money, hedonism, and repentance

Without doxing myself, I'm a nepo baby that comes from generational wealth. Probably like within the top 5%, hell, maybe even 1% at one point or another. I remember my haraboji losing like ten million in the stock market and letting out a deep sigh. It was a substantial loss, but nothing that couldn't be remade.

In spite of this, I've felt fucking miserable for most of my life. I can attest firsthand that money does not buy happiness. It's made everything awkward for me. Every friendship, every crush, every moment that should’ve felt pure or human or earned has always had these invisible strings puppeting it. 

Would they still be here if I had nothing? Would they still laugh at my jokes if I couldn’t pay? Would they still say they loved me if I wasn’t a nepo baby?

That's when the hedonism kicked in, I think.

When nothing feels real, you seek sensation, any sensation, just to prove to yourself that you’re alive, that there's more to life than having a sixty-thousand dollar car at seventeen (eighteen now). Cheap thrills, expensive mistakes, girls I pumped-and-dumped on my personal quest for validation. I wasted too much of my adolescence confusing attention for affection, lust for love, and chasing the rush of someone wanting me like a junkie.

It never worked. Not once. Every high was followed by that metaphysical hangover, that sinking post-orgasmic dread where you stare at the ceiling and realize you’ve just emptied yourself for nothing again. Hollowed out for the sake of an impulse. A dog chasing a ball he doesn’t even want to catch, yet doing it anyways.

The guilt caught up to me last summer in Maine. A dusty old Victorian house with creaking floorboards and salt-damp air. Suddenly everyone I’d hurt crawled out of the walls like ghosts. It was like a shot of neuroplasticity, or frontal lobe development happening in real time. Being hit with the awareness that I wasn’t the misunderstood tragic figure I liked to imagine myself as. Rather, I was the villain in a lot of paperbacks I'd never bothered to read.

I guess I'm still trying to get over a lot of that. Sometimes I think the worst punishment the universe, or God, or whatever bumfuck is responsible for my existence can give is self-awareness without motivation or discipline. Sometimes it feels like I'm trapped inside of my own head clawing at myself to do something, anything, yet I end up doing nothing at all.

I don’t even know what repentance would look like for someone like me. Donate a bunch of money? Cut off all the fake friends? Been there, done that, felt nothing. Apologize to every girl I treated like shit? They’ve moved on with their lives. They've healed. I’m the one still wallowing in a pity-party.

Some nights I lie awake and wonder if this is just karma, or cosmic equilibrium, or whatever poetic bullshit people use to justify their suffering. Maybe I’m being forced to feel the things I made others feel. Maybe this is my repentance, being stuck carrying the weight of my own awareness.