There are more like me out there, I know it. Intensity junkies, stimulation addicts. Spending all our time doing things instead of being. Avoiding any opportunity to have still reflective moments by ourselves doing nothing, just breathing and feeling.

It’s addiction to anything but connecting to ourselves. It’s the hunt for satisfaction everywhere else but inside. In everyone else but me. Ignore what feelings are bubbling under, what needs are being stifled, what power is being drained away. We can’t control our feelings, so we’ll do our best to control everything else in our world, screw up our time so we’ve none left, get into debt so we have to work harder, make believe we’re being productive, fool ourselves we’re being true to ourselves, most especially if we’re doing what is expected of us. Don’t check if it’s really how we want to live, don’t for one second stop to let some doubt in, or wonder what potential is being smothered if we find ourselves bored. Keep busy at all costs. Like a cat on a hot tin roof.

Work – make it the most important thing in your life to get promoted, to work long hours, to focus on achievement and status and getting that bigger house. Burn yourself out by studying part-time as well. Take that extra assignment on because it’ll look good on the CV. Keep up the earning potential because the Joneses are going to rub your noses in it if you don’t get the attic conversion done.

Family – keep oneself completely

distracted by popping a sprog or three and watch all remnants of sanity and control disappear; life becomes a battle to find moments in which to sleep, never mind being quietly awake. Devote oneself tirelessly to the young ones’ needs, even if it’s at the expense of your health or sanity. Place them first, and you can’t go wrong. Can you?

Drink – at the end of the hard day get yourself down the pub. Alcohol lubricates us to merge seamlessly with others, so we lose the raw edge of isolation, avoid that scary prospect of sitting and being on our own. A fuzzy warm glow of being with drunken friends – nothing beats it for escaping ourselves. Except, of course, another drunken night. And another. Then nights in become strange, uncomfortable. Stay out with the lads or the girls and don’t be a party-pooper. Get that regular table going in the corner of the pub, get a tab, get your rounds in. Make your life just like it is in Cheers – all in the same room, pretending it’s living. Next time you see a re-run of Cheers at 5am, notice how each and every character is utterly selfish. Not a spark of generosity; but the illusion of warmth. The humour is cold, acerbic, and cruel. How funny. How much like a room of alcoholics.

TV – switch off the brain at the end of a hard day’s work – no effort required, no feelings to be engaged; except perhaps a dull passive ache of impotence watching the Americans fuck the planet over, once again. But hey, I’m comfy with dull aches when it comes to state of the world. Just don’t ask me consider the state of my inner world. Get into reality TV and live vicariously; watch other people living in goldfish bowls dreaming of the escape from ordinary to the special glory of fame. Flick the remote when the ads come, until something catches your eye. Smoke until the ashtray spills over, keeping all that furious energy sucked in and cancerous. Fall asleep on the sofa and avoid going to bed and risking that in-betweeny conscious hell of looking at the ceiling and asking ‘What the fuck am I doing with my life?’.

Music – spend hours revelling in the mudpit of Morrissey’s psyche and make-believe he’s speaking directly to you. Join the throng of wannabe loners in their bedsits, but ignore the fact that they’re thirty-something accountants with mortgages. Bedsitterdom is a state of mind. You too can pretend you’re really getting to know yourself by singing along to someone else’s declaration that he’s miserable now.

Clubbing and cruising – the weekend starts here. All energies devoted to attracting a mate, like peacocks shimmering their tales of intrigue and fascination. Get the moves right, the gear right, the hair right, the drugs right, the tattoos the piercing the attitude the muscles right and you too can have the sex-life of a modern metropolitan, the way you’re supposed to. The way you’ve a right to, let’s not forget. Ah yes. We gain the right to self-respect, we gain the right to throw it all away if we want to. It’s our choice, and no one’s going to stop us. And no one is going to ask us to stop and think. Puh-leaze!

Food – the secret compulsion, the night-time gorging, the filling of the void in the most literal way. Reading – what better way to lose oneself than to enter the mind of another? So much better to dip into my madness than dip into your own. You’re not mad? OK. Forgive me. You’re just the same as the rest, I know. Self-help books: great escape. Internet – the collective mind – now there’s an escape to beat them all. Computer games – lock your mind into a cyber-prison and do not free it until level six.

Shampoo – it’s a totally unnecessary commodity for normal hair. (Unless we actually spill noxious gunge on our hair, requiring us to clean it off - which happens, I would guess, about once a year?) Our hair adapts perfectly well to a life without shampoo, after a month or so’s adjustment; natural oils keep it shiny, and your scalp healthier and less flaky and dry; just rinsing with water daily ensures you smell nice and clean. We buy shampoo with the message ringing in our ears: “Because I’m worth it”. There is no equivalent counter-message from anyone, anywhere. There is no way that the human race could be persuaded as effectively as it is by shampoo manufacturers that to stay in and not wash your hair is doing something much more likely to get you comfortable with what you are worth. It’s too complex a message. Far easier to buy the fucking shampoo.

Religion – how better to avoid the riches within than to go down to the God shop and pay for it there? Someone else can make you feel better, not you. Some saint can offer you what you don’t. Some pervert – sorry, priest – can give you a wafer and you can remember a radical Jew of a couple of thousand years ago and wonder if he’ll give you the comfort you crave.

Therapy – a juicy one this. The best escape of all, in some ways, the modern religion - no confession, but a priest nevertheless. Absolution, love, acceptance, without judgment. (No therapist ever said to Woody: “Don’t sleep with your stepdaughter”.) Synchronise your moments of introspection to fit in with a therapist’s session, and you spend your time warbling away pleasing them. It’s not really looking within, finding out what is inside you and special; it’s about hoping someone else will find it for you. God knows I’ve been through enough shrinks to know that they don’t know the answer for me. But at least they’ve all pointed out how much I try to get the answers from them. Fuck it. Why isn’t there someone out there who can tell me how to live this crazy life? Because there isn’t anyone else living my life but me. Fuck fuck fuck.

This particular missive from madness was brought to you courtesy of nicotine withdrawal and subsequent chest infection, lungs heaving themselves together night after exhausting night to repel the noxious boarders. Again. I keep myself this crazy because I don’t want to settle down and be ordinary, I suppose.

Our capacity to be spiritual is related to our capacity to enjoy our own company, someone wrote. We don’t need priests or rabbis or imams or shrinks or pop idols to mediate to the “spiritual” entity called God or Jehovah or Allah or Mozza; indeed the more we look to them for solace the further away we get from our own self-nurturing, self-soothing capacity to connect with our inner strength, the faith-full knowledge that we’re alright and it’s going to be alright.