The answers you seek are not at home

On finding hope in the darkness

People these days who are driven to change their lives often instead find themselves stuck in familiar patterns and habits.

When I was a kid, my parents signed me up for wilderness survival school, where I learned some interesting things about what to do if you get stranded in the wilderness. But one of the most interesting things I learned from that experience was that, according to one of my instructors, many wilderness fatalities actually happen less than three miles from the trail.

Intuitively this may sound totally ridiculous. The vast majority of us have the ability to walk three miles. But the problem is not with the body, but with the mind.

The reason for this is that when people find themselves off the trail, and they panic and stop looking at the landmarks around them they end up walking in circles until they exhaust themselves and die of exposure.

I found this to be a very useful analogy to meditate on later in life, when I was a falsely accused sex offender fighting to clear my name, and finding myself in my own circles when none of the answers that I had been given for how to deal with evil were panning out.

For years, I knew that I had found myself in a situation that was on the cusp of something very large - and very evil. I could tell the people coming after me were part of an organized, criminal activity of some kind.

And while I was a student of history, and for a short time an insider in the political world I still felt that I had a little insight as to what to do from inside my terrible and Kafkaesque situation.

Many could argue that being a political professional makes you more enlightened as to how the world actually works. In some ways, it does.

But it only goes so far.

Because for all the thousands of words of news articles that I had read, all the thousands of hours I’ve spent on conference calls with many, very smart and interesting people who I still think about from time to time, my outlook was still very cynical and nihilistic.

Perhaps I learned the wrong lessons from my career in that world. Because even for all the things that I learned, it all got filtered through the same unintentionally nihilistic mentality that I’d had growing up.

This mindset is actually extremely common in our society. The only difference that I had from the “commoners“ version is that my view of the world was even more nihilistic and cynical.

I knew about all the ways the well connected can manipulate the government and the media from behind the scenes, all the related advantages money had, and just how corrupt our society could be.

I absolutely wanted the truth to matter, and I knew my life would depend on it.

But as I meditated in bed as a pariah in my community, with my back against the wall, the remnants of my meal delivery still on my desk, I still couldn’t quite find a reason for hope.

There is a point at which your life becomes such a total living hell that even continuing to exist feels like a totally irrational choice. And yet as bad as it was, I knew I didn’t want to give up on myself, or my family, or my community, or my society.

I had made a choice not to run to Mexico and abandon my family, but nothing I had tried had worked.

I knew I would have to figure out not just how to make my peace with the problem of evil, but also how to confront it.

But the problem is, in my very hippie upbringing, like many other people who grew up in the time in place that I did, I did not have this understanding.

Now, in response to all of this one could say, “we live in the age of the Internet, just go online and get the answer“. But as we all know, in an age when we are all being constantly surveilled, there is a possibility that someone who doesn’t like you may find themselves with an opinion about what you are doing.

This problem in many ways was even worse in my case, because I had plenty of reason to believe that the gangstalkers who were coming after me were watching all of my Internet activity. If I listened to an audiobook or a podcast on Spotify, they would know. And if I stumbled upon something that seemed directly usable in my situation, it was a real concern that my enemies would know about it and prepare accordingly, or use it against me somehow.

And while I tried to evade their watchful monitoring of my life, I found that it was a lot harder than it seemed.

Being stuck in this awful bubble, I tried many of the solutions that people often turned to in our complicated time.

I tried burying my head in the sand and seeming as harmless as possible, hoping my enemies would move on. They did not.

I played a lot of video games, watched an incredible amount of YouTube, and spent thousands on meal delivery from nice restaurants. Although I never developed a serious alcohol problem, one Seattle IPA a night turned into two and sometimes three. And while I never got into drugs, the principles of addiction, including the act of numbing your pain instead of confronting it very much applied, and I found myself still facing the same problems as I wasted time and money and burned years off my life.

And so as I reached a three pronged fork in the road with the options of committing suicide, abandoning my family, or finding the answers even though they are watching, I chose the latter.

Making the experience even more intense was the fact that my enemies closely watched my Internet activity on my phone and my computer. I have reason to believe that they knew about just about every podcast and audiobook that I listened to.

And so, with podcasts and audiobooks, I ventured outside of my tiny world to look for hope somewhere. I listened to hundreds, maybe even thousands of podcast episodes, and numerous audiobooks.

And slowly, with the perspectives of hundreds of podcast guests, audiobooks on military strategy, and leadership, as well as creativity and self-help, I slowly pieced together the outlines of a strategy that I would eventually use to turn the tables.

The bad guys, of course, took note. They soon picked up on how every time I listened to a podcast interview of a special forces veteran, I would get inspired to fight back. This created problems when I was trying to penetrate their wall of surveillance and get help.

My answer? I listened to these podcasts all the time, and instead of only being a student when I was feeling angry or helpless, I became a student all the time.

And as I pursued my studies in the craft of fighting evil, I learned that, interestingly, it is not just the information that matters, but the connections that you make between the things that you learn, and the changes to your perspective that can show you how to make a difference in your situation and, more broadly, in your life.

Also, as painful as it was, I did not shut myself off from the feedback that the world was giving me. What I noticed from the few people who I interacted with, was that the most common reaction when they realized that I was “that guy“ was actually not discussed, but disorientation. While they did have to acquire a certain attitude to protect themselves, they did have a sense that I was innocent. And if I was very careful about my choices, I could stay in the game.

It was a clue that not everyone in this world sought to crucify me - and if I could somehow prove the fundamental details of this situation, there was a reason for hope.

Those two choices - to seek the answers I needed, even if it was risky, and also to stay open to the feedback of the world, even when it was painful, saved my life.

Chances are, if you’re in a hole you’re there for a reason. It may be your fault and it may not be. You have an understanding of your past and your present. You have a perspective on how the world works, and an idea of what the different options are, and the risks and benefits of each option. You have a recollection of your choices, and an understanding of the impact they had.

And while I cannot tell you what this solution is, I can tell you that the world is almost certainly bigger than your idea of how it works, as it is bigger than mine, as you and I are both human beings.

Because our imaginations pale in comparison to the imagination that created this world, if we want to live meaningful lives, and transcend the pain and sorrow of the things that befall us, we must become explorers - especially if there is no hope to be found in the things that are known.