Goofy Shit

Life is absurd. Sometimes, it’s goofy and absurd. Recovery circles have some of the goofiest and most absurd shit I have ever seen, so here’s a bunch of them in no particular order.

Case Zero

The specific incident that motivated me to start sharing some of the goofy shit in these circles is when I had to roleplay as a passive-aggressive rapist in a group session.

Within the confluence of events that led to this moment, not a single person must have imagined that this would be the outcome:

• The idea of using group sessions to build a sense of community and mutual support among those in recovery is a good instinct.

• The idea of writing a letter to someone you’re angry at or sad about just to vent is one that works for a lot of people; almost everyone who goes through treatment will end up writing or reading the goodbye letters to a personification of an addictive substance or process. It can help to apply this to people and relationships we would like to leave behind as well.

• Someone using this opportunity to vent anonymously about someone who deeply traumatized them in the past is engaging entirely in the spirit of the exercise. They did also write that they wanted to kill me, but I didn’t take that personally.

• The two-step process of first writing the letter and then getting a response back through roleplay might be a little tricky, but it might be able to bring closure to people who would never (or can’t) voice the letter to the actual person.

• The exercise’s stipulation that we use a communication style we try to avoid led to me being “passive-aggressive” (if you think I actually am passive-aggressive, well, everyone’s entitled to whatever opinion helps them sleep at night). In any case, it can definitely push someone into the headspace of a different style of communication which is arguably helpful.

All of this in combination led to me writing a passive-aggressive postcard while roleplaying as someone’s rapist. It reminds me of a software project where each module is doing exactly what it was intended to do, but the way they operate together at scale can produce some unforeseen and bizarre events. In this case, I have no idea if the author of the postcard found it helpful or not.

I will say though that roleplays seem to be a real hit or miss. Someone once shared that in one group roleplay session, a facilitator assumed the role of her deceased grandfather and tried to hug out the pain. It did not help them process the grief, it just added a goofy absurdity to the memory of loss.

Case One

I once called comedian Mark Lundholm a “fucktard” to his face, and then I got a free copy of his book Shortcuts: Better Ways to Better Days.

Case Two

I’m not taking advice about ambivalence from someone who spells it “ambivalance.” I’m sorry, but if you’re standing in front of a whiteboard ready to lecture me for an hour and cannot spell the topic, I am mentally checking out at best. At worst, I’m questioning the credentialing processes that allowed you to be lecturing. I’m not saying this to nitpick spelling or grammar as I make plenty of mistakes myself on this site alone, but if you’re lecturing on a subject, you have to at least care enough to spell it right.

Case Three

“I’m angry that my government is ignoring people’s rights and just pulling people out of their homes and off the streets.”

“But how does that affect you though?”

A group facilitator and a client got into a long argument over this point, and though they didn’t express the disagreement in philosophical terms, they were having a deeply philosophical disagreement that I’ve touched on through this site before.

What happens when “you can control nothing except yourself and your faith that a Higher Power will shape the world outside of you” meets “democracy requires a deliberative collective of citizens willing to think critically to hold their leaders and systems accountable?”

By the end of the conversation, I was fairly fucking horrified, because “I can’t control anything except myself” ends up being a wiser-sounding version of “I was just doing my job.” This isn’t a new revelation; psychologists, political theorists, and commentary from the recovery community have all connected this strand of hyperindividualism to complicity with authoritarian structures. What was really horrifying though was seeing how an enormous philosophical gap between authoritarianism and self-empowerment was condensed into a group facilitator yelling at a client that they wouldn’t be sober if they kept their beliefs, all started by a disagreement about a 10-minute motivational video off YouTube.

By the end, both were only more entrenched in their worldviews. The facilitator took the exchange as confirmation that clients have to be made to doubt their self-will more in order to humble themselves to receive the serenity from their Higher Power. The client, while still motivated to find recovery, grew more skeptical of institutional interventions and their capacity to understand the real world outside the facilities they maintained.

Once again, if AA works for you, great, but taking the AA philosophy as a baseline framework for recovery is inherently a sociopolitical stance, not just a spiritual one. The author of the Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr, was famously a pro-union Socialist Party of America leader who collaborated with Martin Luther King Jr. on the issues of class warfare, international relations, and civil rights. He also hated the premises of the Oxford Group as being fundamentally fascist and delusional about producing change in the world in a way that only the most privileged people in society could embrace. William Wilson (Bill W.), the founder of AA, credits the Oxford Groups for directly inspiring the 12 steps.

