My decline started when I began reading reviews instead of books, watching trailers instead of movies, then just looking at covers or posters, then not even that.

Untethered, adrift and lost in myself, I became more boring and stupid by the day, squandering whatever promise I once had.

I realized I hadn't thought about killing myself or otherwise dying or disappearing in weeks, if not months, and wondered if everything was OK, or I’d simply been distracted or stopped caring.

I believe most people are like this, most of the time.

But it gives me no sense of community.

Like psychedelics, sex is always cutting edge, as modern as things come.

For all my faults, I'm better than I was, which is astonishing to think of.

I was really, really broken.

There had to be more to life than this, I knew that from books, but it was difficult to think of joy or meaning beyond consumption and the use of resources I didn't have or have access to, beyond behaviors that took me down the same old paths of sloth and self-indulgence, of thinking I was meditating, reading or living in the moment, when perhaps I was only wasting time.

The double-edged sword of my lack of ambition, so easily satisfied and stuck in such misery.

In the end I became what I was pretending to be: a barbarian and philistine.

I hid my light under a bushel until it went out.

In my sickness I have the urge to pull others down due to my own failings and disappointments, and wish divorce, disaster, bankruptcy et cetera on others I know, or know of, as if their sinking will lift me up.

A nasty, squalid way to live, one that does me no credit and no good.

Distrusting my own happiness, even while I obsess over my misery.

The smart kids from good homes – by which I mean, almost entirely, homes that understood career paths, the importance of money and good habits – focused on better goals early, and worked to achieve them.

Instead I kept my eyes on the prize, an orgasm while stoned immaculate or a cold beer on a hot day in a beautiful place with nothing but time and a book in my hands.

I wanted to go straight to the point of it all, to lose nothing, gain the world and so on.

In this I may have been mistaken, although of course by now some of those smart kids will have died, some perhaps even by their own hand.

In such cases I guess I win, by default.