Splenda Happiness

I’m not happy.

It’s weird writing that out and putting it in a permanent space because it makes it more real. The thought has crossed my mind before, but I’ve always been able to rationalize why I’m just being overdramatic. Much like when you think “I could really go for a double fudge sundae right now” and then spend time thinking of all the reasons why you actually shouldn’t go for a double fudge sundae, it’s been easy to convince myself I’m happy after the thought pops up. Logical arguments: you have a job, you make enough money to have disposable income, you eat every day, you have a social life, you have a girlfriend, you’re not dying. It flickers across your mind – you think it, maybe you even say it, but you spend so much time convincing yourself that you’re actually happy that eventually you shove that little thought into a small box in the corner and try to forget about it.

But the truth is surviving does not equate to happiness. And writing the words down literally sent a chill up my spine because I know what leaving those words in a public space will entail. People reading it and feeling pity and wondering what they can do, or people thinking I’m looking for attention and pushing me off as melodramatic. But I’m not looking for sympathy or pity or attention or anything, really. I’m just making a statement: I’m not happy.

Side note: Do not take this to mean I’m unhappy. Refer to this Oatmeal comic if you are confused.

The introspection and subsequent declarative statement was the result of something big happening this past weekend. Not big in the grand scheme of the universe, but big in the grand scheme of MY universe. Essentially, this weekend the nucleus of my internet life imploded. Everyone has an internet nucleus. It’s the website or thing you check the most frequently. For a lot of people it’s Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram. Reddit, YouTube, Something Awful. Maybe your nucleus is just your e-mail. But it’s the place you go to the most frequently when you’re on your computer or smartphone or tablet or whatever.

My internet nucleus was a forum called NeoGAF. It centered around video games, but it was where I went to catch up on news and events. It was a great place to go because there were hundreds of subcommunities where you could chat with people about anything. Games, TV shows, movies, music, sports, politics, dating, news articles, YouTube personalities, the latest Trump scandal…everything. Every video game had its own thread where people playing the game could discuss things and ask for help. Every TV show had its own thread where you could talk about the latest episode. It was basically my one-stop shop for whenever I wanted to find information or simply chat about something I enjoyed.

So this weekend this basic cornerstone of my life dissolved pretty quickly. You can read longer, full articles here and here if you want a more in-depth explanation, but I’ll offer a quick summary: A Facebook post accusing the CEO and owner of the website of sexual harassment went viral. The CEO himself took a long time to respond to it. This caused massive uproar on the website as it is a very left-leaning site on the political spectrum, so with the recent #MeToo developments there was a very low tolerance for these kind of accusations. The moderators all participated in a mass exodus as the owner kept delaying putting out a statement and it was making him, them, and the community as a whole look bad. As the moderators left, the site started being flooded with trolls and shitposting as the inmates were essentially running the asylum until the site went down for “maintenance” late Saturday.

It was kind of a harsh reality check about the impermanence of the internet and how everything we take for granted is really just data floating in the void that can be erased at any time. Suddenly a website that I checked basically every day (and usually spent a decent chunk of time browsing) was gone. I had a void in my life. Imagine if you went to the same bar every day for years after work. You exchanged pleasantries with the other barflys, you chatted with the bartender, you gave Smelly Joe some change as you left every day. Then one day after work you head to your favorite bar and it’s suddenly a Staples. Smelly Joe is still sitting outside but all the evidence of the bar you loved is gone. You ask Joe where everyone went and he tells you: some bartenders are trying to start a new bar, some regulars went to another bar down the street, a few guys took it as a sign to stop drinking altogether. Maybe some or most of your bar buddies will congregate at a new bar eventually down the line, but it won’t be the same. It won’t feel the same, because that bar is where you made the good memories.

That’s enough to kind of force an introspection. But I felt a larger void than I should have. I almost felt frantic, like I was scrabbling on the edge of the cliff and if I didn’t grab hold of something solid soon I was going to be taking a long fall to the ground below. And I couldn’t really figure out why.

