Neil Sarkar

Why I’m sober this year

A lot of people have asked why I quit everything for a year, and I don’t have a good one or two line answer.

So here is the journal entry where I figured out why I’m doing it. I’m just going to leave this here and refer anyone who asks me why to this:

09/22/2011

Today is the first sick day I’ve taken at groupme. It’s also the beginning of my quitting drugs for a month. I’m trying to get in better shape for the reunion, sure, but I’m also gearing up for 2012: a year without drugs.

It’s an experiment that came to me one night when I was lying in bed and wishing for what ultimately amounts to freedom from the various addictions in my life. I mean how nice would it be to be able to get on a roll, to build up something steadily without being derailed by benders.

The part that’s hard to come to terms with is the social anxiety. Honestly, drugs are a significant part of my identity. The fact that I’m a little worried I’ll lose friendships or not be entertaining enough if I’m not allowed to drink for a year is the surest sign that I should quit.

And this monthlong run is going to be a good test. It’s going to be a little strange saying “I don’t drink” for an entire year. I’m just thinking now about what I’ll do for Abe’s wedding but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.

I’m trying to analyze and get at the heart of what I feel I’m losing by being seen as someone who doesn’t drink. First off, and very cliche, is that I feel I’ll be seen as not cool. The point I started being cool and liking my image is when I started drinking, junior year of high school. It provided me with the confidence to express myself in an unfiltered way, and I’ve clutched dearly to that crutch ever since. I’m worried about what James and I of 2002 would think of this me, while still aware that the judgment of immature frat boys is kind of marginal, especially when compared with the judgment of women.

That’s what this all comes down to, it’s no surprise: I need to take drastic measures to make myself a good gift to a woman that deserves it.

The other judgment I’m worried about when presenting myself as a teetotaller is one that unfortunately is not irrelevant to women: weakness.

People see someone who has to get help and follow a program to fix their ailment as weak. Even admitting that an ailment is affecting you is weak. And admitting that you can’t even control it is weak. But being afraid of that perception is something I’m just going to have to get over. It’s like Anthony said in class, you can’t hide in plain sight. I may delude myself into thinking I’m concealing my weakness, when I’m sure if you candidly asked anyone that knew me, they judge me far more for my current failings than they would for being a teetotaller.

Improv is something that’s certainly going to help. Hopefully I can replace this approximation of courage and confidence with the real thing. I gg to the dentist but the final thought swimming in my head is that I don’t need a good “why” for when people ask me why I’m quitting. I just need to be OK with being perceived as weak. In fact it might be freeing to respond: “because I’m weak and I can’t control myself and my drug abuse is the primary reason I never get laid”

I may never actually say that, but I should keep in mind that the loss in social currency of uttering that explanation is well worth the gain of an identity reboot.

Why #firstworldproblems are as important as starving children

Just finished reading Chip Conley’s book Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow and the book had its interesting moments, but by far the most profound lessons in it were directly paraphrased from the work of Abraham Maslow, whose books I am now eagerly anticipating reading.

You may have heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Basically it says that humans have physiological needs: the need to eat or sleep or have sex, then once those are satisfied they need stability and security, then social belonging, then esteem, and finally they can reach a place where their need is for self-actualization and transformation.

Each level must be satisfied for a person to start focusing on and filling the next one. For example if you desperately need sleep or food, you don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about you or if you belong to any community…you have a ringing alarm in your head from your reptilian brain that drowns out any higher order desires.

Similarly, if you haven’t found a community you identify with, or a comfortable social position where you are secure with the people you have relationships with and content with your status within the groups you circulate through, you’re going to be too focused on that to worry about whether your time in this life is being used to express your unique talents in a way that furthers a purpose you believe in. You’ll just want to fit in.

It’s the top of the pyramid that’s most interesting to me. Every person does have a need for transformative self-actualization through pursuit of a purpose larger than themselves. How few attain this? How few ever even aspire to it?!?

Maslow was interested in answering the question of how we can get more people to the top of that pyramid. That’s where Maslow diverges from what most people think of as psychology. Freudian psychology is focused on studying people who exhibit neuroses and psychological issues that are particular to the human animal, and its goal is to negate or suppress these abnormalities.

Maslow takes the opposite approach and says instead of studying the weirdos and fucktards, let’s look at the inspirational people, the ones who have cultivated and actualized their innate abilities, and who do amazing things at a level that most people never even strive for, let alone attain.

I love that approach. I mean, if you focus on not losing, you’ll break even at best. Sure, if you ignore pitfalls you won’t succeed…but at some point you have to focus on taking scary chances that will help you win, or all the treading water will be fruitless.

When I was younger I would say that I don’t get why people give to charities to feed starving kids they’ve never met, rather than giving their money (or better yet, the thing money approximates: time) to help the people around them whose characters they know and love and want to support.

Within Maslow’s framework of human development, this impulse question is given creedence. There’s a trendy twitter hashtag #firstworldproblems. It’s what your friend might say when she’s going through some personal conflict or some annoyances at work and is meant to juxtapose her being tired on a monday morning with a kid starving in Ghana, rendering her problems unimportant.

Well you know what?? Who’s to say that your friend’s inability to satisfy her social/belonging needs and eventually transcend them to self-actualization is less important than that child’s inability to satisfy his physiological needs of food or water and eventually transcend them to security and then further up the pyramid??

Equality goes both ways. If that child’s life and happiness is as important as your friend’s, then her life is as important as the child’s. And if your friend never in her life transcends their social needs to realize their potential, is that not ultimately as tragic as that kid starving to death?

I truly believe that #firstworldproblems are equally as important as #thirdworldproblems. Not more important, not less important, equally important. For human society to progress, humans need to support each other through each tier of the pyramid.

If we are all focused on pulling those starving and freezing to death up to levels of subsistence, then what??? What is the point?? If we’re focused only on survival, then we’re worse off than animals. We don’t get to reap the higher-order benefits of our ability to analyze and collaborate, and we have far less visceral pleasure from eating, fucking, and killing than your average animal.

That’s a good baseline for whether a human life was successful: did they create more happiness for themselves and those around them than an animal would have? Did they utilize their unique talents to create something of themselves that only a human can?

Surely, this is just the beginning of my foray into understanding the field of positive psychology and the importance of self-actualization and how to enable and support that growth in myself and in others. I love Maslow’s fascination with group therapy, and his idea of the professional sphere as an untapped resource for promoting individual growth towards self-actualization.

This arena of human development is woefully underserved, and it would make me really happy to see us make strides towards making the default job for an educated professional not a corporate soul-sucker, but rather an essential vehicle that supports individuals mid-level needs and guides them to their happiest, most fully realized states.

So long as you don’t get attached to any one particular outcome, everything tends to unfold perfectly.