Everything Is F*cked(6)

We will then return to the original question: what is happening in our world that is causing us to feel worse despite everything consistently getting better?

And the answer might surprise you.





Chapter 2


Self-Control Is an Illusion


It all started with a headache.1

“Elliot” was a successful man, an executive at a successful company. He was well liked by his coworkers and neighbors. He could be charming and disarmingly funny. He was a husband and a father and a friend and took sweet-ass beach vacations.

Except he had headaches, regularly. And these weren’t your typical, pop-an-Advil kind of headaches. These were mind-crunching, corkscrewing headaches, like a wrecking ball banging against the back of your eye sockets.

Elliot took medicine. He took naps. He tried to de-stress and chill out and hang loose and brush it off and suck it up. Yet, the headaches continued. In fact, they only got worse. Soon, they became so severe that Elliot couldn’t sleep at night or work during the day.

Finally, he went to a doctor. The doctor did doctor things and ran doctor tests and received the doctor results and told Elliot the bad news: he had a brain tumor, right there on his frontal lobe. Right there. See it? That gray blotch, in the front. And man, is it a big one. Size of a baseball, I reckon.

The surgeon cut the tumor out, and Elliot went home. He went back to work. He went back to his family and friends. Everything seemed fine and normal.

Then things went horribly wrong.

Elliot’s work performance suffered. Tasks that were once a breeze to him now required mountains of concentration and ef fort. Simple decisions, such as whether to use a blue pen or a black pen, would consume him for hours. He would make basic errors and leave them unfixed for weeks. He became a scheduling black hole, missing meetings and deadlines as if they were an insult to the fabric of space/time itself.

At first, his coworkers felt bad and covered for him. After all, the guy had just had a tumor the size of a small fruit basket cut out of his head. But then the covering became too much for them, and Elliot’s excuses too unreasonable. You skipped an investor’s meeting to buy a new stapler, Elliot? Really? What were you thinking?2

After months of the botched meetings and the bullshit, the truth was undeniable: Elliot had lost something more than a tumor in the surgery, and as far as his colleagues were concerned, that something was a shitload of company money. So, Elliot was fired.

Meanwhile, his home life wasn’t faring much better. Imagine if you took a deadbeat dad, stuffed him inside a couch potato, lightly glazed it with Family Feud reruns, and baked it at 350°F for twenty-four hours a day. That was Elliot’s new life. He missed his son’s Little League games. He skipped a parent-teacher conference to watch a James Bond marathon on TV. He forgot that his wife generally preferred it if he spoke to her more than once a week.

Fights erupted in Elliot’s marriage along new and unexpected fault lines—except, they couldn’t really be considered fights. Fights require that two people give a shit. And while his wife breathed fire, Elliot had trouble following the plot. Instead of acting with urgency to change or to patch things up, to show that he loved and cared for these people who were his own, he remained isolated and indifferent. It was as though he were living in another area code, one never quite reachable from anywhere on earth.

Eventually, his wife couldn’t take it anymore. Elliot had lost something else besides that tumor, she yelled. And that something was called his goddamn heart. She divorced him and took the kids. And Elliot was alone.

Dejected and confused, Elliot began looking for ways to restart his career. He got sucked into some bad business ventures. A scam artist conned him out of much of his savings. A predatory woman seduced him, convinced him to elope, and then divorced him a year later, making off with half his assets. He loafed around town, settling in increasingly cheaper and shittier apartments until, after a few years, he was effectively homeless. His brother took him in and began supporting him. Friends and family looked on aghast while, over a few short years, a man they had once admired essentially threw his life away. No one could make sense of it. It was undeniable that something in Elliot had changed; that those debilitating headaches had caused more than pain.

The question was, what had changed?

Elliot’s brother chaperoned him from one doctor’s visit to the next. “He’s not himself,” the brother would say. “He has a problem. He seems fine, but he’s not. I promise.”

The doctors did their doctor things and received their doctor results, and unfortunately, they said that Elliot was perfectly normal—or, at least, he fit their definition of normal; above average, even. His CAT scans looked fine. His IQ was still high. His reasoning was solid. His memory was great. He could discuss, at length, the repercussions and consequences of his poor choices. He could converse on a wide range of subjects with humor and charm. His psychiatrist said Elliot wasn’t depressed. On the contrary, he had high self-esteem, and no signs of chronic anxiety or stress—he exhibited almost Zen-like calm in the eye of a hurricane caused by his own negligence.

His brother couldn’t accept this. Something was wrong. Something was missing in him.

Finally, in desperation, Elliot was referred to a famous neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio.

Initially, Antonio Damasio did the same things the other doctors had done: he gave Elliot a bunch of cognitive tests. Memory, reflexes, intelligence, personality, spatial relations, moral reasoning—everything checked out. Elliot passed with flying colors.