Almost as if the universe kind of knew my brain needed to figure shit out, I was simultaneously introduced to something called “the spoon theory” this weekend. If you don’t know what it is, you can go here for the full original explanation, but I’ll try to summarize it myself quickly: The spoon theory revolves around explaining how chronically ill people have to plan out how they use their energy each day; basically equating a “spoon” as a unit of energy, and having a finite amount of “spoons” to use each day before they have to stop and recharge. And while healthy people have an infinite amount of spoons, those with physical or mental illness sometimes have a much smaller supply of them and when they’re out of them, they have to spend time recharging. Which means they have to make specific choices on how they want to use their spoons, while healthy people often don’t consider these “spoons” at all when making decisions in their life.

You’re probably wondering what the hell this has to do with a forum going down on the internet, but bear with me – I’m getting there.

So in the context of the spoon theory, I started thinking about how I was spending my energy – essentially what choices I was making with my life and whether I was happy with them. And what I realized was that for a long time I’ve been letting the world around me dictate how I use my “spoons” per se, as opposed to me choosing how I wanted to use them. I would hand out my spoons like they were candy or let people take my spoons because I cared about people’s opinions of me more than I cared about myself. I’d essentially started being what I thought people wanted me to be instead of being me. My energy was no longer my own.

I had lost all my spoons.

I didn’t have any energy to do anything, so whenever I had my own free time I would spend it trying to recharge by doing easy things like losing myself in a video game or book or TV show. For a while, I parlayed this recharging into trying to start up a YouTube channel, which ended up being an ouroboros of recharging energy to then use it again, which kept me static but not fully recharging myself. I was occupied, but I was still exhausted. I wanted this YouTube channel to be me accomplishing something, but I was just treading water as it never took off . I was using my free time to recharge just enough to make it through the tough stuff until the next time I had free time so I could recharge again. And then when I took a “break” from my YouTube channel, I never recharged enough energy to start back up again.

So then I put the final piece of the puzzle together. I had been using the NeoGAF website simultaneously as a way to both recharge and a place to put energy. I wanted to discuss video games and TV shows and movies and books, and sports and politics and dating and funny shit but I was going to GAF instead of my friends. It was safe. It was easy. And while I thought this was a good use of my time, it turned out I wasn’t getting anything out of it. Because while the community was great and I could talk about whatever I wanted on there – I wasn’t making any real relationships. If my account disappeared instead of the website, it would be a blip on the sea of users. Nobody on that site would care if I was suddenly gone. I was taking any spoons I had and just throwing them into the trash.

And I’d been doing this for years. YEARS.

And it started a chain of dominoes. Referencing the Oatmeal comic from above – I realized I had stopped doing things I felt were meaningful. Things that had previously brought me some form of joy or happiness I was doing simply to get my mind off everything else instead of enjoying them for what they were – things I wanted to do. I wasn’t actually interested in these things anymore, I was just collecting things to do to keep me occupied while I rested and recharged my energy.

That’s when I realized that I was feeling a void in myself not simply because a website was gone, but because I had been feeding myself fake energy this whole time through the website. It’s why I suddenly started panicking and trying to find everyone I could on Twitter from GAF because what I had perceived as the support structure keeping me afloat was gone. Except it had never been a support structure. It was a false idol, a hamster wheel, a distraction. And now I was forced to face the fact that I wasn’t happy because I didn’t have my distraction to keep my mind occupied. The energy equivalent of empty calories had just been excised from my life – not by my choice, but the result had given me a choice: continue on feeding myself empty energy and recycling the same thing over and over, or try and change.

To try and find meaning again.

It’s ironic that as of writing this, NeoGAF has come back up with a message that says “NeoGAF will be back online shortly.” It’ll be a test of willpower on my part if I return to it – I imagine there’s going to be a lot of trolling and the site won’t be the same if it comes back online since there’s a lot of hatred for the CEO/owner now – but the fact is I’m 90% sure I don’t want to return either. Not just because I don’t want to be associated with him, but because I need to focus on my own happiness and I’m not getting any from there. At the same time, it’s going to be kicking a habit I’ve gotten used to over the better part of a decade.

So let’s circle back around to the beginning. I’m not happy. I’ve been close to happy. Splenda happy, if you will. It’s kinda almost happy and gets you through in a pinch, but you can tell it’s not the real thing. I want to be real happy. And moving forward it’s not anybody else’s problem but my own. I’m ready to face that fact – and the first step is writing all this shit down and putting it in a place that I can’t run away from it. Maybe none of this makes sense – but in my head it does, and I have a goal going forward, albeit a small one.

So now the question is: how do I go about fixing myself?