Why Do We Chase the Things That Hurt Us?
Table of Contents
I. The Weight of Light
The sky above the city isn’t black. We like to think it is, that we are surrounded by a comforting, absolute darkness. But look up. It’s a bruised, toxic purple, choked by a trillion watts of electric desperation. We are terrified of the dark, and so we have built a cage of light to keep it out.
But the dark always wins. The universe is composed mostly of nothingness. The stars, those pinpricks of hope we wish upon, are nothing but accidental furnaces burning against an indifferent void. Most of them are dead before their light even touches our eyes. We are wishing on ghosts.
We stand beneath that sky, feel the crushing weight of the infinite, and realize how small we are. We are ghosts in a machine we didn’t build, running on a clock we can’t pause.
And in that realization, something snaps.
The philosophical weight of our own insignificance is too heavy to carry. It is an existential vertigo. To stop the spinning, we need an anchor. We need something dense. Something immediate. We need a sensation so loud it drowns out the silent scream of the cosmos.
We call it pleasure. We call it an escape. But really, it’s just a way to prove that we are still here.
II. The Cartography of Sensation
There is a map we all carry. It is not drawn in ink, but in nerve endings and scar tissue. It is the cartography of our sensations, the record of every high we’ve chased, every friction we’ve sought, and every collision that left us feeling more real than we did the moment before.
When the world feels too vast, when your identity feels like it’s dissolving into the fog of a standardized existence, you seek the map. You seek the edges.
I knew a man once—let’s call him a “restorationist” of things, before he became a ghost of himself, who stopped looking at the stars because they reminded him of everything he had lost. Instead, he started looking at the ground. He looked at the cracked pavement, the puddles reflecting the neon signs of underground clubs, and the hands of strangers. He was a collector of collisions.
He didn’t just drink; he drank to forget the boundary between his skin and the air. He didn’t just drive; he drove to find the exact velocity where terror eclipsed sadness. He sought out high-intensity, low-consequence “collisions”, sparring in back alleys, nameless lovers who smelled of peppermint and regret, and the chemical hum of neuro-inhibitors that cut the rope of his consciousness and let him drift into the deep space of his own mind.
He was navigating by the temporary. He was mapping his existence by how much it hurt to still be breathing.
We all do it. Perhaps your collision is less violent. Perhaps it’s a scrolling addiction that turns your brain into a dopamine receptor, a relentless pursuit of corporate validation, or a relationship that is a constant state of low-grade warfare. It doesn’t matter what the vehicle is. The destination is always the same: Friction.
Friction is the only proof we have that we are solid. Friction is the moment of contact. It is the knuckle meeting bone, the first shot of tequila hitting the stomach, the gasp of cold air when you break the surface. For a microsecond, the universe shrinks down to that single, undeniable point of impact. The stars vanish. The debt vanishes. The dead wife vanishes. There is only the sting.
And the sting is beautiful. It is the closest thing to truth we have.
III. The Economy of Numbness
But here is the “raw” truth we try to ignore: Sensation is a currency, and the economy is rigged.
The “temporary” is addictive because its half-life is so short. The moment of friction passes. The high breaks. The sting fades. And when it does, you are left in a silence louder than any club’s bass. You are left in the exact same void you started in, only now your nervous system is raw, and your soul is a little more translucent.
The world knows this. The city is built on it. There is a whole infrastructure dedicated to selling us the temporary. The clubs, the drugs, the social media algorithms, they are all designed to keep you seeking the next collision, because if you ever stopped, you might notice how empty the room is.
This is the Economy of Numbness. We pay for the privilege of not feeling the weight of our own lives. We are investing in our own disappearance.
I have seen men, intelligent, capable men, turned into tools by this economy. They became assets for people who only understand leverage. When you seek the temporary, you become temporary. You lose your permanence. You lose your “density.” You stop being a person who affects the world, and start being an “analog asset” to be moved, used, and discarded.
When you are high on a chemical that costs more than medicine, you aren’t “transcending.” You are pathetically fragile. You are a ghost floating on a puddle of neon light, and any passing wind can extinguish you.
This is where the raw becomes ugly. It is the realization that your “escape” is just another cage, only this one is lit by strobe lights.
IV. The Paradox of the Anchor
In this economy of disappearance, true resistance doesn’t look like a revolution. It looks like an anchor.
An anchor is not a solution. It is a weight. It is something heavy, grounded, and undeniably real. In a world that is always dissolving, an anchor is the terrifying prospect of permanence.
The man I knew, the restorationist, met an anchor. It wasn’t a spiritual realization. It was a person. It was an ER nurse. A woman named Maya. She was his antithesis. While he was trying to vanish, she was trying to keep people solid. She spent her days watching people turn into ghosts, watching life ebb out of broken machines, and yet she refused to let the darkness win.
