As long as I kept moving and doing and performing, it seemed that these “Black Dog” days of depression could be kept at bay. To be busy became a virtue, rather than a vice. For about thirty years I believed sloth was just lying around and didn’t understand that the other half of sloth is the constant busybody who cannot stop working. Thus it seems that sloth is more of a national pastime than baseball. Funny that I had never been told the word, “acedia,” also known as the Noonday Devil, in any of my schooling.

The old American ethic of hard work starts early and sets deep in the bones. Oddly enough, we call this the “Protestant work ethic,” which is ironic because Protestants reject “faith and works” in favor of “faith alone.” But they certainly understand work, or like so many of us, we speak about our hard work to express our virtue. I like to do that and then spend far too much time surfing the internet or reading books. This obsession with busy efficiency even filters into leisure time, where so often a vacation or weekend is jam-packed with busy events, to the point that after the leisure time, I need leisure time to recover from the leisure time. But of course, there is no time for that - it’s back to work.

As long as I never sat still for too long, and always had something to do, I would never have to look into the Big Empty. Everyone seemed to have this same malady of filling the time with must-haves which were nice-to-haves or not-really-needed-at-all. Through some good fortune, I had the opportunity to spend weekends as a child on farms, where the flow of life centered around the animals and the crops, and the mania of the suburbs didn’t infect me there. I also had the good fortune of a grandmother who would chase us away from the television and disallow it except for a short hour at night, so that we had to find outside, pastoral activities, like climbing apple trees, or chopping thistles around fences, or marveling at giant garden spiders with their webs in the tall grass, or catching elusive butterflies, or helping with a new calf, or playing with cats (or finding a dead one occasionally).

There was no rush to get somewhere or be anywhere because the dairy cows owned the clock. 

I was in that world for many years of my early life, and seemed to have forgotten it entirely once sports and school was lifted up as the way.

Because when the world came calling, I left that behind. The culture insisted, and I believed it, that the ways of the country swain were plain and dull. Music and movies went out of their way to persuade that the hicks were all ignorant. Hillbillys, hayseeds, and yokels were portrayed as white, male, abusive, ignorant, alcoholic, and oppressive, but from my own experience I knew better (or I should have). I remember the first time I heard someone actually use the term “flyover states” in derision on a business flight and how I laughed but secretly winced, knowing the goodness of the people in those lands that appear so empty from a tin can 30,000 feet up in the air.

The farm was gone from my life, and many of the actual farms themselves just disappeared. Like so many other little farms in the name of progress and solvency, nearly every one I had worked on had been sold to a larger concern. This land crash was the source of many songs and things like Farm AID in the 1980s.

All of the conventional wisdom steered me away from the simple farm life anyway. “There is no future in farming.” “There is no money in it.” “There is so much more to experience in the city, in traveling, in retiring on a beach somewhere.” The reduction of farm populations has been happening for centuries, I just happened to be in the last gasps. Agriculture had long been going the way of Walmart like every other industry, where brutal efficiency and economies of scale became the only way to remain a going concern.

Thus, the path forward was through schooling, sports, and especially STEM. Mostly, the way to rest was to be busy, not sitting in rocking chairs in the yard watching the sun go down. Plucking potato bugs out of mom’s or grandma’s giant garden, or bottle-feeding those hungry calves; no, these tasks were now best done by pesticides and (increasingly) immigrant workers. That way of life was coming to an end, visibly, as the roads I knew where many little farms had been in operation, dwindled to a few, and the few that were left no longer gave names to cows. Those cows with personal names like Pearl and Loretta now had serial numbers in a database.

My point from that long story is this: I’ve never felt more whole than when working on a farm, in the slow days, where time rolled with the lives of animals, crops, families, and the ever-present community that found a centerpoint under a Church steeple. Never once in that world did I hear anyone say the mantra, “Believe in yourself.”

Now: before I go on, let me put a damper on this rose-colored glass view of the “country life.” I’m aware of the oozing, reductive nostalgia. Ample struggles occur in the rural life. The people are sinners in many ways, like anywhere else. But clearly I’m not alone in lamenting our collective departure from the agrarian life and nature. The Romantics made a genre of it as a backlash against industrialization, against the mechanized worldview, and the rural life is now fully mechanized. Looking back to days in the country is a literary staple. Virgil was doing the same before Christ in his idyllic Georgics. In the Nativity story it is the shepherds, the lowly country people, most disposed to receive the good news. They were not making a name for themselves, they were living quietly like the lambs that they tended.

This is a theme even in the Old Testament. When Lot and Abraham go separate ways, Lot chooses to go to the city. Lot chose poorly because he strays from God. Abraham stays in the land with the flocks and remains faithful to God. David begins as a shepherd, innocent and naive, and only falls into sin once his name becomes great. The lesson of living the simple life is not in literature by mistake, it is from actual life experiences. Whether from Genesis, Luke, Virgil, or John Keats, this loss of innocence after leaving the farm is a common theme. In my own experience, those nearest to nature or farming, who are not just weekend suburban tourists punching their nature tickets, who live quietly outside of cities and society, seem to commune with the divine more readily. They certainly seem more prone to prayer. They give glory to the highest good, God, not the precious Self. And the cult of self-esteem had no time for that kind of cow-eyed view of life. Kneeling and silence and simplicity were never a part of my life in school or sports or career pursuits - and so as I was indoctrinated, such “useless” things came to seem like a waste of time.