So, you cannot take the political out of the spiritual or the religious. Even the distinction between “spiritual” and “religious” is fundamentally a political phenomenon. If you mean to introduce that premise into a psychoeducation class or facilitated discussion session, you’re going to run into deeply held beliefs about politics and society.

Case Four

I have had multiple classes in which the facilitator turns on a soundbowl ASMR for an hour and takes a paid nap. I have had others where we watch a Ted Talk, go around the room to answer how we felt about it (“I agree, we should make choices that improve our happiness” or something equivalently shallow), and then watch another Ted Talk. I cannot see the therapeutic value in this process, and I do not blame half the class for ignoring the rules about not being on their phones. An hour of Sudoku or texting a friend seems more therapeutic than being lectured by prerecorded “happiness coaches” rehashing corporate propaganda from a decade ago. To quote a facilitator, “I get paid either way.”

Case Five

I walked into a doctor’s office and explained how I had been managing recovery, medication, and other health issues, hoping to get advice on what works in the long-term. Instead, after telling the doctor about my recovery approach, they took out a notepad and asked me to repeat it so that they could recommend it to other patients. I came to get an expert’s evaluation, and I left having given the expert my self-evaluation. In that moment I truly felt the old adage land, “No one is coming to save you.”

Case Six

I once had a therapist attempt to be culturally sensitive by handing me a worksheet describing “Indian-American values” to, supposedly, help me discover the value system from which I could find the strength to apply coping skills. I, an actual Indian-American, am sitting in front of this person and can answer questions about my relation with my culture and the negotiation of values involved in applying those to a changing world. I have no idea what therapeutic manual recommended that was a good way to go. Admittedly, it’s not a reasonable expectation for a therapist to know about cultures around the world, but neither is it reasonable for me to explain air to a fish that’s only known water.

Case Seven

If you didn’t walk into a treatment facility using nicotine, you almost certainly will walk out using it. You might as well with all the secondhand exposure you’re guaranteed to inhale. I have been given an absurd amount of free vapes. I feel like a kid in a candy store.

Case Eight

Someone named their kid Justin. Middle name Hale. Justin Hale. Just inhale. I know I’ve brought up the “No True Scotsman” fallacy when it comes to discussions about being a “True Addict”, but this is one of those incidents that makes me reconsider that position.

Case Nine

If you’ve seen Better Call Saul, you might recall that there’s a story beat where Mike Ehrmantraut attends a support group for people who lost loved ones at the request of his daughter-in-law. While it represents a turning point for Mike when he turns away from the group and the prospect of processing his grief, the scene also depicts a real phenomenon of someone faking stories in peer support circles to elicit sympathy, compassion, and attention. Sometimes this is through a clinically-recognized Factitious Disorder, historically referred to as Munchausen syndrome, though the show doesn’t explicitly use this label. Many peer recovery groups begin with a premise of unconditional support rather than cross-talk and questioning in order to create a safe space to share their stories. Anonymity and rigorous honesty form a complex paradox, a fine line of enabling or disabling each other. People who seek attention can readily get it from these groups without the years of gradual intimacy it can take to share deeply personal traumas.

Anyways, it was surreal the first time I saw someone fake stories in a real support group. I didn’t notice it at first because you hear a lot of genuinely crazy stories when you put a group of people who live in subcultures on the margins of broader society into a single room. Also, I just struggle to pay attention when people who are not me are talking longer than 15 seconds. Over time though, I begin to notice details that don’t add up, that don’t seem like they can just be chalked up to the ordinary messy process of memory retrieval and reconsolidation that people always undergo.

Their cadence seems rehearsed, not in the way that someone with social anxiety might try to prepare their thoughts before speaking, but in the way that a standup comedian plans to pause for audience feedback. If and when it doesn’t come on some nights with a tougher crowd, a panicked expression flickers across their face as if they missed a step walking down the stairs. If they try nervously to recover, they can end up slipping between associated concepts. An ex-girlfriend becomes a fiance becomes an ex-wife, who cheated with a best friend who becomes a random Tinder hookup who becomes a sugar daddy after they drove her away through a DOC that changes each time the story is recounted. One gets the impression that the speaker is giving a new improvisation of the same rejected mad libs script.

