Month: January 2022

Addiction, bullying, Law of Attraction, Love, Mental Health, Prayer

Nihilism is killing people

Katrina Russell

I want to start by saying that I wasn’t raised religious. This is important for me to point out because a lot of people feel that only people who were brainwashed from childhood could possibly be religious, and that’s just not true. Religion is for those who are looking for meaning in life. There are as many religions in this world as there are people because everyone interprets their religion in a personalized way.

Human’s need something to believe in. They need to feel like life is worth something. Not every religion is a good or positive religion, but they all at least give people hope for a future. People need hope. They need something to hold on to. People work all week for the weekends. They struggle all year for their vacation. They Scrimp and save for a house or car or something bigger and better that makes their life feel more complete.

People also need to feel like when they lose someone that they are not gone forever. That a part of that person lives on in some way. I was not raised religious, but after my father passed away, I couldn’t imagine an existence without him. He HAS to be watching over us. My son’s father used to think I was crazy. He’d try to explain all the ways in which it wasn’t possible. I told him none of that mattered. That no one could possibly KNOW what happens after we die so we can believe whatever we want. Whatever makes us feel better.

He couldn’t handle that explanation. He was a nihilist in its truest form. He couldn’t fathom a reason for any of it. He was scared out of his mind about dying. He would go into full-fledged panic attacks over the thought of it. He knew it would happen at some point, but he just couldn’t wrap his mind around not existing. He couldn’t see any other option, but he couldn’t handle the thought of just being gone. He didn’t understand why we bothered to live. Why we bothered to suffer. Why we bothered to work hard or fall in love or have a family if it just meant that we died in the end, and it was over.

This wasn’t anything new in his life. He had these feelings and concerns since he was a teenager. He couldn’t believe in anything that he didn’t have proof of. He felt empty all the time and turned to drugs. He ended up institutionalized multiple times before he turned 18. By the time I met him he had been diagnosed with bipolar, borderline personality, and generalized anxiety. He was in recovery for his addiction, but still heavily medicated for his other disorders.

He was a great guy, and we did fall in love. We did create a family. He loved our son more than he thought possible, but that caused him even more pain. He couldn’t understand what the point of all of it was. He couldn’t see why we should all put our energy into accomplishing things in life just to die. His goal was to actually become a robot. I used to laugh at that. I used to tease him saying, “like a cyberman from Doctor Who? You know those are the bad guys, right?”.

He didn’t see any other way. He couldn’t handle emotions. He couldn’t handle the fear, the unknown, emptiness that he saw in his future. The irony of his disease, his nihilism, his despair for the future is that it made him suicidal. He had tried twice before I met him, and I couldn’t understand when he told me how anyone so afraid of dying could want to die. He told me that it was the constant fear of the unknown. The constant exhaustion he felt over the anxiety of not feeling anything. The drugs didn’t work, the therapy didn’t work, nothing worked because he had nothing to believe in.

Every generation seems to be becoming more and more like this. They seem to not understand what life is about. They don’t want to work for things. They don’t want to get married. They don’t want to have a family. They just want to live a life of nothingness, of physical and momentary pleasures. Life is about the “Now” there was a whole book series about this, but I don’t think that any of them actually read or understood the concept of that book. The new generation has decided that religion, and family, and responsibility are somehow bad and that primal pleasures are the only things worth living for.

Yet every generation becomes more and more depressed. More and more dependent on drugs and alcohol. More and more suicidal. All anyone ever does anymore is complain about how miserable they are. How lonely they are. How broken they are. But when you suggest that maybe that is because they have nothing to believe in or goals to accomplish, or real relationships to depend on they just respond with something about the patriarchy and “ok Boomer”.

My generation was the first generation with a major war or a draft. My generation was the first to have vaccinations for the really harmful diseases. My generation went through life arguing about whether or not Die Hard was a Christmas Movie. We were the first generation that were just expected to go to college, and we did it without much help from computers and no one had cell phones or social media as kids. We were the last generation to be raised to think about the future.

The Millennials came up right behind me and suddenly everything they ever did was out on the internet for the world to see. Suddenly everyone was comparing their lives to everyone else’s, and no one was happy. No one saw value in anything. They just saw envy and greed and became a generation that focused on what they could get for as little work as possible.