She wasn’t a savior. She was just awake. She was “insurance” for a criminal enterprise, but she was also a catalyst for the only “restoration” that actually mattered.
An anchor doesn’t offer you comfort. An anchor challenges your nihilism. Maya didn’t stop the man from falling; she just made sure he hit the water with his eyes open.
This is the central paradox: To escape the void, you must first accept its weight. You cannot fight the darkness by trying to become a star. You fight it by becoming dense. By being an object in the world that has mass, that has gravity, that cannot be simply erased.
The “raw” element isn’t just the addiction or the violence; it is the moment when you look at your own hand and realize it still has callouses. It is the moment when you feel your own breath and realize that you cannot use the dark to hide from the fact that you are still here.
V. The Anatomy of Disappearance
To understand the weight of the deep, you must first understand the anatomy of a lie. The lie is that we are broken beyond repair. The lie is that nothing matters, and so everything is permissible.
This is the “Deep” work. It’s not about finding a meaning; it’s about making one.
The restorationist was forced back to his old skills. He was tasked with disassembling a 19th-century nautical chronometer, a device built to find one’s way home using the stars that he so hated. He was asked to gut it, to hollow out its lead weights to make room for contraband. He was asked to turn a masterpiece of history into a coffin for a crime.
This is what happens when you let the void use you. You stop restoring and start demolishing. You become the wrench that loosens the bolt. You take things that are whole and make them hollow.
The “raw” turning point is not when he finds a new drug. It’s when he finds an inscription inside the clock’s casing, hidden for a century: “For those lost at sea, the stars are the only map that doesn’t change.”
The irony is vicious. The very things he was mocking, the dead stars, were a map. They were a standard. They were the original “permanence.”
The lie he had been living was that “temporary” was freedom. But freedom isn’t found in vanishing. Freedom is found in the weight of your own existence. It is found in being the standard, the map, the object that doesn’t dissolve.
To be a restorationist of oneself is to stop gutting the mechanism. It is to find the gears that are still functioning, the parts that still have mass, and to make them move again. Not because it’s “good” or “moral,” but because it’s the only way to avoid becoming an “asset” for someone else’s void.
VI. The Great Restoration
The man I knew didn’t find God. He didn’t get sober in a conventional sense. He didn’t even stop being scared of the stars.
He just stopped trying to be a ghost.
His escape wasn’t a choice for peace. It was a violent rejection of a life of disappearance. It was a collision, yes, but a collision with a purpose. He used the very tools of his trade, the heavy brass of the clock he was supposed to gut, to fight his way out of the basement. He didn’t just “feel” the pain anymore; he utilized it.
The final “raw” moment is not the fight. It is the jump.
They stood on the edge of a pier, the water black and indifferent below, and the city’s lights blinding them from behind. There was no “temporary” high waiting for them in that water. There was only a choice: Be owned by the void, or jump into it with your eyes open.
They jumped.
And in that freezing black water, surrounded by crushing pressure and absolute silence, the final transformation occurred. The “temporary” vanished instantly. The universe did not shrink to a point of friction; it expanded to a point of absolute, undeniable presence.
He opened his eyes under the surface. It was dark, but for a split second, the bubbles from their plunge looked like a galaxy of rising stars. He reached through the murk, his fingers finding Maya’s hand. He wasn’t pulling her toward him; he was holding on to prove they were both solid.
The real restoration isn’t a state of “healed.” It is a state of “dense.”
It is lying on a cold steel deck, soaking wet, with the city a dying ember on the horizon. It is looking at a ruined journal, a book of star charts soaked in salt and ink, the pages a blur of beautiful, illegible blue stains. It is realizing that the map is gone, but you are still here.
VII. The Sovereignty of the Deep
The stars still don’t care. They are still dead. The void is still vast, and the city still runs on the economy of numbness.
But the restorationist is different now. He is no longer a ghost in a machine. He is a man with a ruined book, a heavy debt, and a hand that still has a pulse. He is no longer fighting the deep; he is of the deep. He is a standard, a map that doesn’t change because it is too heavy to move.
And that is a kind of pleasure that “temporary” could never provide. It is the raw, terrifying, sovereign pleasure of simply being real.
The choice is always before us: the temporary high or the deep weight. We can continue to wish on ghosts and seek the friction that distracts us from the void. Or we can stop gutting our mechanisms. We can accept the weight of our own existence. We can make a map of our own scar tissue and become the anchors we were trying to escape.
The stars are dead, yes. But they are also a standard. They burn against the void, and they don’t ask for permission. We can do the same.
Ebook Announcement: For those who need to go deeper than the surface, my new ebook, “Temporary Pleasure: A Philosophical Thriller,” is now available. It is a raw, narrative exploration of these very themes. This isn’t a guide. It is a descent. Choose the deep.