But creating and remembering stories is exhausting, so lies and sarcastic jokes are often wrapped around kernels of truth. The most sincere part of the story this person expressed was their repeated ostracization from groups they joined, oblivious to how they were the common denominator in each of these instances, but especially oblivious to the way even their own description of events raised eyebrows. Complaining that people don’t get your sense of humor, especially when we’re talking about people in recovery who have an unusually high tolerance for dark humor, edgy jokes, digusting rock bottoms, and tough love, is a major red flag.

An interesting contradiction I noticed though is that this person, despite their vocal and enthusiastic sharing in the context of group, had almost no interpersonal dynamics outside of the meeting structure unless it was part of an emotional rollercoaster that factored into the stories of trauma they shared at meetings. In fact, they seemed to keep to themselves when the spotlight was off, so to speak. I wouldn’t make this claim if I was the only one who felt this way. It was echoed numerous times by others in private conversations, yet no one dared to break the trust and culture of the recovery group by suddenly accusing someone else of making up their story. To do so would be to put everyone on their toes for an accusation as if giving testimony on a witness stand. So we all carry on agreeing to the polite fiction that we’re all practicing rigorous honesty underneath the anonymity.

Case Ten

The idea of having to hit a “rock bottom” before you can change is really dangerous. I hear it said very often in recovery circles that someone didn’t feel they could change until they hit a rock bottom where they lose everything but achieve some “gift of desperation” that permits transformation or a “real” desire to engage in recovery. There’s an almost admirable self-awareness people can express about their ambivalence towards the cognitive dissonance behind knowing they should change but don’t think they can until they hit a point of no return.

I’d like to help by offering my own two cents. There are only two real rock bottoms: death and a state worse than death. In neither case can you be certain that you get to return.

A lucky few are resuscitated after an overdose, an unlucky fewer are resuscitated only to end up hooked to machines in constant pain and intermittent lucidity while loved ones accumulate massive debts to sustain whatever quality of life your organs are sputtering out. Families can’t just decide not to pay either; in states like North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, Texas, California, Arizona, Washington, and others, families can be legally on the hook for costs. Hospitals can sue to garnish wages and place a lien on shared property, especially in the cases of a healthy spouse with income or adult guardians who are entirely liable for minor dependents. Sometimes, in the chaos of emergency operations and admissions, families will quickly sign paperwork that might have them acknowledge their role as legally-bound financial guarantors for a patient’s healthcare costs. There are also some old laws that are still technically valid in over two dozen states that state adult children are liable for supporting elderly parents, though in practice government funding steps in before hospitals pursue those avenues. No guarantees though. And while all this is happening, you might have no ability to communicate that you’d like to refuse further treatment and accept whatever dignity remains in choosing death.

So, you can pick any moment to decide to change. You can declare where you are right now as a rock bottom you have no interest in breaking down to find an even deeper hole. You are condemned to have the freedom to choose to change. I recommend choosing it sooner rather than later.

Case Eleven

Who the actual fuck thinks it’s funny to drop a literal metal pipe in the middle of a sound bowl session

Case Twelve

I’d like to break this up with something more positive than the last. The diversity of people you can meet across recovery circles is unbelievable.

I’ve met people whose families own vineyards and yachts, lawyers at major corporations and public agencies, undocumented immigrants who are the first in their families to attend a university, reformed felons who survived multiple shootings, disowned teenagers who killed traffickers in self-defense and earned thousands street-fighting, lab techs who created and tried experimental tranquilizers, strippers turned DJs, military soldiers whose butt-chugging would put every college fraternity to shame, and a lot of very sweet dogs. Granted, there’s also the occasional neo-Nazi who pops off about interracial marriage or the homophobe who loses their mind about rainbow pencils being given to kids in June, but recovery circles are decentralized enough that you can avoid a lot of those nutjobs.

It’s genuinely inspiring to see how people can form networks to take care of each other in these environments when they’re facing common problems that they can actually talk about. I can ask someone “how are you?” and it’s not just a polite formality born out of cold intimacy as the beginning of a small talk ritual, where someone feels compelled to respond with “I’m fine” or “I’m good” through a fake affect. That allows a lot more support and resources to be exchanged between people once they’re not feeling obligated to repress their experiences to maintain the polite fiction that the world is an absolute mess that feels suffocating to handle alone. I will give credit where it’s due, Alcoholics Anonymous is an incredible mutual aid network that embodies an anarchist model of human organization and autonomy.