I was the tail end of the Gen Xers and the beginning of the online dating scene. It used to be you had to meet someone in person. You had to talk to them. Get to know them. Get them to like you before you saw them naked. It took work and made the end result worth it. Now you just swipe, and you have a line up for the week. No work involved and no feelings of accomplishment either. Relationships are work. Saving is work. Work is work. No one wants to do that anymore. Because no one thinks that anything that happens actually matters.

I know that they’ll say, “oh I have to work 3 jobs just to afford rent”. Sure, and when people point out that you buy a new $1000 phone or a new $1500 game system every year you just scoff that you deserve it. Yes, things are more expensive. Things are always more expensive every year. But if you got married and had a joint income that would give you more collective money… but no one wants to do that.

Everyone wants to take a pill, hook up, and sit in front of a screen and pretend their life away. I saw a video of Keanu Reeves talking about his conversation with a kid who didn’t understand what was wrong with living in the Matrix. Who cares if it’s not real? He thought this was great! He literally missed the whole point of the 4 movies he was in. It’s not great.

I saw a commercial for the new Facebook Meta world VR system. There were two guys who played together all the time. They were great friends in the VR world. They were ignoring their families and annoying those around them. including each other. As it turns out they were neighbors and didn’t even know it. They just yelled at each other to “keep it down” when they heard each other enjoy each other in real life.

Is that the kind of life people really want? Ignoring and annoying their family and neighbors to live online? This world is becoming obsessed with not living. Like my son’s father who couldn’t handle real feelings and fears and wanted to become a Cyberman. And like my son’s father this whole world is killing itself with drugs and apathy.

August 14, 2019 Neil Thompson died of a drug overdose. He had just worked out a custody agreement with me. He had just finished his Associates Degree and was moving on to his BS. He had started a new relationship with a new girl who he lied to about all of his issues. He was found in his bed in his sober house because he couldn’t handle living while feeling. How long is it going to take the rest of the world to kill themselves in the name of nihilism, and not having anything real to believe in?

close up photo of woman with her hands tied with rope
Addiction, bullying, grief, Law of Attraction, Love, Mental Health

Trauma… the badge of honor

Katrina Russell

When did trauma become the cool thing? Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that people have trauma, but trauma is a horrible thing. Trauma is not something that you want wish upon your worst enemy. Most people have had some sort of trauma in their life and it’s all relative. I was in a pretty bad custody battle as a child. I lived in a car with my mom. My parents had a tug-o-war over me in the streets. I was kidnapped by my mom and brought to live in a church commune…. you know… a cult. These things can be pretty traumatic, but they all ended. Eventually these things stopped, and my dad got total custody and only allowed my mom to visit when he was around.

I had an older brother… on occasion he liked to kick the crap out of me. On occasion we played fanciful games together and had a great time. When we got to our teen years he fought with everyone a lot and ended up moving out at 17. I was 14. I remember having the guidance counselor at school try to talk to me about it. How was it affecting me? What could she do to help? That was easy, I was sad. I missed him, but there was nothing to be done until he came back. It was a little over a year before we heard from him again. I remember answering the phone when he called and being overwhelmed with emotions.

I dated jerk guys and nice guys. I had friendships fall apart and new one’s spring out of nowhere. I was unemployed, underemployed and worked too many jobs to count. My best friend became an alcoholic and I had to help her ex take care of their kids I lost my Grams and got married and divorced… and this was all in my 20s. (well, divorced in my early 30s)

By my mid-30s I felt like I was getting my s**t together. I was dating a great guy. We were talking about starting a family. I had a great job in an industry that I loved…. what could go wrong? Well, everything. By the end of my 30s I had found out that my mom, who I hadn’t heard from in years, was dead. I had my baby boy, whom I love more than anything in the multiverse, but his father had relapsed into a spiraling drug induced state… and when I was 39, I woke up one morning to find my father had died in his sleep. Eight months later his longtime girlfriend died as well… on my birthday, and a little over a month later, 2 days before Christmas, on my nephew’s birthday… I watched my dog get hit by a car. Since then, I went through a long custody battle of my own with my son’s father that culminated in him losing his battle with that said addiction… thankfully it was a few years later.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, I got my son a therapist. Losing his Papa and then the on again off again of his Da who finally died he was having some behavioral issues in school and a good healthy case of separation anxiety whenever he left my side. I call it healthy, because that’s what it was. It was his way of working out the things that he needed to work through.

