Red Pill Blue Pill

The Matrix.  The phrase conjures up a movie we should all know and love, right?  A giant computer simulation where people go about their lives and business in complete ignorance that nothing is real, at least not real in the way that we believe it to be today in society.

Now, I want to be clear, I am not really of a belief that we are living in a computer sim, though we are finding compelling evidence that it is at least a possibility.   I just find the term Matrix to be a convenient allegory for society.  I would very much like to share when I discovered I was in our society and came into an existential philosophy that turned my world upside down, and fast tracked my addiction.

The year was around 2005.  I was 31 years old, and had two young boys.  I had a nice house, a good (very smart) wife and we had been married at that point for a decade.  My career was going exceedingly well and I was still fueled by the .com boom which had served my financial situation well.  I remember I was getting a little bit uncomfortable with how much money I was able to make for my company at the time working on large eCommerce projects for multi million (even billion) dollar companies.  Think fortune 500 or higher.  But I was paid well, so I kept going to my cubicle and doing my routine work.  I found programming to be engaging, and I had just been promoted to working manager of a largish (14) team of developers, so I was able to manage the team but still write code.  The best of both worlds!

I had decided that I didn’t want to advance to a director level or above.  Looking back, maybe I should have just kept on a management path and my life would have turned out different.  Maybe, had I not fought the system or society, I wouldn’t have entered a world of pain that would cause me to lose everything and end up on the street begging for scraps.

The thing about being a low level manager, is you can still be of the people.  I found that at the director level, you really have to sell out your soul to the company.  Toe the company line.  Deliver tough messages to subordinates, such as layoffs and such.  At a low level management you can still fight for your people, and push back if you have the balls to do so.  Which I did.

I was drinking quite a bit, but I was very much a functional alcoholic.  I went to happy hours and parties.  I went out to bars on the weekend with coworkers, and occasionally (but rarely) would drink at home, and yet even then really only a few.  I was into good beers and homebrewing.  I would attend beer and wine festivals, though my favorite was the strong beer festival in Tempe, AZ, where I was living.

One incredibly fateful night, I was alone out in my hot tub enjoying a rare gin and tonic, and I was looking up at the night sky.  I have always enjoyed the night sky, dreaming of the cosmos and what exists out there.  Origins of life type stuff, but really I never thought too deep on the topic.  I was raised in Utah to believe in God, though I was not Mormon.  My mom was raised catholic, so I just always had somewhat believed there was a creator.  The reality is I was a fence sitter.  I simply was not ready to truly face what I knew I believed.  I was scared.

I had another cocktail, then another.  Sitting in the hot tub, I knew it was time for something.  It was time to get off the fence.  I just had to take a stand.  I didn’t even know why, but for some reason I just knew that in order to really move on and advance my life at that point I had to address this pressing issue.  

I was scared, but with a little alcohol in me, I started shouting at the universe and realized something I knew I always felt.  That there was no God, and I was an atheist.  In 5 minutes, my entire world as I knew it shattered into a million pieces.

I took the red pill and extracted from the Matrix, from everything I thought I knew.

Call me a late bloomer.  Several have laughed when I share this story, because they are like “Oh, well I figured that out a decade ago”.  Hell, my own kids told me they figured that out before they even became teenagers.

But the really scary part was knowing that I only had this one life to live, and that is it.  Why save in a 401k?  Why just keep working like a dog as a cog in the wheel of corporate employment when it was all for nothing?  I mean, jeez, at least religious people know they are working towards a great afterlife.  Eternity in heaven.  Heck, this life is just a brief trial run which, if successful, means they are granted a seat at God’s table, and an eternity of happiness with the ones they love.  For me, I could only look at my young children and think “well, they will die as well.  And their life is meaningless, as is mine”.

In an instant, I became a full blown existentialist, though I didn’t really know it at the time.  It took a lot of reading, and research, to realize what I was.  But back to that fateful night.  I kept drinking until I was so drunk I didn’t care anymore.  That became the beginning of me drinking every single day.  Few people, I think, can actually pinpoint the moment;  the day they started drinking around the clock.

Of course, initially it really was only in the evening.  I had to keep going to work because I had a wife, two kids, a house… things and people who cared about me and relied on me to do what I had done to that point which was to provide.  But with each passing day, week, month, and year, I became more miserable and felt more trapped in my circumstance.  It was like, once I extracted, I could not unsee certain things.  I started recognizing how my position in life was simply to fuel a machine that cared so little for me.  There was no purpose.  No grand plan.

I tried talking to my wife about my feelings, but mostly she brushed me off and considered it a phase I was going through.  But it wasn’t.  This was no midlife crisis.  This was a complete crisis of consciousness that had me second guessing everything I knew and held dear.  And I drank to cope.  It wasn’t long before I realized I had a problem.  I went to my first rehab in roughly the year 2007 when I knew that what I was doing was not sustainable.  The location was Michael’s House in Palm Springs, California.  I did go to a handful of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings prior to that, but it just didn’t stick with me, for reasons I will get into in a later post.

I felt very good coming out of Michael’s house, like maybe I had a handle on the drinking.  It was a 30 day program, and I probably made it sober for 2 weeks afterwards.  Then, began the hiding and sneaking.  I couldn’t face my family in a relapse, so I started buying and hiding pints or fifths of vodka.

Meanwhile I read voraciously, and watched programs that talked about the meaning of life and God.  I listened to friends talk about their faith, or how they managed to quit drinking.  All the while I was miserably putting a foot in front of the other, wishing to all hell that maybe I had taken a break before starting family life and took time to backpack across Europe and “find myself”.  At work, I grew increasingly disenchanted with what I viewed to be a scam to make very few shareholders incredibly wealthy at my expanse.  My extraction from the Matrix was nearing a climax.

My main point of this post is to illustrate the why and how of my degradation.  I think I have explained sufficiently.  I have much more to say, however I am trying to keep each post to a 5 or 6 minute read.  What followed were years of misery, in and out of rehabs and mental institutions while I studied the cosmos and religion, searching, searching.

That must be it for now.  More to come!  As always, peace and strength to you.  -Christian.