Despite the title’s usual associations, this blog isn’t about pulling back the mask on some idealized thing to reveal a scandalous or disturbing truth. It’s also not an argument like “Covid is no problem, so we should stop wearing masks!”

It’s about removing the scandalous, disturbing mask from “problems” we needlessly fear, to unveil an exhilarating and fascinating reality. It’s also about how and why this mask of problems stays in place. And yes, it’s about me. It may also be about you, depending on who you are…

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It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. -Upton Sinclair

Why does insanity always twist the great answers? Because only tormented persons want truth. Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and women, not truth. Only if the mind Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness: then it hates its life-cage and seeks further, And finds, if it is powerful enough. But instantly the private agony that made the search Muddles the finding. -From “Theory of Truth, by Robinson Jeffers

In the post-pandemic world, people are paradoxically required to understand existential risks to survive, yet our lives often depend on not understanding them. For the first time in history, the search for truth has become prerequisite to a happy, fun, and meaningful life.

Looking back, sanity seems to have been a temporary comfort, a historically aberrant cognitive state that briefly insulated us from life’s paradoxes and dissonances. It was invented for a Matrix-like global theme park, once illuminated by the ideological lamps of 19th and 20th-century prosperity. Sanity is now a luxury, now confined to small private parks, as it was then, theoretically, available to the general public of developed nations. It’s no more realistic than success.

Most of today’s thinkers don’t seem to realize that Sanity-land has been closed for a while. I’d guess they’re pretty bored, with nothing to do but smash the park’s dimming lamps–ideals, ideologies, dreams, gods–to get our eyes on the new, scary things outside that people need to see to survive.

But we’re already outside, looking in. And as long as we keep looking in, our depressing inner worlds, confined to themselves, get darker every time some philosopher smashes another lamp. We’re sustained only by our dwindling physical contact with other human beings. Every time we lose skin-to-skin touch with someone we love, we reach into ourselves instead. Forget sanity, how is this even fun? Since the best ride in the public park–the uniquely human dream of interstellar civilization–closed, we’ve stopped evolving and begun involving.

We’re outside, we’re free, and the sun is brighter than ever out here, but for people living in closets, the light burns. When it gets too hot we retreat to our dark little safe places, do some navel-gazing, and pretend we’re happy seeking cheap imitation sanity, shallow personal fulfillment, “food and success and women.” But short of letting in the sun, our little closets fill at best with tasteless cardboard imitations of life–ideological diets to replace lost ideals, titles and awards to replace social success, cheap plastic dolls to replace erotic contact with other absurd, squishy, sensitive beings.

Some Boomers turn their backs and say “I’ve got mine, fuck you!” The rest of us are forced to accept that our lives are so interdependent now that we can’t betray others without betraying our future selves. Happiness or truth, we MUST choose one or the other, right?

We can choose truth, face the sun together, and find joy in each other’s arms, only as meager as we expect. Or we can choose happiness, put on our masks and live in our closets, huddled alone together around the burnt-out lamps of dying worlds, dreaming the world will fulfill impossible promises made to us when we were little. In the Paleolithic era we turned our bodily functions into metaphors, built a world from them and forced ourselves to live in it. At its peak of development, this world became the global sanity-park.. But meaning always came from the physical world– the source of symbolic thought–not from the metaphorical worlds themselves.

I’ve always chosen truth over happiness. Before 2020 my “life” was a list of chronic illnesses, existential horrors, and traumatic life events so extensive that I’d have to be insane not to wonder if some evil god was messing with me. Invisibly to others, just beneath my skin, for decades, I fought a perpetual war against an immediate certainty of personal and planetary doom, refusing to look away from any painful truth.

In April 2020 I was shocked to find this terrifying “life” and the “person” who lived it gone, leaving room for a peaceful life filled with moments of wonder, sacredness, sensuality and laughter.

The usual thing to do would be to “tell my story”: enumerate my list of oppressions and pronounce my great achievement of freedom, complete with an instructional method on how YOU can do it too, making myself out as some hero or guru.

But after a lifetime with only the fantasy of “fixing myself” to stave off suicide, the topic of my life history and its overcoming seems sad, narcissistic and childish, like so much of today’s culture. Make no mistake, this is totally about me! About what I have to offer certain people now, not about some boring, sad “life story.”

I find more interest in exploring with curiosity, instead of assuming presumptuously, how I can offer myself–mentally, physically, and more– to others who’ve been trapped, or are still trapped, in the dark closet of the self.

Human beings can’t live on self alone. Self-care, self-exploration, even self-realization gets boring without human contact and connection. After a while, private agonies, then ecstasies too, get old. The dark little closet of self, however nicely furnished with insights, images and books, is not a home. No one, housed or not, should be ashamed to ask for a home. It’s a basic human need.

