You live in it, I live in it, we all live in it. It is what binds us, it is what breaks us, it is what makes us do as we do when we don’t think to have thought. It brings out the very best in us, it brings out the very worst in us, it brings out the very nature in all of us to reach for meteoric highs and mediocre lows. It is innumerably complex and invariably stupid. It insistently rejects reason and is so often ill suited to fix what fails us. It is built upon the legacy of those who came before us, and therefore it is what we build today that future generations will use to define us. It is society, and living in it is absolute madness!

 

Society is our lifetime membership to a world of unwanted expectations, unwarranted responsibilities and unneeded necessities. Society is what robs us of our identity as we strive to achieve what matters to others instead of what matters to us and is the reason we abnormally try to appear normal despite the fact that we are unstrangely very strange. Society is an insufferable chocolate chip cookie with the potential to satiate our needs but is instead burnt with broken promises, made stale by prolonged exposure to fear and ruined by raisins without reason. What’s more is when we cry foul at the insufficient state of our cookie we are told by monsters that this is just the way it crumbles as they devour it with glee, leaving us to scramble for the burnt, stale, raisin tainted crumbs. This all encompassing collective of mankind is an altogether confounding, frustrating and debilitating experience. It suffocates our souls, bruises our brains and turns our hearts cold… in other words, living in society is a real bitch. Surely there must be a way out of it!

 

There are certainly those who have tried. The hermits, the black sheep, the weirdos and witches among us but despite their best efforts they are unable to fully escape from the trappings of society. For a moment they may find less external stimuli to suffer from but their reclusion from humanity also causes more internal torturing as they wither away further and further from people, straying closer and closer to their demons. Here they become increasingly out of touch with reality and increasingly misunderstood by the masses until they are inevitably drawn back by the forces of society into an environment of people that no longer recognizes them. Thus from this fearful populace they must face a renewed effort to beat them into submission of whatever is deemed socially acceptable as they are shackled in a prison of the state or of the mind or to bundles of wood as they are outright burned at the stake! Fortunately in modern times burned steaks tend to be of the angus variety and I suppose that is a more unfortunate state of affairs for bovine society than our own, though some would argue that the udder bound populace who so often utter moo utterly affects humanity more than we may like to admit, but that’s a discussion for another day. Regardless, the stakes are no less high upon the modern pyre of humiliation, punishment and demise.

 

If this is not the fate found by those who endeavor to perpetually sequester themselves then the alternative ironically is that often the very people trying to escape society will find in their much sought after solitude that they are not alone but surrounded by a bunch of complete rejects like themselves! So they group together out of common interest and find themselves in the very thing they thought they had vanished from, a society, and so the aggravating cycle of the good, the bad and the ugly continues.

 

Now death is one way one might think they could permanently extricate themselves from the clutches of society but there again one would be wrong. If death is nothing but nothingness then you would know nothing of peace, you would know not relief from the pressures of humanity, you would simply know, feel and be nothing therefore there is nothing to be gained from premature expiration. If on the other hand death is a matter of heaven and hell then there you will surely find yourself once more entangled in a society but this one would be made up of a great many more infuriating souls that you must now deal with, spanning the entirety of mankind from years past and proving more vexing and complex than anything experienced in a lifetime. You may think that one of these spiritual realms would clearly be better than the other but I would argue that neither are preferable. Hell would be absolute hell to endure I’m sure but maintaining the expectations of perfection in heaven would be one hell of a way to spend eternity! Either way you might be dead but society lives on in the community of souls.

 

It’s almost as if we all belong in society… like it’s a law of the universe or something. It would seem as mass relates to gravity so too are the effects of the masses of society on the individual and no matter how far one finds themselves from society they still remain in orbit, unable to truly break free. “The dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished.” so said Einstein and you know Albert had a habit of figuring out laws of the universe and such so I trust his judgement. Well then, if society is insanity and escaping it is an impossibility then how do we cope with this reality? Catharsis.

 

The need for catharsis is universal but the means of doing so is not. The quest for catharsis has been the great endeavor of mankind through the ages and as such we have discovered a wide variety of methods for cathartic attainment. There is the classic bubble of blissful ignorance whereby you only indulge in facts that are an alternative to any undesired reality where you may see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil to find a false sense of relief. In a similar vein one may attempt to find catharsis by avoiding any thoughts on the nagging painful truth of their place in humanity and instead plunge themselves as far as possible into the many distractions created by society with full immersion in the sports arena, gaming arena or media arena. Then of course there is the age old practice of using various substances from the magic of mushrooms to the elixir of alcohol to embracing the likes of Molly, Mary Jane, Aunt Nora and the whole family of brain ticklers and gray matter smashers to maximise fleeting moments of pleasure to forget about life for awhile.

 

However these methods of catharsis are merely another attempt at escaping the burden of living in society and as we have already established escape is not an option. If we’re lucky the dream of escape is shattered when the nightmare of reality sets in as we sober up to the realization that we escaped nothing in our protracted distraction but definitely lost something down the porcelain throne we awoke clinging to. Less lucky but no less likely is the possibility that in our attempts to numb our pain we find ourselves in a destructive cycle of abuse that causes more pain and suffering to ourselves and others than we thought possible as our need for catharsis increases but our ability to find it dwindles.

