[Originally written on 2024-07-21, during a train ride from Prague to Munich after a research conference. I stumbled upon it today and decided to post it after cleaning it up.]
I want to go home. There is no home for me to go back to.
Work helps. It is quite easy to not notice that you are homeless when you are focused on fighting fires everyday, especially ones of your own making. You can't worry about sleeping on hard gravel with an abandoned sheet as your place of rest.
Medication helps. SSRIs can numb the intensity of your emotions, at the cost of giving you sexual anhedonia. Bupropion might nullify your melancholy and translate will to action, at the cost of being unable to relax. Buspirone could dissolve your anxiety about mundane and civilizational problems, at the cost of destroying your ability to sleep.
You are a source of interesting conversations at parties. You are a responsible roommate. You are a competent coworker. You are a convenient customer. You are the mentor to ambitious naive youngsters. You are a walking ATM for tourist traps.
You only matter to others to the extent that you are a useful tool to them. The lie was the names you gave these roles: friendship, community, love.
Drugs help. Stimulants delay the emotional crash, and borrow your ability to do things from the future. They aren't sustainable. The debt will be collected.
Girls can help. The thrill of the chase, and the feeling of achievement you get when the girl's will is putty in your hands – it is unbeatable, except by drugs I wouldn't recommend you try. It helps a lot if you are cynical about ever finding a home to stay at, and have accepted that all that there is, is the game. Once you win the game, you move on.
Fantasies can help. You can play one video game after another. You can read a thousand fanfictions, never mind the quality. You can jerk off to the more and more niche pornography, as you find yourself needing them to even get hard. You can simulate an imaginary friend (a tulpa), and talk to yourself so that you feel like someone cares about you. A facsimile of a home.
Psychedelics can help. LSD and mushrooms seem to reliably cause people to report that their well-being has improved when they have a 'good trip'. Go on, increase the temperature of the simulated annealing your brain does to itself. Scramble it a bit, surely the change will tend towards better states, right?
Meditation can help. Spend enough time doing jhana meditation, and you can dissolve your sense of self, your 'ego', and become one with the universe. It frees you of all the misunderstandings you have had! All those worries, all those pains you expected – everything arising from a mistaken belief that you are somehow separate from the universe, someone with wants and desires and needs. Dissolve your ego, dissolve your needs.
Was there ever a home to go back to, really? Perhaps parents were a home, once, if you were lucky. Eventually, you can't stay.
There is no home to go back to. Perhaps there never was one.
There is just the abyss, and its only comfort is its honesty. It does not lie about being a home. It is what it looks like: a ruthless structure that can break, maim, and kill you if you don't comprehend it. It is also an understandable machine and an enumerably infinitely complex puzzle.
It rewards mastery.
And to master it is to make it home.