Sport and School

To be playing a sport, or studying, or watching a sitcom, or eating or drinking was to be happy.

No, that’s not it. No, to be doing those things was to be busy.

And to be busy was to be useful. Even watching TV had a cultural currency of being able to speak the lingo of the week. To have watched the latest Seinfeld or Sopranos episode became applicable knowledge at the water cooler and at happy hour.

From the age of twelve onward, I was always busy with something, and if not busy, I was taking in multiple streams of noise, doing homework during American Top 40 or carving out time for appointment TV, like Saturday Night Live or The Simpsons. TV filled the gaps between homework and sports until I finally learned to enjoy reading. The goals of life were fairly straightforward: what was valued was youth, strength, knowledge, career, fun, and victory. Especially victory. In sports, the lesson was rivalry and competition. The self-esteem train continued through it all. The aim of life was to make a name for oneself, just like the builders at Babel intended. Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song should have been the school fight song. Victory, youth, vigor, success, wealth, fun, and who can forget sex? Valhalla, I am coming.

Arriving at the “age of reason” means the end of childhood. When it arrives, the seeds planted by those guiding the child begin to sprout. As to when I reached the age of reason, it’s hard to say. But when it did, what grew from the seeds of esteem did not flower as my teachers imagined.

Of course, the answer to all modern existential problems was to stay busy, to assuage the horror of looking into the void. To accomplish this we kept every hour of every day booked with running hither and thither, because experiences meant fulfillment. Fun meant life. Accomplishment brought esteem.

A student-athlete’s life is a constant blitz of must-do lists. I think that student-athletes understand the pressures of a quarterly sales world long before they should. The market’s “tyranny of the quarter” probably came to be from Anglo-Saxon student-athletes (scribe-knights?) who couldn’t kick the addiction. While salespeople live by “the number,” that monetary target they must hit, student-athletes go from one pressure situation to the next, and it’s never about what they accomplished the week before. It’s more like Glengarry Glen Ross. The question of coaches and adults is unspoken, but it is the same as a sales manager: “What have you done for me lately?” Oh, you won last night? There’s another game tomorrow. Your body is sore? Suck it up. You have a math test? You’ll have time on the bus. Do you even care? A season ends and the next begins. Are you even trying? I believe this is why Army basic training felt disappointing to me. I was expecting more of a challenge. After years of the student-athlete grind, the co-ed Army training didn’t really pack the punch I expected.

Somewhere around 10th or 11th grade the crackup started. I made it through several of these and I suppose each one makes you stronger, for a while. When the crack up starts, the load becomes visibly heavy. The solution of being busy stops working, and people notice. Then someone would play the good cop, and march out the old mantras: “You’re doing great. You’re very capable. You just need to believe in yourself.” This was like a kind of repetitive prayer for the self, but without any actual healing.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right, I should have practiced more.” “Yes, I should have studied more.” “I’m such an idiot - I just need to believe in myself.”

Even Sundays were not for sitting. The day of rest was eroding rapidly into a day for shopping and sports. I remember when people would not work, when stores were closed, when farmers would not even plow a field on Sunday. It was not long ago that the Third Commandment was taken seriously (which gives me hope that one day it will be again).

The years of middle school and high school rushed by - an absolute blur. School and sports provided the meaning of life, with a mystical career ahead. Without ever having read Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning I understood the basics of his logotherapy, which was that I needed a purpose, a goal, something to shoot for. Like many student-athletes it became a kind of religion. I think it’s fair to call it an idol. More accurately, we had a whole set of idols, like the Greeks had for gods of different domains of life.

In those early years when the mania of sports and school took over, I was certain that I would never use drugs or alcohol. That would be insane. How could I consider such a thing? How could I jeopardize sports glory for the pride of the town, the team, and my personal status? Even in eighth grade, I wondered why or how anyone would risk their athletic eligibility by drinking on the weekend. What kind of lunatic would do that? To Valhalla, through sports! Sports provided the most transcendent activity available, I thought, so how could anyone trade the beauty and goodness of dropping a three-pointer, or hitting a running back so hard that a snot bubble emerged from his nose? Did those teen drinkers not understand that they exchanged honor and glory for something as smelly and nasty as beer?

That was before I ever felt a buzz.

I realized that the transcendence of a buzz exceeded the glory of hard hits on the field or the sound of a swishing net. In that moment of the first buzz, I learned that the concept of self-belief was malleable to whatever I wanted it to be, because I was sole decision maker over what was good, true, and beautiful. Sports was out; the buzz was in.

Without a doubt, I began to lose the nerve in competition once alcohol blunted the edge. Where there had been a yearning to take the last shot, I now wanted to drink a shot. I no longer wanted the pressure. I wanted out. I wanted to move on, to post-high school, to escape - anywhere - to the military, or an adventure, or a trade. Race car drivers can “lose the edge” and be forced to retire, and I know exactly what that means, despite never having driven a race car. Once the inner burning fire of “rage to master” a sport is dwindled to a pilot light, the desire can only be faked.