Before 2020 I’d felt like a freak. Now I feel something one might call antinatalist survivor’s guilt. Right as I’d escaped it, the black hole of nihilism, isolation and existential terror that sucked me out of society started eating up everyone else.

To different degrees and in different spheres, more and more of us have found ourselves outside the biosocial parameters within which almost any human being can reasonably expect a life worth living. Real sanity is to recognize this.

In response to the complex traps of 21st century life, most proposed solutions create more horrific problems. Every minute another relationship ends, another person forgets what it feels like to touch someone’s skin, another god fails and dies, another lamp burns out.

The wonder, laughter, love, trust, and primal human connection that once made life precious is now a rare find for non-believing, non-gullible people who can’t accept the belief systems that have been made prerequisite for such connection.

Ironically, some of life’s joy has been trashed by those called to enhance it–cultural influencers, technological innovators, psychologists, spiritual teachers, and artists, particularly those informed by the legacy of the 1960s counterculture. As if it could replace our disintegrating biosocial body, they give us the carrots of burnt-out lamps and dead gods and the sticks of original sin tropes.

What remains of the failed 1960s counterculture is a tragic parody of the best of East and West that its gurus heralded. The toxic fusion of original sin from the West with perfect enlightenment from the East mixed together to make a mechanical, anerotic culture obsessed with fixing things, especially our “problems,” which distracts us from the reality–physical social isolation, disease, and general biosocial breakdown.

In many social contexts, if you still feel sexy and powerful without the career, the wardrobe, the body, or the cool attitude, you’ll be sold problems. If you don’t buy them (and you don’t care to sell any of your own), you’ll soon find yourself with no friends, because people only “need” to connect when they have “problems.” To find meaning in today’s depressing world, we’re often ordered, more or less explicitly: Go back to the breath! Find someone to talk to! Stay mindful! Honor your inner child! Fix yourself before you help others! All this really means is: don’t worry about physical connection, put your supposedly sane “self” and its “problems” first. You must have Problems and Goals, these supply Motivation!

First, this reverses cause and effect: happiness results from physical connection, not vice-versa. There’s no way around it. Last, if we can’t physically connect without the social justification of some sort of personal growth or career advancement, or some correction of “deficiencies,” we’re forced to lie to ourselves and confabulate boring goals, ideologies we don’t believe, and horrific psychological problems, just to access human touch. Result: a miserable, nihilistic, paralyzed society.

Unless your life already has enduring, material, joyful meaning to people outside yourself, trying to fix yourself or others, taken as your primary life purpose, is a form of torture. This torture is what we’re being sold.

We’re also told to accept the future’s impossible risks. Grow up and work! We’re offered neither honest nor compelling reasons to do so. When young people don’t successfully launch into careers and families, our fallback is to become a tiny node in a monumental network of narcissistic, self-referential minds, hidden in increasingly murky social contexts, competing for crumbs of acknowledgement, acceptance and connection.

We were alone together. Now we’re heading for a future of collective solitary confinement. At best, we figure out how to become contentedly masturbating children, microcosms of a civilization that gave up its dreams of colonizing space, discovering aliens instead within each other, when we could be having sex with real human partners. Huge swathes of our culture have simply lost the option of mature engagement with life beyond the self.

Practically, this aspect of my writing is challenging. It’s hard to find words that convey a viewpoint from which problems are fascinating mysteries, not existential torments. This perspective isn’t so rare, but it’s antithetical to language and cultural norms, and no surprise that it hasn’t been articulated from any visible platform. I certainly haven’t done it in this post. I’m trying to use language against itself (when I’m not using images or touch), not torment you with another scheme to fix your “defective” existential state.

This post took me two weeks. I think it’s kind of dull, and it certainly can’t reach out and touch you, but it’s a foundation to build exciting things. I always wanted to be a writer but my top-down, linguistically dominated writing bored me. I wrote great academic essays because I was an academic essay. Now my thoughts construct themselves bottom-up (kinesthetically, synesthetically, pre-linguistically) in response to what turns me on. It’s been a tad difficult to formulate this top-down foundational post to delineate and categorize my project of physical connection using meaning and thought (such as sacredness, eroticism and wonder) outside lines and categories.

Technically, my writing here will evolve by trial and lots of error. It may switch between voices, contradict itself, miss nuances and context, be cheesily earnest, rudely skeptical, matter-of-fact, gnomic, goofy, grandiloquent, lack a consistent ideological allegiance (except to truth and kindness), form run-on sentences, and make unfunny jokes. It will definitely say “embarrasing” things about my sexuality. I’m glad I never started a career, I don’t have to worry about professional boundaries 😉

All I ask is you read with an open mind, and unfailingly, no matter what, take me very seriously. (That was one of those unfunny jokes, there may be more in this post ;))

-Elle and Buddhini