The young man told me that his purpose going forward will be to help people overcome trauma and bad habits. I'm not sure those were his exact words, it's just my best recollection of his meaning.
How would he work toward that purpose constantly enough to stay distracted from the constant sales pitch of the world around him, which recommends sex, drugs and rock'n roll above all else? It's unlikely that he could resist that pitch, as is immediately demonstrated to me by my own automatic thoughts even as I write this: surely there's nothing fundamentally wrong with rock'n roll -- drugs can be immensely helpful if they are used correctly in emergencies -- sex is fundamental to life, isn't it? And the confusion seeps in from the very start.
How can I love Dylan's lyrics in Like a Rolling Stone and Mr. Tamborine Man; or the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil and Get off of My Cloud; or Lennon & McCartney's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Happiness is a Warm Gun... without secretly wanting to be disaffected, cynical, high and violent? The music of my youth is all around me all the time. I can never fully separate myself from it and I would never want to. My whole world is in that music; all of history is in those lyrics. Roger McGuinn's 12-string riffs, Hendrix's explosions in the national anthem, "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name!" and "You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal" feel like important pieces of my fundamental being.
How can I have benefitted from the polio vaccine, antibiotics, a neurosurgeon's skill and general anesthesia, and yet want to prohibit or discourage others from free, informed use of Prozac, psilocybin and cognitive behavioral therapy? Why would I hate to know that my children ever smoked weed, when I did it frequently myself my first year in college and sang John Prine's Illegal Smile song with so much joy? Why would I search for the perfect combination of drugs that might enable a dog groomer to make Spensuril beautiful and better smelling without getting bitten, yet tell that same groomer how deluded she is for implying something problematic about Spensuril's brain chemistry which a vet ought to know how to expeditiously fix?
And sex? Well, I have three wonderful children and three beautiful grandchildren. I've been married to the same woman for fifty years. But like everyone else (I think), it's not as though I was never some sort of pervert or cheater. It's not like the explicit scenes in the movies Poor Things and Body Heat, or the beautiful and silly sensuality of the women in "Sex and the City" never got my attention, or skirts and blouses never invited my notice. And what of erotic dreams for godsakes? Can Nietzsche really explain desire as a primary expression of the fundamental drive in all living things to grow, expand, and overcome resistance, not merely to survive, with his theory of the "will to power?" I desperately want it to be a happier issue than that!
So how can I advise the young man in trouble, though I am a relatively incompetent philosopher? I guess I would just say create a purpose. Your choice need not be perfect or serious. In fact, it should be as casual and even arbitrary as any game can be. If you get tired of a game you know you freely chose to play, you can stop playing it. And there isn't really any purpose except those you create yourself.
The complexity, and probably all travail in life, comes from games that are apparently not freely chosen. "Recovery from mental illness" is perhaps an example. People think, and are told that they have to. It's so serious. The brain is so serious, because it's so complex, and it's everything after all.
Except that's a lie: psychiatry's lie, to be exact. My first advice to the young man is refuse psychiatry!
And how about a casual purpose: Psychiatria delenda est!
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