I went to a volunteer event this past Saturday at a church even through I am a devoted heathen. It was a fun time filled with positive energy, smiling families, and lots of 80’s music for some reason. I had to traverse a snowy landscape in the early hours of Saturday morning to get there. I kept thinking, as I was in route, about how different this was to the Saturdays of my past. Back then, I would only ever see six in the morning if I hadn’t yet gone to sleep.

This is intentional. Over the years, I’ve grown burnt out on consumption. There are only so many DJs to see, so many drinks to have, and so many cool bars to check out before it all starts to feel so empty. At least in my experience. And the people I was meeting while living the life of a consumer were not the kind of relationships that would grow or sustain me.

My hedonistic consumption reached a peak during the pandemic. As the world closed itself off and became inaccessible, me and my rag-tag group of acquaintances and drinking buddies fled to each other’s’ studio apartments, basements, and dilapidated rental homes. The only thing that united us, in hindsight, was our dissatisfaction, our loneliness, and our desire to escape some aspect of our realities.

But I wasn’t thinking about things too deeply. At that point in my life, my only concerns were to maximize the distractions and to minimize discomfort. I was terrified of effort and sincerity and would do anything to avoid these things. So, I constructed a life that would allow me engage with reality a la carte. I indulged in the things that were easy and avoided that which was difficult or asked anything of me.

As it turns out, reality, like anyone else, doesn’t like users. Increasingly I found myself alone despite having somewhere to be every weekend. I found that I increasingly didn’t like the face that was looking back at me in the mirror. As a result, I pulled away from the world for awhile. I didn’t know how to engage with it but I knew that the way I had been engaging with it was leaving me empty and sad.

I spent a lot of time alone. I purged my social media of weak ties and I pulled back from giving myself to people so easily. I wanted to starve myself of the distractions and the noise I had grown accustomed to using to drown out my internal discomfit. This may sound grand and enlightened, but in practice it entailed a lot of crying alone indoors and taking long solo meandering walks.

Eventually, ever so slowly, I became interested in being engaged with the outside world again. But I didn’t want to recreate what I had built before – I wanted to construct a new, more productive and more positive reality. I wanted my life filled with people who asked what they could give to the world, rather than those who calculate how much they can get from it. I want to surround myself with those people because I want to be that kind of person. I am not there yet, but I feel I am ready to do what it takes to get there. Even if it means waking up early on a cold Saturday morning.