 

The waves of stress, rage and chaos from the oceans of mankind will forever crash upon the shores of your sanity but instead of consuming catharsis in a vain attempt at avoiding the feeling of this salty water and pretending that the shoreline of your mind is not eroding away I implore you to actively step into these turbulent waves by creating catharsis to withstand the sea of people and the many storms of life. Use your imagination to pop that bubble of blissful ignorance and discover the joy of new found knowledge beyond. Interrupt your distractions with cathartic expressions by crafting new perspectives of how you see yourself and how you see the world. Rather than seek catharsis through a substance find catharsis that has substance. From here you may build a pier to dock your battered brain for repair from time to time and keep it afloat as it embarks on involuntary voyages into the great unknown again and again.

 

Of course you can assuage the pains from the slings and arrows slung at you from living in society for a moment through consumption as all of us must do from time to time to keep our brains from bleeding out but this method is a band-aid over ever expanding wounds ripe for infection and in desperate need of proper examination! Only by constructive means can one truly heal and truly attain catharsis from the bludgeons of our ineludible social construct and these must be engineered by the utmost expert of the self, the personal physician within, the who inside you.

 

The difference is that consuming catharsis provides relief by temporarily bracing one from the immense glut of madness and anguished feelings that fall upon us, however these continue to accumulate unabated and increasingly erode your sanity until the structural integrity of your very being at last collapses under the pressure and what was once a babbling brook of madness becomes an apocalyptic flood in the valley of the mind. Whereas producing catharsis actively processes these feelings into a tangible form that can be built upon piece by piece to create incredible relief and a stronger self, capable of perpetually generating catharsis as the waters of chaos pass through the turbine of the brain and are released away downstream of your consciousness, allowing you to no longer need give a damn. In other words, we spend everyday swallowing down unlimited refills of lunacy and there’s no sense in trying to hold all of that in by artificial means as the mounting pressure from the rage filled bladder of the mind will continue to swell until it bursts. So I suggest you find some sort of craft receptacle or artistry or a nook in the alley behind that rusty idea generator and let loose an expression of who you are and what you feel before you piss yourself!

 

For me I find immediate relief by simply screaming into the void all manner of frustrations that living in society has pressed upon me. When life is shit and everything seems fucked I believe the best release is to acknowledge those feelings with an exclamation into the ether of “This is shit!” or a good “Fuck! Fuck! Fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck!” to purge myself of these repressed emotions. If you find yourself mute or lacking the velocity in your vocal chords to make such exclamations another option is to write out your anguish. Empty the filth and disgust and runoff of society from the cesspool of your brain onto a page of discontent where you can let it go before it becomes toxic sludge in your mind.

 

From this mound of expelled brain mud and funky thinking garbage you now have the material to begin crafting and releasing more powerful forms of catharsis. I for one find myself wondering why and how this tangled mass of societal pressures and pollutants could omit such a foul and unpleasant odor and if there is anything I can do about it. So I look to history to see if others have suffered such a fate and am inspired to see when they have and figured out how to overcome such things. Or I become grateful to know that they were suffering through a worse manifestation of society than me and if they managed to carry on then so can I. Also I find refuge from the refuse of society’s bad eggs and rotten experiences by crafting poetry and comedy to build new perspectives and vent my steam of discontent before I blow a gasket. Furthermore I like to pick through the sticky ideas and grungy philosophies hidden in these cerebral expulsions and give them a good scrub down on the off chance that I might reveal something worth keeping and worthy of adding to my collection of beliefs.

 

These are the constructive means that produce the most catharsis for me but I would urge all members of humanity to actively pursue their own personal means of production. Make time to doodle, to sing a song of your own creation, to tinker away on customizing a dream car or on designing a reinvention of the wheel. Yes of course ingest a healthy helping of faux consumer catharsis from time to time but solely consuming this will leave your soul empty and starving it will eat at you relentlessly. You must create your own from within and whatever it may be that you produce from yourself must first and foremost be done for yourself. The audience is you, the owner is you, the beneficiary is you! The point of creating catharsis is to find relief from living in society not for pleasing the finicky whims of humanity!

 

From this place of much needed self indulgence then you may share your creations with whomever you so please and I would encourage you do so to remind the rest of us of how silly and free we could possibly be but not before first making this catharsis for yourself, otherwise you will not feel catharsis, you will feel the added burden of being shackled to another chain of expectations from the society you seek to escape. Producing catharsis from within to expel the muck and thorns that swamp us can be as simple as scribbling into a journal or as complex as writing a manifesto and as effective from knitting together an oven mitt to stitching together a symphony because it is a personal reflection of who we are outside of the clutches of society and from this we may not be able to escape but we can set a part of ourselves free to run wild!

 

In conclusion, the maddening thing about society is that it causes us to go mad because of our repressed feelings of how mad living through this perpetual madness makes us! We need a release, we need a way to purge ourselves of this lunacy, we need anything that will relieve the pain of this atomic wedgie of social dependence for a moment and so we desperately seek out catharsis. Now I am not immune from insulating myself from painful truths by living in a cathartic bubble or from finding immense catharsis by means of distraction nor would I wish an entirely sober experience of life on anybody! However I do believe one must be aware that entirely relying on such methods to make you unaware of your dependence on society only erodes your capacity for independence from the insanity. Instead coping with our existence through the creative process of catharsis has made living in society bearable for me and I believe that if every member of our insane species can learn to appreciate their own capacity for creation and find a constructive means of cathartic expression rather than relying on all consuming destructive means of distraction then we might find ourselves living in a less primitive and more productive society. In other words, don't just run from life, create an escape.