What was good, true, and beautiful suddenly came in a can or a bottle, because that was instant escape. When the first shots of sloe gin had tucked me into an envelope of drunkenness, I felt more alive than in anything else before it. No, not alive - I felt dead to all concerns. I was removed from all other goals. The pressure of math and sports and needing approval suddenly and totally vanished, at least until morning. The warmth and tingle of the liquor took away all expectations, all resentments.

However, a warning sign appeared the very first night, as I punted a football at my friend’s house and broke a window. But that didn’t register as a signal from above to reconsider my choice, because I believed in myself. The broken window happened by chance. That was just bad luck, you see, not a lesson in free will.

In the first years of drinking, while sports and school still weighed heavily, days of utter despair would come and I had no answers why. There was no answer to, “What’s wrong?” Something was deeply wrong but I had nothing to blame but myself. Life and meaning were based on the self. So when the hours yawned, when I wasn’t busy, the edge of the Big Empty showed up. To escape its gaze was to jump into it. I could avoid it by achieving, or just fall into the Empty. Depending on the day or the hour, I would either believe in myself or be trying to destroy myself. Sports had become a burden and I wanted out by my senior year. I’d had enough of the screaming coaches and insanity. I wanted oblivion and escape. I wanted to be in the Big Empty. I’d had a decent share of minor sports glory and was ready to move on - it wasn’t the high I was looking for, because it wasn’t high enough. I wanted to play basketball just for fun, but that was impossible. In the machine of year-round high school sports, it’s a job. It’s far more like a job, but you don’t learn anything new and there is no life application for knowing how to beat a zone press. Win or lose, you get screamed at. Then in the huddle someone yells, “C’mon guys, we gotta believe in ourselves!”

Yeah, that’s what we needed. More self.

Years later, after a few ACL tears and knee surgeries in college, my physical strength had waned and sports departed from my life. Drinking and reading surged ahead, as I would work, drink, read, and repeat.

But after graduating from college and having no purpose other than to get a job and make money, the void began to stare back at me. No, it came looking for me, and drinking to avoid the void no longer worked. A repeating pattern like the movie Groundhog day is fun, but before long becomes a living hell. Signs appeared. I ignored them. Literally, like when I put my face through a windshield, having rammed my Jeep into a tree. Or when I missed work, or when I soured relationships speaking in slurred cursive. The isolation started. Those things were unfortunate, but really, I rationalized, they could have happened to anyone, I thought…or well, anyone that chose to drink to oblivion. The world was wrong, all wrong. I was right.

By age nineteen, I had already known the falsity of the joy of alcohol, and had tried quitting many times, even taking a whole summer off, and what a glorious summer it was, working on a farm. Yes, once again, after a year of internship in a cube in front of a laptop, I had one last hurrah working on a farm. Once again, I felt whole. But by autumn the liquor and college bars resumed.

In a few short years of drinking, I already could see the problem but could see no way out of it because to be rowdy and reckless felt like life. Life in the suburbs lay ahead and thought I did not want to go there, I was drawn toward it like a lodestone rock. It repulsed me, yet I was going to be there someday, and I wondered how could I possibly become one of those yuppies who pet their grass and check their 401k statements.

How strange it seems now, that the joy I once had from sports and school was gone, and I pretended that I was getting my meaning from drinking. Work was just something to be done between wild weekends. Honor and glory seemed less interesting than self-destruction. But then this was the 1990s, when bands like Nirvana and films like Fight Club drew so many young men. If you didn’t believe in anything, you could choose self-improvement or self-destruction. Like many others I knew, I tried to have both. And like every drinker who cannot quit, forgiveness of the self was granted weekly - because I needed to drink again for that brief escape.

The cult of self-esteem still had me, and what it led to was a cycle of self-salvation and self-hatred. I came to a bitter understanding of what St. Paul meant when we said in Romans, “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” And I knew that I wanted to quit, so badly sometimes, and I would swear it off, only to fail shortly thereafter. But truly I did not want to be healed, and here I came to understand St. Augustine’s struggle with sex addiction when he said, “Lord let me be chaste - but not yet.”

It makes me shudder to think of it now because I missed so many signs and chose so poorly in those years. They are terrific reminders for me, like the four stupid tattoos on my arm; these are forever reminders of the lost years, because they have no meaning, other than to do something to stay busy. I would love to stop here and tell you that alcohol was the whole problem. But when I quit drinking a decade ago, I found that I still “needed” anti-depressants. Alcohol was not the problem at all, it was only a mask, a symptom. Four years into that sobriety, I completed an Ironman triathlon and had achieved what I thought would cure me of all maladies, only to find that I was quite possibly as blue and lost when I was sober and accomplished as I had ever been drunk and insane. I was chasing banners, flags, mascots - I was an escapist - like the mobs of people in Dante’s outermost circle of hell. I was stuck in the modern infinite loop of acedia.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com