Poisoned Youth

by J. Pilgrim

I think of myself more as a late Gen-X kid, rather than a millennial, because that’s the movies and music I liked, but regardless, I’m an 80s kid. We’re the Nostalgia Generation. I had a Zoomer on Telegram ask me why—given the utter destruction that the digital revolution brought on society—we didn’t see it coming. The simplest answer I can give to that is that our lives were simply too exciting to realize that everything was being destroyed around us. We were being entertained to death.

“Here we are now, entertain us!”

-Famous suicide (probably not) victim

If you weren’t a kid in the 80s and 90s, you can’t imagine how optimistic those decades were. I grew up watching Top Gun, Firebirds, and Iron Eagle (That last one is still the best of the three.) I wanted to be a fighter pilot more than anything. All of my friends had Big Dreams, too. Life was awesome. You could turn on the TV, and sure, there was the news, but man, look at all the cool new things that are coming out! Super Soakers. Roller Blades. A Super (!) Nintendo. The cassette tape Walkman was still going strong, but if you had some extra cash you could get a CD Walkman, and if you really had some extra cash, one with anti-skip protection! And since I had a paper route in high school, it meant that I could buy a Nintendo 64 and a TV from a garage sale.

Paper routes for high-school kids don’t even exist anymore. I miss my childhood. I miss the optimism. I miss the entertainment and the lack of cynicism. I mean sure, the food was full of seed oils, the drinks were full of corn syrup, the TV was screwing up my capacity for healthy dopamine regulation, etc, etc, but at least there was a sense of optimism in the world.

I’ve been entertained my whole life. My family was given a hand-me-down Atari 2600 when I was like five or six years old. The family that gave it to us had just gotten a Nintendo. We got that Nintendo a few years later, when the Super (!) Nintendo came out. I was hooked instantly. The N64 from my paper route turned into an Xbox from working at McDonald’s (or something). Jack in the Box bought me an Xbox 360. During that time, came the greatest invention of all time for the chronically-entertained: the Internet. Which was everything I could have wanted at the time. It was a library to learn from (even before Wikipedia, youngster!), a place to hang out (message boards FTW!), and a game to play (Smaug-codebase MUDs still hold a dear place in my heart).

“I’m a twenty-first century digital boy. I don’t know how to live, but I’ve got a lot of toys.”

-Famous anti-establishment band that signed a contract with the Establishment in order to make a lot of money.

As the entertainment got more and more exciting, so did the darkness that began to smother me. I was the kid who used his wooden play swords to swat wasps, which is fun, but not a game that most people think is fun, so I was the “weird” kid. The Internet introduced me to porn, ironically through a school research project on the book The Scarlet Letter. Dad was dead, of cancer at the age of 32. I struggled in school because (they told me at the time) I was ADHD. I don’t even really know if that’s a real thing, even though I’m still being told that I’m ADHD. Did you know that being on the younger end of a public school class’s age range makes a kid more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD? Nobody told me that, they just said “Oh, but he’s so smart, why doesn’t he apply himself? There must be something wrong with him!”

Being the youngest kid in your high school graduating class by over a year is not a recipe for success. It’s a recipe for depression because you’re going to be, by simple developmental milestones, a hell of a lot different than your would-be peers. It’s weird to hang with your buddies because they’re all older than you, and if you try out for sports like I did, you’re a lot smaller. And those strange and beautiful creatures known as girls, who develop faster than boys anyways, were simply impossible to talk to, and God knows I tried talking to the ones I knew. I was trying to figure out life without anyone to guide me, without having anyone remotely “like me” to identify with.

On came the pills. Ritalin because it’s natural for an 11-year-old boy to need a STIMULANT. “That didn’t work? A boy flooded with testosterone is angry and sometimes depressed? Oh, he’s probably not ADHD, he’s probably Bipolar. Here’s even more meds. Prozac. Zyprexa. Wellbutrin. Zoloft. One’s not enough? Try two at once. Up the dosage! We have to make this near-genius child sit still and pay attention and be happy! No, it’s not a legitimate statement that he’s just bored, his English teacher’s a professional and there’s so much content in To Kill A Mockingbird that of course it takes a month to discuss in class!”