I remember talking to his therapist about everything and her saying something along the lines of, “You’ve been through a lot, but unlike other people they aren’t things that you do that cause the problems. It’s things that just happen to you”. And she was right. The school councilor back in the day wanted to know how to help me. But there was nothing that could be done. My pain hadn’t come from anything that I did. It came from something that happened to me. My parents dying. My son’s father dying. Problems with exes, these were all the results of other people’s actions. Some people would find that disheartening. Some people would look at their trauma and their “victim status” as a reflection if not an identity of themselves. They would feel as if the world was against them and hold onto that trauma like an award that was given to them to prove how special they were.

I don’t see trauma in that way. I certainly don’t see bad things that happen to me as a reflection of me at all. I didn’t cause my parents to divorce, or my brother to leave, or my son’s father to do drugs, or my parents to die. These are things that other people have done that affect me but does in no way embody me. I am who I am despite all of these things happening around me and to me. I am who I am because of all of the things that happen around me and to me. It doesn’t do anyone any good to create a persona of trauma and hold onto it so tightly that it drowns you.

Trauma happens to everyone. I have been through my share, but it is nothing compared to what others have been though and its way more than some can imagine. Letting it dictate my life only lets the trauma and those perpetrating that trauma on you win. I’m not saying it’s easy to let it go. I’m saying its necessary if you want to move forward with your life. Somewhere along the line in our society it because desirable to be damaged. To prove that you have it worse than others. It gives you an excuse to not try, not do, not be…. everything that you can be because someone else broke you.

Bad things happened to you. I’m sorry. I truly am. But unless you want to live the rest of your life miserable and giving your power over to those that hurt you then you need to stand up and take your power back. You need to forgive those who caused you pain… and let go of what’s been drowning you.

aerial photography of rock formation
Politics, Prayer

Morals without Religion

Katrina Russell

I was born in the 70s and raised in the 80s and 90s. This was when a really big push away from organized religion and more towards “spirituality”. At least in the US. I was not raised in any particular religion, though I was brought up with Judeo-Christian values. My father had gone to Catholic school as a child and hated it. My mother was a Protestant who later developed schizophrenia and became obsessed with God talking to her.

Growing up my dad would read the children’s Bible to me, and we watched an awful lot of the History channel, so I learned about a lot of religions. The reasons behind them. Their beliefs. Their corruption. When I would do sleepovers as a child my dad would encourage me to go to church, or Temple or what have you with my friend so I could experience things on my own.

When I hit my late teens I started to really get into the Wiccan religion. This was around the time of movies like, “The Craft” and teenage girls were all drawn to the mystery… and Skeet Ulrich. This was also around the time of other outside religions becoming more popular. The ancient ones like what the natives and druids practiced as well as the more recent Buddhist. People were more about being one with Earth or the Universe than to answer to an overbearing Father figure.

I remember it became very popular for people to say, “You don’t have to be religious to be moral” and I agreed. I was particularly religious. I had gone to church a handful of times since my parents had split when I was a baby. I didn’t follow any doctrine or worship at any specific alter. I just knew what was right and what was wrong. I knew it was wrong to lie, cheat, steal, kill.. I knew it was wrong to be disrespectful to my dad or my grams. I knew that it wouldn’t do me any good to be envious of those with more or to be spiteful to those with less. I knew the Golden Rule was Golden not because some God told me so, but because it made sense and it felt right.

When I learned about religion I learned about philosophy and psychology and politics. I understood how people could say that all of the rules being spouted were more about leaders trying to keep a citizenry safe and obedient. How the same rules that God laid out in the TEN COMMANDMENTS were very close to the rules that were taught in “everything I need to know I learned in Kindergarten”.

