only way back to reality is to get so fucked up that they hit complete rock bottom. Once someone experiences catastrophic consequences to their actions, i.e. homelessness, serial job loss, hospitalization, they're forced to reckon with their choices a little more honestly. Or they just stay homeless and on drugs the rest of their life. That's really the only impetus for change, and you as a friend or therapist can't really manufacture it. If that feels unatural to you, please go watch a few nature documentaries, and specifically the parts where small cute animals are being eaten. In fact, watch it on loop. You're welcome.
I think the sickest aspect of therapy is the idea that you should be become a passive observer in your own life. There's this idea floating around that the world is the result of a serious of nebulous circumstances and tectonic actions, which are unrelated to your own agency, and that therefore any future state of the world is simply another permutation which you have absolutely no control over. What's the solution? Become the most introspective navel-gazing person imaginable. Why do I feel this way? Why am I unable to be decisive? Why do I exist? Please produce a 8,000 word essay on each prompt. If I solve the master riddle of why my mind works the way it does, I'll suddenly be empowered to walk on water and cause bread to fall from the sky. Good luck. In actuality, you do have agency over your life, but it's a limited agency. At any moment you can put the bong down and study 500 hours for the LSAT, but when you're driving to the test site some asshole on coke headed to Atlantic City t-bones you, and you head to the hospital instead. Was it even worth it? That's up to you to decide.
Another other issue is hypochondria. Did you eschew studying to scroll on your phone for a few hours? You have ADHD. Did you get nervous before an important exam? Now you have anxiety. Did you feel really bad after your partner cheated on you? You're fucking depressed buddy. Please come this way to be administered your mandatory prescription medication and therapy sessions. At a certain point we need to be honest that the human brain feels emotions that we do not like. If I put you in a room and tell you Mirko Cro-Cop is waiting in an octagon to pummel your brains and hump your skull with his nutsack on live TV, I would imagine you get pretty nervous. Like maybe even start having a panic attack and vomiting in the trash can nervous. Do you have a problem that requires medical intervention? If I could subject you to medication and/or therapy to the point that you no longer feel any reaction to the situation, there is something very wrong with you, and you would not survive a single day in Subsaharan Africa, and end up as Lion food immediately.
But what if someone's been living out the same patterns in their life over and over again, unable to break some damning cycle of misery? Maybe they're indecisive in big life moments, maybe they're afraid to talk to people, or maybe they cope with sadness via late night coke-and-gambling and just can't figure out why. Is someone at fault for picking up a bad habit early in life that shapes the way they think and navigate the world to their own detriment? It seems only fair that they have access to a professional who can tell them, "Hey man those domestic fights you witnessed as a child are causing you to mistreat your girlfriend, and you might want to look into that if you ever want a relationship to work out." We can postulate endlessly as to which mental models you absorbed early in life and have been repeating for years, and what the result is today. You can't deny that that is helpful. But at some point, the time for action arrives. You need to force yourself to make different decisions, and confront yourself on a regular basis to see if you've been slipping up. It's kind of like having never-ending homework. A therapist can't jump through your window every time you yell at your girlfriend and give you a lecture, you need to actually give yourself that lecture.
You will have moments of the black dog, and you will need to speak to someone about it. Repressing that shit will unironically fuck you up in the long term, and probably lead to destructive coke-and-gambling adjacent habits. We all have a need to voice and be heard about concerns that are digging a hole within us. If you keep it repressed it'll just swirl around in your brain constantly. There's something ameliorative about sharing an embarrassing weakness or trauma with another person who's fully listening and actually cares about you. You might start crying, and they might give you big ol' bear hug, and they might even say that they also find themselves speeding off to Atlantic City without knowing why, and you'll have a moment of shared bonding and mutual understanding. In fact, you should share it with everyone, even people you've just met. You won't magically forget your trauma, but I guarantee you'll feel more free, kind of like the community as a whole is helping you bear the burden.
