The Grind

Six days before today, I'm lying in bed. Miserable & just barely awake, alarm clock just out of reach, screaming about the time. I take a look as I switch off the noise--8:32 am, a few hours later than when I closed my eyes, but I don't feel any different than when I went to sleep. My skin's still too heavy on my bones, brain still like a sheet of paper had an eraser dragged over it too many times. Well, no. I don't feel the same; worse, if anything. Like a body rotting before it's died. Not insomnia, exactly. Past that.

I keep telling people we're living in the middle of a watershed moment in history, and this is one of the reasons why. Our understanding of how our minds work is exploding, kaleidoscoping, sending out branches into places we never even thought were possible. The guesswork, instinct, and assumption of millenia are being replaced with research and nuance. You already know that stress & sleep & depression all link together somehow, stress bad, sleep good, depression some kind of imbalance between the two. But now we're finding that stress might be part of why you'll get Alzheimer's at 60, sleep (or lack thereof) why you can't taste your lunch today. Depression isn't just one widespread disorder, it's hundreds of separate conditions, it's brain-death in miniature, an inability of neurons to repair themselves efficiently. Your frame of mind and the underlying physiology feed into one another. We just discovered that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder causes physical changes in the brain. And that's something we can see with our relatively crude brain imaging technology. Imagine what we're going to find next.

I was thinking about all this six days ago, as I went through the torture of the morning routine to prepare myself for another shitty day in an educational institution I loathe. I thought about the millions of us choking ourselves into neckties to work jobs we hate. I thought about everybody trying TV and celebrity magazines, philosophy and indie music and collections, all that other bullshit, to anesthetize their lives and get through the grind so they can make rent. And it's supposed to be one of those things you just do, suck it up, that's the way the world works--maybe it is. But it's not how we work. And the more you deny that, the faster you're killing yourself. You weren't meant to have a boss.

I'm quickly realizing I'm either going to be either a millionaire or penniless someday. Maybe both, but probably never something in the middle.