Religious doctrines are rules created by which ever gods the religion believes in, and religious leaders decide are best for the people to abide by to create a working civilization. Some are good and some are bad, and you can tell their worth by how successful the society is. In some religions as in some politics there is a choice to make one the better and one the least of us. Good leaders treat everyone as an equal and gives everyone the same rules and same opportunities. This is something that the Western Enlightenment. Specifically, the Protestant Enlightenment has been fabulous at. For 10s of thousands of years tribes have been conquering, enslaving, and killing off other tribes. In just a short couple hundred years the Western Protestant Enlightenment changed all of that.

No one other than the Western Protestant Enlightened countries has ended slavery, has given women and children rights, and has even given its citizens the right to not believe in their God. You don’t have to be Christian in this country founded on Christianity, but you do have to follow their rules. Their morals. You don’t have to be religious to be moral… but you have to be moral. This country is losing their morality. We are becoming a country of literal Satanist. You think I’m kidding or being hyperbolic, but there are many who are turning to the “Satanic Temple” or some variation thereof. Their belief is that the individual is GOD. that all that matters is the individuals wants and needs and desires.

It is no longer about being a healthy and productive part of society. About creating a world that is better for your children and your children’s children. People today don’t want children. They don’t want to get married. They don’t want to work. They don’t want to pay off the debt they have accrued. All of those things are too hard. Being faithful, and respectful, and responsible is something other people used to do. The people who lived by the patriarchy or the theological bigots. People today want to do what feels good to them at the moment. Who cares who it hurts? Including themselves later.

So, now that I’m older, wiser, and seen more of the world. I think you do need some religion. Some guiding force. Something to help you become a good, strong, healthy member of society. Because left to one’s own devices no one will ever grow up… and no one will ever take on responsibility if they are not taught to, and civilization can’t be healthy without it.

Addiction, bullying, Mental Health, Politics

Just because you can laugh doesn’t mean you should

Katrina Russell

Social media is one of my favorite things. I’ve not going to lie about that. I have been on Facebook since MySpace got crazy. I have Twitter, Insta, LinkedIn, GETTR…. and so on. I love connecting with my friends. I love following my favorite PodCasters and news outlets. I even love following news outlets that I can’t stand anymore, just so I know what is being said.

I am very actively involved in my feed. Especially on Facebook. I’m in my mid 40s and that’s pretty much the demographic for that site. The moms of the world buying/selling on marketplace, setting up play groups, getting family event ideas and sharing all of our picture of our kids… fur or otherwise.

I like, comment and share my way through the day. I love the new “care” feature that has been added. It’s really good for people my age who have to comment on all the posts from friends whose kids are sick, who are losing their parents, who got laid off from a job, or are getting divorced. You don’t really want to like or love those posts, but you want to react to it in some way to show that you care…. viola! The share button is invented.

The one thing that I don’t understand is how people use the laugh button. I mean it’s really very sick. Especially with all the Covid information going about. I’ve read posts about people who have been locked down losing their homes, or their kids committing suicide, or businesses burned down during the BLM riots last year…. and the response is someone laughing. Laughing at kids committing suicide because they believe that none of that matters as long as we prevent Covid from spreading.

There is always a constant stream of people being diagnosed with Covid. Some of those people have chosen not to take the vaccine, because they know that no one knows the long-term side effects and they would rather take the chance with a virus. Then they get infected with Covid, and people hit the laugh button and comment that they hope that the person dies. People are hoping that other people die because they choose a different course of action in medical treatments.

A good proportion of this country in particular, but the world as a whole has become a cult in which if a person isn’t with them, they are against them. People are hoping for the death of their friends, family, coworkers, or fellow human beings because they make a different choice than themselves. They laugh at other people’s pain and heartache because they disagree with their perspective.

All over social media there are posts about Narcissists. Everyone claims to have dated one or be raised by one or to have worked for one, and I used to think that people were just being dramatic, but now I see that it’s true. Of course, the same people who are making the claims are they, themselves Narcissists. They are angry and lashing out on their Narcissistic mate because the other Narcissist didn’t cave to their own Narcissistic demands.

No one wants to get married anymore. No one wants to have kids. No one wants to take care of their parents. No one wants to work for their own welfare. Everyone just wants to take what they feel and laugh at other’s who disagree or get in the way. No wonder drug use and suicide rates are so high. Without empathy no one can have a truly meaningful life.