Chapter 26

“If I cared any less I’d be dead.” —Ruth, Ozark

I saw an article the other day that said 80% of Americans hate their jobs. If that’s true, then most people reading this probably think I had no excuse for shutting down, for going numb, for curling into a shriveled-up whale penis of despair just because I took a better-paying job in life. Millions of people drag themselves to jobs they despise every single day without isolating, breaking out in stress rashes, or struggling to haul themselves out of bed in the winter like some terminally ill Victorian orphan.

And that’s fair. My response wasn’t normal.

But feeling dead inside? That can be normal.

Hegel wrote about the horror of the mechanical human—that at our core, we’re just biological machines, mindlessly processing through life until we die. Žižek took it even further, calling us zombies. You wake up, shove food into your face, excrete it later, stumble through a workweek that feels like a scene from Groundhog Day, and then you do it all again. And if you don’t find a way to break the cycle, to add something real to your existence, you just keep going—rotting in place, alive only in the biological sense.

Nancy McWilliams, a psychoanalyst, touched on this in Psychoanalytic Supervision. She wrote about people who go through life with a kind of quiet deadness—no big tragedies, no real crises, just an absence of being. It first presents like anhedonia, but for these people, it isn’t some deviation from a previous state of joy or meaning—it’s just life.

Psychologists have tried to slap different labels on this type of internal deadness. Helene Deutsch called it the “as-if personality.” Joyce McDougall called them “normopaths.” Christopher Bollas called them “normotics.” Lacan talked about a lack of jouissance. André Green gave us the “dead mother syndrome.” Different names, same reality: an entire class of people who are physically alive but dead inside.

But here’s the key difference between them and survivors: someone who has never felt real vitality doesn’t know it’s missing. They don’t know they’re sleepwalking because they’ve never been awake. But for survivors, for people who have come back from the brink—who have stared into the abyss and somehow climbed out—going numb again isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s unbearable.

THE WAITING ROOM

Robert Lifton pointed out that for some survivors, a certain level of psychic numbing is necessary just to function. I felt that. I felt myself knowing something was wrong but not being able to name it. I had survived worse. I had come back from worse. But this? This was different. This wasn’t suffering. It was a slow, choking realization that I had left a battlefield and entered a world that didn’t need me. That I had traded war for waiting. That I had gone from clawing my way through life, fighting for something real, to sitting comfortably in my own private tomb.

And comfort, as it turns out, is just another way to die.

Let’s be honest, we live in a society that hands us everything we could possibly want—instant access to all the things that are supposed to make us happy. And yet, none of it works. The harder we chase it, the more meaningless it all becomes, dragging us further into an inauthentic existence where we should be fulfilled, but instead, we’re staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, wondering why life feels like an overpriced theme park with all the rides shut down.

And for those of us who spent years microwaving our dopamine receptors in the grip of addiction? It’s even worse. Because even if we get what we want, we can’t feel it.

Nancy McWilliams gets this. In Analytic Supervision, she acknowledges the particular hell that is post-addiction emptiness:

“. . . not only do people who feel dead inside seek substances like cocaine and amphetamines that will energize them, but they also learn eventually, even after becoming reliably sober, that internal deadness is a common aftermath of addiction which hijacks the dopamine system.”

Slavoj Žižek takes it a step further in Surplus Enjoyment, where he explains that we live in a “society of permissiveness.” In other words, we can have whatever we want, whenever we want it, which should make life more enjoyable—but instead, it makes us feel like shit. Why? Because our superego kicks in and tells us that if we aren’t happy, that we are the problem. The more freedom we have, the more guilty we feel for failing to enjoy it properly.

Think about it—this is the most comfortable, abundant, pleasure-saturated era in human history, and yet nearly half of American adults struggle with depression.

Žižek builds on a Freudian-Lacanian argument that says pleasure isn’t just about getting what we want—it’s about the struggle to get it. Pleasure exists in contrast to something else, in opposition to social values, rules, and restrictions. But in a totally permissive society, those restrictions dissolve, and suddenly, pleasure itself loses all meaning. We can have anything, anytime, and yet we’re more miserable than ever.

In this world of instant gratification, enjoyment becomes a duty—a job we have to perform, a social expectation we have to live up to. We start performing happiness rather than experiencing it, buying more things, posting more curated moments, signaling to everyone that we’re winning—all while feeling emptier than ever. It’s not just that we can’t enjoy things. It’s that we feel guilty for not enjoying them.

This is where Lacan’s objet petit a comes in—the unattainable object of desire. The real pleasure isn’t in the thing itself but in the chase, the journey, the struggle to obtain it. As Žižek puts it in Surplus Enjoyment, summing up Lacan:

“It is generated by the very performance of working towards a goal, not by reaching the goal.”

And when the world removes all obstacles between us and pleasure? We stop experiencing pleasure altogether. The struggle is gone, the chase is dead, and all we’re left with is an endless, numbing consumption loop.

Žižek also refers to Miller’s triangular model of oppression-repression-depression: when oppression is removed, repression is lifted, and what do we get? Depression. When life gets too easy, too abundant, too frictionless, it can kill our ability to feel anything at all.

I return to Edward Norton in Fight Club. He had it all. The nice apartment. The IKEA furniture. The corporate job. And yet, he felt nothing. He needed to be hit. He needed pain—because pain, at least, was real.

Some of us don’t need more options in the form of “freedom.” We need a barrier. A mountain to climb. A fight to win. A reason to bleed. Because without struggle, without resistance, without some kind of hardship to sharpen us—we’re already dead.

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