How We Try to Fill the Hole Inside: The Crazy Cycle

It’s astonishing how feeling-based, subjective, and cyclical many of our beliefs are. It’s not only us drug addicts, but food addicts, womanizers (sex addicts), bulimics, anorexics, alcoholics, nicotine addicts, social media addicts, game addicts, all of us, relentlessly seek the things that make us feel good. As we pursue them, we experience a sensation of momentary but fading satisfaction. If we want to feel that way again, we need more. Round and round we go, each time through the cycle our dependence increases. Outwardly, as we strive to find purpose and meaning we go through cycles. Inwardly our brain goes through similar cycles.

Each time around the cycle we make slight modifications, adjusting our objectives, goals, and methods slightly, confident that this time, we will be satisfied. And for a moment, a season, a year, or even longer we feel happy. When the feeling starts weaning away, we go at it again. We tell ourselves “Once I meet this goal, get this degree, score this girl, land this job, then I will be happy.” Once we accomplish these things, we find that we are still longing for more and still unsatisfied, so we reevaluate and establish new goals (sometimes more mature or other times more desperate and promiscuous). We say “I get buy my home, once I have children and a family, once my kids are successful, once I get that dream car or boat, then I will be satisfied.” We often set one goal at a time, sometimes we do it consciously and other times it is subconscious. We put our hope in something, we long and strive for it, then we are surprised to find that once we get it, it we are not satisfied or the satisfaction we get from it does not last, so we need to go again.

We use all sorts of different things to fill the hole inside. Whether we use material items, wealth, success, prosperity, drugs, status, fame, relationships, religion, or anything else, the odds are that we feel very discouraged and disheartened when we do not experience lasting purpose, meaning, or pleasure. Before I could move forward, I had to figure out the cycle. I slowly replaced every bad habit that I could with good ones. I replaced bad influences in my life with good ones. Instead of using drugs, I used exercise to relieve stress and deliver dopamine to my brain. I stopped putting myself in triggering environments. Instead of going out with friends I would spend time at the gym and enjoy the sauna. I smoked cigarettes since the temporary buzz that they gave also distracted me from my deeper longings and temptations. I went to support groups that provided me with a sense of belonging and therefore met many of my social needs. It would take me years before I could start mustering up this type of self-control, but even when I did it, I still felt empty and it still seemed meaningless. .

Looking down on others boosts our confidence, strengthening the idea that we’ve got life figured out. Our patterns and biases, concretize into habits. We convince ourselves that everything is fine and we continue in slightly varying cycles over and over again. The cycles are different enough each time that we can convince ourselves that, ‘this time’, we have grown and moved forward, and maybe we have. Yet, round and round we go, following fun, following prosperity, following success, following lust, following health, in a world based on ourselves. Maybe this is the point of life, the sum of all it will ever be. An unpredictable alteration between good cycles and bad, between good days and bad. A hollow repetition in which we go from one thing to the next, one habit, one relationship, one job, one home, one party, one spouse, one friend, one hobbie, one car, to the next, to the next, to the next. Taking what we can get from them and using it to temporarily nullify the deep gravitational pull of the black hole inside.

The reality is that we don't know what we want. One day we want one thing, the next day another. If we don't know what we want, how on earth are we supposed to know what we need? What i've found is that the one who made my heart knows it better than I do. He knows what I was designed for, how I was hardwired, what makes me feel alive. He knows my heart because He created it and put it inside of me. Even if my best efforts can't fill the void and free me from the cycle, He can, because He designed me.