Part I. Literary Materialism
1.
I was tired of disliking myself. I was drinking too much, smoking too much pot, watching too much porn, not exercising enough. My bad habits—so normal as to be made fun of on sitcoms and to constitute the neurotic weight of many bro-comedies—were somehow more shameful than serious addictions. Why couldn’t I be a coke addict or weirdly addicted to taking LSD? I had taken a lot of mushrooms up to this point in my life, after all. But no, my habitual excesses were incredibly common, only adding to my sense of shame—not even in my neurotic tendencies was I unique. It was 2008, my mid-twenties. Externally, I probably didn’t appear to have any terrible problems, but a deep dissatisfaction and anxiety percolated beneath my living. I felt like I was in a frustrating meeting about workplace policies, but I couldn’t leave until the meeting was over, and that meeting was life in its entirety.
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