So I’ve also never particularly enjoyed being alive, or maybe I’m just bad at it. Not since I was four, when Dad died. I mean, yeah, I’ve been entertained, but I’ve struggled with “mental illness” since I was ten—probably unrelated to when I was thrown into the shithole known as public schooling. As I got older, ADHD and depression made it largely impossible to function. I graduated high school with a 2.7 GPA, and a college-plus reading level, and proceeded to work entry-level jobs for a decade. A night owl by nature, I preferred the graveyard shift.

Graveyard shift + video games + porn + the interbutts + Mountain Dew + Big Pharma = (I got distracted whilst writing this and went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out whether or not there’s a connection between “Subject 117” from the sci-fi show First Wave and “Spartan 117” from Halo. Did you know the planet from Pitch Black was numbered M6-117?)

“The Industrial Revolution and it’s consequences have been a disaster for the human race.”

-Famous professor

I have an attention span that rivals my toddler’s. But this isn’t about Tedposting like the internet is actually SRS BSNS. This is about what happened when the optimism of the 80s Kids crashed into the GWOT. It’s about arrogance, self-medication, and having no idea what the hell is going on while we’re trying to fix ourselves.

My best friend while I was in Boy Scouts was a kid who, with help from another friend, I pressured into giving us his lighter so we could try to start a campfire. In southern Idaho. In July. In defiance of literally every possible best practice regarding the concept of “not starting wildfires.” He and I, somehow, became good friends. (That “another friend” later killed himself.) My buddy was the last of my friends and family to have his intact parental structure fall apart. So we played video games and occasionally watched movies, because that’s just what we did for 10 years. We drifted apart when he joined the Army and got his life together

I’m so smart that I’ve tried college four different times, and never made it past “Freshman.” The last attempt ended with a stay in a psychiatric ward and a school evacuation. Don’t ask, because I’m not going to tell the story anyway. But please, let me continue writing about how my friend became a Daily Show Liberal, and I’m an enlightened Dark Enlightenment guy who appreciates ISAIF. The important part is that I sound better than the people that I’ve desperately wanted to be more like, just because they’re probably happy normies now, while I’m still a brooding schizoposter.

I recently saw a girl that I went to high school with at a concert. I mean, I think I knew the girl, she sure looked familiar. The girl danced with her man, while the rock band on stage sang about being mentally unstable and cheating on girlfriends. She was happy, while I waxed nostalgic at a show that was delayed over 3 years for COVID-19. My sister was there, I’d bought her a ticket. In the interim, her husband was killed in training with the National Guard. But back to the girl, she was happy while I was depressed. She was enjoying a concert with her husband/boyfriend, while I cannot manage to get along with my wife. I spent the whole concert depressed, and wishing for a better life, instead of appreciating what God has given me. I couldn’t even enjoy songs that I’d known all the words to for 20 years.

But look, my depression is actually enlightenment, it’s an insight into the darkness of our times. It’s not my fault that I’m a loser, it’s Big Pharma. It’s my Dad’s fault for dying. It’s my mom’s fault for putting me into public school. It’s that girl’s fault for not dating me in 10th grade. It’s my boss’s fault for firing me. I’m special! I didn’t deserve this!

“Cynicism is intellectual cowardice”

-Famous punk rock star

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Look, even if being this thing that I am is objectively better than being an NPC, I still don’t have a legitimate reason for the arrogance I have. I’m not “special”, I’m just a weird anomaly in a poisoned generation. Yes, I probably am in the 98th percentile IQ, but I’m also a poster child for self-perpetuating damage. F@#$, man, I’m 40 years old. I still get mad and mope about when my feelings are hurt, instead of acting like an adult. I’m exactly 50% of the reason my marriage has sucked for almost 5 years. OK, maybe 75%….

“…but I don’t have the right to look down on anyone because
I wallow in my own temptations just the same way they are.”

I think I write about repentance a lot because a lot of my life has been spent looking at myself and hating what I’ve seen, so it’s easy for me to talk about turning to God to change myself. (Talk about, mind you, because I don’t do much to actually change.) I honestly hope that a sense of self-loathing never goes away, no matter how old I get. Arrogance, I pray that God helps me with that. I certainly don’t warrant it, and I don’t need it. The older I get, yeah, I think my life has turned out objectively not-shitty, but I’m so focused on the wrong things that I hate it even if it’s good. I live backward, focused on what was and what could have been, rather than what is. I feel like I’m constantly looking to be entertained, not that video games are even “fun” anymore, just because I can’t really stand to be alone with myself.

“All your excuses are lies”

-Famous roadie for the aforementioned famous punk rock star.