But we also have a need to process it and move on. Therapy as a business requires you to be continually processing. Maybe at a certain point you should just man the fuck up and crush it at your job, or crush it at rec-league soccer, or crush it at the poker table, etc. If we have real responbilities to say, a family or community, and we spend our time navel-gazing and focusing on our own feelings, we are letting them down. So is that the crux of the argument: despite notable caveats, and in the lack of a real community surrounding oneself, therapy is helpful to a certain degree, but isn't a substitute for grueling action and persisting through discouraging failure and setback? That really reminds me of a rich New Yorker nepo-baby from the 19th century that went through serious trauma of his own, and decided to use his family's money to start a cattle ranch in the dakota badlands as a form of hardship-induced recovery, then ran for office and wrote a series of jingoistic pamphlets about the highest calling in life being an extremely one dimensional Jocko Willink super soldier character who hustles constantly like a Tate brother. History really does go full circle doesn't it?
Time to wrap up.
a) After the passing of the twilight of that magnificant institution which we now regard as a collective tradition of Western Christian society, the generations of yeomans and peasants and cowherders praying, fighting, and dying within the same plot of land as their forefathers, all striving together as one community under a shared orthodoxy and kinship, the world passed into a new, stranger territory, one with severed connections between neighbors and the oddities of distant quasi-friendships and relationships based on status and carnal sexual desires, and all had no option but persist in communion with a professional class who donned the uniform of turtleneck sweater and manufactured credentials, preying on those poor souls lost in the moonlight of a great empire, wallowing in their own damnation.
b) Can't you frickin' see it people? The globalists want you and your family to be miserable! Drinking your sloppy goo that comes out of the kitchen faucet all laced up with phosphorides and heptopeptides, they want you to be all scrambled in the head. Do not walk into that therapist office! They want to split your skull open and whisper into your brain that you're an animal stuck in the mud, all so they can sell you more globalist propaganda, and netflix subscriptions, and pornography! Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!!
c) Despite the lamentable passing of those institutions of family, community, and shared religion that once formed a bond between all men, we cannot ignore the reality that people in that idyllic rural hamlet also had problems: disease, starvation, wars, and plagues. They were undoubtedly miserable and depressed, and the social stigma around performing a duty was so strong that they repressed the feelings their entire life. While we feel a strong suspicion towards the institution of therapy, we cannot deny the results that it has helped people who are lacking community.
d) This essayist is a fucking moron, neonazi Evangelical Christian. Does he really think everyone should just convert to Christianity and hang out with some braindead bible-thumping pastor who dropped out of highschool? Don't you realize that not everybody fits into a nice cookie-shaped mold that's acceptable in Christianity? What about non-binary, transgender, or LGBT people, how about women who just had an abortion? I'd like to see what happens when he has a loved one die or a personal tragedy and slips into depression. Is he gonna man up and pull himself out of that? Fuck this guy. Find his LinkedIn and get his nazi ass fired.
So should I see a therapist? I would probably get care that's perfectly fine, and legitimately help with any issues I'm having. Would I be playing into a globalist plot to destroy religion and alienate people and sell them wellness subscriptions? I'm gonna plead Miranda on that one. Some people have zero outlet for an introspective conversation with someone who'll listen to them. Should they just become an evangelical Christian and trauma dump on their pastor at four in the morning. Maybe they should pursue genuine relationships with people explicitly for the purpose of trauma dumping on them at four in the morning. If you're a staunch atheist (lol) and have zero genuine friendships, you might have no other option. Will you leave the office on some woo-woo spirituality of ascending to the fourth dharma? Maybe. Or you could just repress your feelings forever and get in a bar fight. Bar fights are great because we carry all these violent impulses around that society tells us are psycopathic, but in actuality are just a natural form of interaction that humans have needed for millions of years. Did you know that if you get in a quick 10 second bar fight and leave right after, you probably won't get arrested? Do whatever you want with that information. I'm off to Atlantic City.