HUNGER

Purity of spirit is a reckless aim; the only souls that remain untainted in this life are the ones who have pacified their hunger with the consumption of something far more sinister than unbridled desire. Gorge yourself on it. Carve it into the deepest crevices of your bones. There is nothing pure that has not first bathed itself in filth and blood.

I hesitate to be fully honest sometimes because the truth of what I feel in my soul is far too explicit for what is normally considered acceptable. I bring a "lets look at the dark scary thing in the corner" vibe to the function that is generally very looked down upon. As much as I say I hesitate, it always bleeds out in ugly ways. I cannot refuse to see. I will not refuse to see. Give me truth even if it tears my soul apart.

I opened this essay with a meditation on purity because I feel that we are culturally at an impasse. Maybe we have been for many generations. At the center of our globalized existence, the echoes of an ancient kind of hunger reverberate through our bodies in terrifying ways. It whispers in the most quiet corners of our hearts telling us that it is not enough. More money. Hotter body. Higher status. More clicks. Grander narratives. If only they would let me crack. I bet you didn't even know that you NEED a 24 carat Labubu. Surely the gaping hole in your heart will be filled on your next doomscroll. Underneath all of the messaging lies its most fundamental echo: the only way to fill this endless hunger is to subsume yourself into an image of perfection that will rid you of your bodily flesh and, with it, all of its suffering. You will find salvation when you have torn out your own bleeding soul.

I can't help but groan at my own melodrama. I can hear the voice of my mom in the back of my head telling me that I think too much and that I am so dramatic. Both true and untrue. Under our given circumstances, I feel that my drama is merited. Well, I really think almost all drama is merited. Life is so incredibly strange and haphazard; if you don't fold yourself in a thick blanket of deeply violent but stabilizing illusions, it is so easy to get swept up into the madness of it all. I sometimes really understand how people lose their minds.

The desire for purity is also the desire for perfection. It is a cannibalistic impulse towards youth; an attempt at consuming the future in order to maintain the illusion that anything can remain untouched by time. We would reverse time if we could and freeze it in its grandest moment, immortalized for all eternity. Oh yes. This one is familiar. It is (*ding*ding*ding) HEAVEN! I am certain that all of our current issues derive from the base logic of our most prominent religious systems (but that is an essay for my theory substack). The desire for salvation is a tricky one. Wouldn't you give everything to live in eternal perfection?

Personally, the answer for me is a strong fuck no, but I can see its draw. I have always thought living eternally sounded incredibly unpleasant and boring. When life is filled with so much excess, nothing maintains its meaning. Though I do think that is the aim for many people who hold this belief close to their heart. Meaning is made through sheer scale; you only know you've existed when you've dominated over it all. I recently read a couple of ~manifestos~ of major venture capital firms that all circle around a kind of Temu logic of wealth. More. More. More. If you just add more, then everyone will be happy. Excess will feed your soul.

Maybe it comes naturally to me because I have fully felt my pain. I have allowed my suffering to shred my spirit only to forge it into something new. That being said, I understand why people are so afraid of friction and conflict. My soul has been beaten to a pulp on many occasions for breaking the rules. Eventually, you get used to it if you can adopt a "fuck it we ball" kind of attitude. Fear and shame are incredibly powerful forces: salvation offers a solution to never have to encounter it at all.

Herein lies all of our issues. We would so much rather live frictionless existences than meaningful ones. Or perhaps we are so all consumed by our suffering that we do not have the space to cultivate our own source of meaning. Suffering is tremendously powerful in that way. It has the capacity to consume your ego. Allow the voice of suffering to get too loud and you will find that it has possessed you entirely. You will become inseparable from your trauma; and somewhere deep in the darkest corner of your heart, you will know that you have chosen to become the very thing that snuffed out your own light. Hold onto suffering too long and it can be turned into a perverse power. Violence is justified if you are always the victim.

I am certain that the current state of the world is overrun with childish hungry beasts consumed by their own suffering. I know this because I have felt it - the grating of perfection on your soul. Every silent desperate plea for perfection is a violent blow to your spirit. Hate yourself into submission and you may find yourself very close to a beautiful image - Hell, you'll have the most insane resume of anyone you know. That finance job right out of college will for sure be worth the damage to your nervous system because you will get to lord it over everyoneee. You'll finally take up your proper position and maybe then you can let yourself be happy.

Of course everyone is obsessed with purity in our culture. It is either eternal suffering or eternal salvation. Perfection or suffer. What is funny about the obsession with perfection is that it never produces any good results. Fast and large ones maybe, but never fundamentally good. It is a pitiful kind of perfection that is built on subjugation and a cognitive dissonance so powerful it could distort reality itself. In the pursuit of more totalizing and absolute narratives, you birth something with a tremendous gravity deep within you that is very very small.

The solution, I have found, is to allow hunger to consume you entirely. This is not to be confused with consuming your hunger: that is what elicits the terrifying emptiness. The pacification of the hunger in your spirit with something immediate is what grows it until it is unbearable. Now, to allow hunger to consume you is to permit yourself to be suffer. Suffer so profoundly that your pain rips its jagged edges across your heart and mutilates your very being if it must. Let the hunger for life propel you through the darkest corners of existence; more importantly, allow it to pull you back to the light. Do anything to come back to center. Come back to love. Come back to connection. Come back to the gentlest most vulnerable parts of your soul. There is nothing too broken that cannot be made beautiful once again.