Reflections on the Noise

The Noise haunts me. It envelops me; chokes me. I can feel my life slipping through my fingers at an ever increasing rate but I do not know why. I am acquainted with the idea that time accelerates as you get older, years passing at the speed of months and months at the speed of weeks, until you are dead. I see that my body is no longer capable of what it once was. I no longer recover as quickly as I used to. I am not as strong or as fast. My skin is slowly, consistently marching away from my body until eventually they will be two separate entities altogether.

Death has never been that frightening to me as an intellectual exercise but now I seem to be getting letters of its arrival in the post. Only a matter of years.

Yet, I am a young man. Statistically, I have not lived the first half of my life even. Something feels off, though, in my current existence that is incongruous with how I ought to be living.

In a recent YouTube short that was thrown at me by the algorithmic powers that be, I was introduced to a man with tattoos across his arms and neck, wearing a grey tank top. He opens a bottle of Grey Goose, squirts yellow flavoring into it, changing the color, and pours the resulting concoction to the brim of a glass. He then takes this yellow mixture and begins running it under water. As the spout is going, he talks about his own experience with alcoholism. He says that everyone would tell him that he has a problem with alcohol. What made him stop drinking, though, was not that idea, instead, it was this mental reframing: “Alcohol is not the problem, it’s the solution.” He had other problems in his life but he used alcohol as the antidote. Slowly, presumably (if I may), his life descended into worse circumstances, but when it came time to fight, he was swinging at ghosts.

I self soothe with YouTube and Twitter. During work, I enjoy putting something on in the background, and when I get stuck on a problem I indulge in the scroll. Unfortunately, it is reaching the point of anhedonia, where these dopamine seeking activities bring me no joy. Instead, they actively distract me, making time pass more quickly than it already needs to. There are times when I open the app and scroll as quickly as I can to the bottom. I try and beat the refresh, to literally scroll out of the app. Flick, flick, flick; bright light, laugh. I feel shackled to a post, searching within a five meter radius for water. The post was initially put above grass but now, from my wandering, the ground is trampled dirt.

I am not ready to resign myself to this dirt existence: I know that water exists in this metaphor, if only I were to cut the chain. I have faith in something larger. I can self medicate these feelings with digital drugs but ultimately I am hiding from the actual problem. Indeed, I am so caught up in running that I cannot even completely articulate the problem itself. I, too, am fighting ghosts.