Saying the last decade has been chaotic is quite the oversimplification, as many of us have been through quite a lot of stress, upheaval, loss, and inconvenience. Several years prior to the pandemic my life fell apart as I became sick with cancer, abandoned by the love of my life, and began recovery from alcoholism and addiction. Yet even in the midst of that tumult I naively thought every year that good times must be just around the corner, only to be continually met with further instability and uncertainty such as occurred from the pandemic, but also in my own private life with unreliable friends and hostile family members. Like most people from our generation I also find myself living in this dystopia where owning a home is a dream, besieged by chemical poisons never before faced by mankind, the probable destruction of our entire planet, all while forcefully separated from other human beings by the very built environment which functions only to move vehicles in service of money at the expense of our connection to others and nature.

It can often be difficult to find our bearings and remain grounded, and seems nearly impossible in times of chaos and stress. It is first important to remember that while our challenges often seem ominous no generation of humans have ever been without hardship. Generations before us had their own problems, like widespread infectious disease which claimed peoples lives on a regular basis, parents often losing most of their children to plagues of tuberculosis, many wars and regular political instability, or working twelve-hour days, seven days a week because the concept of overtime and the weekend had not yet been won by our unionized forebears.

Although I have made great progress in my own satisfaction and sense of fulfillment across the last decade I have been beset by a constant and vexatious sense of optimism, knowing that my work and efforts were having real effects not only in my own life but in those of others, now discovering the cause and cure to cancer expecting that any day now my efforts to relieve humanity of our collective suffering will do just that, and free us from the pain and misery of existence, extinguishing fear and ushering in a world of love and prosperity. The problem is that life does not work this way at all, and it is only required to look around at our current progress where computers fit into pockets, the entirety of human history and knowledge at our very fingertips, where almost nobody ever dies of tuberculosis, with skyrocketing stock markets and novel financial tools like cryptocurrency, and electric cars and other marvels of human innovation that exceed the expectations of previous generations to see that humanity is still the same creature it has always been, that though we don’t die from plague we die from loneliness, depression, diabetes, hate, and war.

In truth a world without disease will also result in a world with enormous populations of human beings, further extracting resources from the Earth, and at what point to do we plunge headlong into the kind of dystopia where people are obliged to commit suicide at the age of 200? While this is not a real danger yet, fear does not need to be real to be debilitating. Most of us handle stress, fears, and anxieties whether they are financial, illness, personal, or existential by seeking their immediate opposite or antidote—we who fear disease try to eat healthy and take care of our body, or become germaphobes or hypochondriac, those of us who fear financial stress chase money, play the stock market, or get into crypto. Anxieties of group identity motivate geopolitical conflict, even that which is heinous and evil from which no soul can return. The irony is that the antidote to every single one of our fears and insecurities is never the opposite of what we are afraid, which is why even the richest people continue fearing poverty, why the most politically powerful fear losing power, why even those who are young and healthy diet and starve themselves. If it were truly possible to live longer than the typical human lifespan it would never actually resolve a fear of death because death can come from anywhere at any time—if all disease was resolved, there was no food insecurity, and car accidents and gun violence were entirely solved our planet could be struck by an asteroid. In several billion years time when the Sun starts to die it will actually grow so large as to fully swallow the Earth itself, so even if it were possible to live forever, it would not be possible to escape death without magical, superhuman powers that exist only in comic books and fantasy.

Since the resolution of our fears can never come from chasing their mortal antidote from where does relief come? The least read chapters in my book, Fuck Portion Control, are those on spirituality and social discord because most people are reading to get a six pack, restore their erections, or heal cancer. But I have died spiritually several times already, first when the world in which I was raised was rudely ripped away and revealed to be a hateful religious cult that preaches fear and suspicion and robbed me of a loving family, then again later when my inherent trauma robbed me of a chance at love, and finally again at the age of forty discovering my lifelong struggles with health were due to cystic fibrosis and autism and that I have from birth been destined never to have a normal or fulfilling life, being dealt a disadvantage from the very start completely at odds with what I wanted, believed, and deserved. I knew from around the age of 22 that my spirituality had been corrupted by my upbringing, and tried various alternatives like yoga, meditation, reading inspirational books, even smoking weed. But none of that worked either because none of those have anything to do with spirituality either. Even meditation is a distraction from spirituality because meditation, religion, yoga, and drugs are all attempts to escape the conditions of life, and finding spirituality requires acceptance of the conditions of life, not escaping them.

Being thusly denied any chance at achieving the desires of my heart to be rid of mortal limitations I was plunged forcibly into the depths of my soul as the only remaining frontier I had not yet plumbed for answers, and was utterly shocked to discover that spirituality was not only real, it was much more magnanimous and active in my life than I had been misled to believe by my harsh upbringing. Many people read my books not understanding that the very reason they exist is not because of my research or success in science but because of my work in discovering the spiritual heights of my own existence. Before learning that my existence matters simply for being my mind was too burdened with fears of acceptance, shame, criticism, rejection, death, powerlessness, and loss to attempt sharing my work with others. Even my ability to write effectively was impaired by the trauma which prevented me from connecting to my spirituality (which is saying something!). One of my first forays into sharing my personal work with the world at large was to share some of the poetry which is now in the pages of FPC on social media, and I was quickly disheartened to find friends of my ex making fun of me, even going so far as to suggest that I was ‘simple,’ (which, yeah, I am). But my spiritual growth had progressed enough to help me realize that while these people were ridiculing my work, they were in fact DISCUSSING and debating it, as if I were some established luminary and not an amateur failure just trying to find my place in the world, and the joke was, in fact, on them.

The problem with spirituality is that such experiences are impossible to communicate in words, and I simply cannot adequately describe to you the cataclysm which occurred as I watched my love drive away for the last time, taking with him the delusions that had held me back, the black gulf of awe realizing how wasted my life had been pursuing success, money, security, confidence, love, attraction, and health, the peeking light of a spiritual dawn realizing I had finally found the correct path to trod. While most of my work over the last decade has been trying and succeeding in the restoration of my physical and mental health the only part of it that is not transient and actually matters was finding out who I am and the meaning of my place on Earth, and those answers are why I do this work, and why I know what to do and how to do it, because my mind is no longer burdened by the fears, insecurities, and trauma of mortality which blocked connection to my own soul in the previous years of my life.

No matter the quality of time, whether it is peaceful or awful, the only way to uncover the mysteries of life and find fulfillment amongst the mundane and chaotic alike is to turn inward using tools such as inventory therapy discussed in both of my books. The Perfect Child more deeply explores childhood trauma and the ways in which we adults worship fear, control, and insecurity. I’m also working on my third book which will discuss the science of spirituality—don’t hold your breath, though, it is something I’m working on for the next decade and requires more maturity than I have currently. In the meantime you can develop your own spirituality using the tools that worked for me as discussed in my current books.

No life can be complete without resolving those fears of childhood which keep you from reading the chapters which don’t immediately solve your dissatisfaction with your body and fixation on superficial things like your waistline or the hair on your head. None in life persists but the energy of which we are made. Self-care means taking care of our health, but for most people the parameters of what that means is similarly corrupted by unresolved trauma and fear such as plagued my own life. While you have time left to breathe it is best spent learning to connect to the energy of the spirit by practicing self-compassion and confronting those fears that drive you in the opposite direction.