The thing is, growing up as part of a poisoned generation can either lead you to be an arrogant piece of shit like me, or it can kill your soul without you even knowing it, or it can drive you to struggle towards repentance…like me. The line between where I live and complete nihilistic despair gets fuzzy. So I can wallow in despair, blaming everyone else for my own focus on the worst parts of my life, or I can stop making excuses and focus on the good things. Normally I think of myself as a positive person, and indeed focusing on something idealistically positive is how I’ve avoided suicide.

“Keep your mind in hell and despair not.”

-Famous saintly robed dude

It’s one thing to be entertained to death. I suppose there’s a certain level of innocence in people who watch professional fishing on TV because that’s their preferred way of spending a Saturday and they don’t realize that to others they seem to be dying in that recliner. I’d rather eat a car battery, but I don’t really think I have the right to look down on them. God, it’s tempting, but I don’t have the right to look down on anyone because I wallow in my own temptations just the same way they are. It’s not like I’m some superior creation, I’m just an anomaly, a person who’s unable to stay entertained. I think I’m safe quoting an earlier famous holy-robed dude, and just calling myself the “chief of sinners.” I’m aware of the poison, they’re not, and I keep guzzling it. Now who’s the dumbass?

I’m really tired of being damaged. I’m tired of having a poisoned childhood that I can’t seem to grow up from. I’m tired of being angry. I’m tired of having appalling physical fitness, I’m tired of having an unrewarding marriage (who decided what’s rewarding, anyway? I did.) And the more I stay in the cycle of damage-despair-damage-despair, the less chance I ever have of truly being grateful for the life I’ve been given. A wife. Kids. A homestead. Even my dog. Do I even appreciate my dog anymore? Or am I so focused on the poisoned parts of my life that I ignore just how awesome my dog is? Look, man, schizoposting is just that: Schizo.

It’s time for us to get healthy. Not just physically, not just in terms of a healthy society, and not even in terms of mental health.

It’s time for us to get spiritually healthy.

We need to leave our poisoned childhoods behind. You, and I most of all, need to turn away from a poisoned world and turn toward the Creator that can heal us all. Two-thirds of Christ’s miracles were just Him healing people. That’s a hell of a focus on healing people’s bodies, from which it could be reasonably inferred that Christ wants us to be healthy. Part of almost all of Christ’s miracles was an admonition to stop sinning.

“The question is now how much exercise do we need, but how little do we require?”

-Famous muscular dude

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So, let’s get practical. The only way to effectively stop poisoning yourself whilst living in a poisoned world is to do so one small step at a time. It’s not even a question of “Well, just don’t drink the poison”, because that’s overwhelming. Even as I write this, there are things I can’t answer about how to avoid everything, and the answer is probably terrifyingly huge and seems insurmountable. The aforementioned famous muscular dude would tell people that doing anything more than the minimum amount of lifting required to force the body to achieve muscle growth was a waste.

So what’s the absolute minimum we can do that will still achieve actual results? One. Just doing one thing differently once is a change. Nothing huge or major, but it’s a change. You might end up measuring your turn radius in miles, but what if you just have one less beer? One less can of corn syrup? What if you just spent one minute less watching porn, or had one less cigarette? What if you said one less bad word in front of your kids? Did one pushup? Saved one dollar? Did cardio for just one minute? Asked God to help you repent just once?

The important thing is that once we recognize the world as poison, we have to do SOMETHING about it, and it’s not “Go out and change the world.” The world’s too big, too evil, and it’ll just grind us up before we get anything done. No, the thing we have to change is our relationship with the world. The World is not our friend, it’s a poisoned and poisonous place. In essence, the World is our enemy. Enemies, once recognized, are not invited into our homes. Enemies, once recognized, are not placed in charge of teaching our kids. We certainly don’t let them tell us what’s true and what’s false. And if we’ve made these mistakes before we recognized the world as our enemy, then that’s fine, but we certainly can’t afford to keep doing the same things.

There’s not a person alive who would let a stranger punch them in the face and just keep walking. Everyone on the planet is going to reassess their situation after getting punched. They might not fight back, but it’s a world-changing event to get punched in the face. Well, this world punched me as a kid, and it hasn’t let up in 40 years. It hasn’t stopped punching you, either.

So stop what you’re doing. Reassess your relationship with the world. Do something, anything, to change one thing by one measure to address the fact that the world’s your enemy.

And for the sake of all that you could be, spit out the poison as fast as you can.

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