The Nerdist Way_ How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) - Chris Hardwick [36]
ADDICTION-ARY
This chapter may not be for everyone. If you don’t feel the nagging tag of addiction, telling you to partake of substances that you know in your higher brain are bad for you, then skip this part! I don’t believe that everyone who drinks is an alcoholic. There is nothing inherently wrong with alcohol. If you can do it responsibly, drinking is like pouring smiles on your brain! Also I realize that addiction can cover a wide variety of flavors encompassing food, drugs, the Internet, drama—whatever. Almost anything is obsessable. For these purposes, though, all I can do here is talk about some of the stuff I went through, and you can agree or tear these pages out and wipe your butt lips with them.
I will say, however, that it’s my guess that a lot of Nerds suffer from addiction. We are a group that obsesses over things, dives into things to the level of Abyss depth, and has a very active internal monologue. These are some delightful ingredients—mixed with a bit of genetic predisposition—for overdoing things that make us feel good in the moment. For me, it was all about drinking. I was never really able to smoke the weed or do hard drugs. The few times I did the former, I had panic attacks because I thought that my heart would stop beating if I didn’t concentrate on it (this is a strong deterrent). The latter I avoided altogether, my thinking being something along the lines of, “If I can’t handle pot, a drug that is supposed to mellow you out, then something like cocaine would probably make me feel like my internal organs would want to exit my body all at once via my skin.” The fear of leaping into traffic during a narcotic-induced freak-out was enough to keep me away. Beer, it turned out, made me feel like I was in control, which was a big thing to me. Many Nerds led tumultuous young lives. Besides being a bit smarter than their counterparts, many Nerds are socially ostracized. I believe that because the Nerd is not being sated in the external social world, he or she is forced to turn inward. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, in that it paves the way for self-awareness and introspection. You know how some of the popular kids in school seemed to lack substance? This is because they were not in a social stratum that forced them to search themselves to find any. Many of their grade-school successes were predicated on the fact that they were accidentally attractive or rich or outgoing. Jocks live in an external world. They don’t plot. They don’t plan. They just act. Many of these types grow up with an unearned arrogance that will either further their aggressive-bastard quest into adulthood, or destroy them when their external qualities begin to fade and their lack of depth renders them emotionally unarmed, and without the necessary tools to cope with life.
Nerds, on the other hand, are HYPER-self-aware, as I have previously stated—sometimes to the point of being unhealthy. For me, drinking beer was a way to silence this awareness, or at least take it down a few notches. For others it could be pot, eating, drama (yes, some folks are hopelessly addicted to creating drama), whatever. I think it all comes from the same place. We have difficulty controlling our brains and we get into a pattern of gaining control artificially. Ultimately for me, I think a lot of it had to do with control. Nerds LOVE control. They crave it. Eating a shitload is a form of control over your body. Video games are chance to control a universe. Never striving for better in life is a way to control your outcomes: If you don’t try, you can’t be rejected. Whenever I could fire a regular stream of beer into my gaping maw, I knew exactly