Case Thirteen

Always wear shower slippers in a treatment facility. IYKYK.

Case Fourteen

This one is only barely relevant, but I figure with how much TV everyone watches as a mind-numbing sober activity, it’s worth a mention. There is perhaps no quicker way to make a movie seem ridiculous than casting models to play an ugly outcast. If you watch enough D-tier garbage on Amazon Prime, it can really start breaking your immersion.

Case Fifteen

There’s a Round Table Pizza in Lake Forest, California that, for some reason, provokes the strangest racist rants from people. I haven’t been there a single time without experiencing someone having something of a manic breakdown over racist conspiracies.

The first time, some kid in his 20s was losing his mind over the concept of interracial marriage as he couldn’t understand why someone didn’t want kids that didn’t look like they did. He then launched into a pseudoscientific rant about how scientists can infer your race based on your skeletal structure so that “race is bone deep, not just skin deep, man.”

For the record, that’s not what the science says. What researchers have actually found is that humans have undergone natural selection based on the locations they live in, so that we can make an educated guess about what part of the world one’s ancestors might be from based on some physical characteristics. For instance, someone with narrower nasal openings is more likely to be from a population that lived in cold, dry climates while wider openings correspond to warm, humid climates. So, we might guess that someone with the narrower openings is more likely to be from the region of present-day Norway than present-day Venezuela. That’s it. That’s the entire finding, which should be unsurprising to anyone who learned the first thing about Darwin’s observations of local wildlife at the Galapagos Islands in 1835. The researchers are tracking geographic correlates, not anything comparable to racial essentialism. In fact, genetic studies consistently show that there is more genetic and physical diversity within racial groups than between them.

Yet, this kid insisted he knew a lot about this science, so much so that he was regularly asked “are you a neo-Nazi or something?” He did not actually clarify that he wasn’t, he just laughed at the question being asked of him. One gets the sense that he was all too unfortunately inspired by TikTok edgelords. And also, he claimed to be white while also claiming to be descended from Italians. Apparently his research did not inform him that Italians were not considered white or equals to Northern Europeans and Anglo-Saxon tribes for centuries, and many still do not consider them as such. In the American South, Italian immigrants experienced segregation and lynchings alongside Black Americans, not to the same degree but for the same underlying reasons. FDR’s politics and calls for national unity in WWII moved the needle and brought Italian-Americans into the fold of White suburban neighborhoods distinct from Black and brown communities.

My armchair psychologist headcanon is that his insistence that he inherited great White traits from his mother is compensation for not having inherited enough traits from his father to feel masculine. It’s a shame, he’d make a halfway decent femboy if he just gave in.

The second racist rant didn’t go on as long but was equally passionate. A gentleman took great issue with how “the Jews own everything. A Jew owns PornHub, a Jew owns OnlyFans-”

One kid interrupted to save this gentleman from himself: “you mean Israeli billionaires right? There’s a difference between a government and everyday people.”

Alas, the gentleman did not take the helping hand. “I mean it’s all Jews, there’s always a Jew in charge behind the scenes.”

The anti-Semitism isn’t remotely surprising, but the gentleman’s emphasis on porn kind of was. Does he imagine that a secret cabal of Jews are trying to get Americans addicted to porn to decrease the birth rate as part of the White Genocide conspiracies? Is he speaking out of sexual frustration and dissatisfaction with his own porn habits? Is he upset about the rejection he received when he tried asking out a young woman half his age? All of a sudden, I’m no longer sympathetic to his complaints that his ex-wife moved across the country with their daughter.

People like this are why I cannot stomach the AA standards about having no opinion on outside issues. I am not opening up about the intergenerational trauma and structural differences in my lived experiences resulting from colonialism, imperialism, racism, and xenophobia in a room with people like that. And if I’m perfectly honest, I don’t much care to keep them sober either when their sobriety directly contributes to movements that produce the trauma that makes sobriety harder for others. If they insist on making recovery a zero-sum game, I insist on meeting that energy.

UPDATE: the same person said “don’t you know Muslims date 10 year olds?” while freewheeling between Muslims in the recovery program and Zohran Mamdani.

Case Sixteen

Maybe I’m just old and conservative, as my new white hairs suggest, but I am not necessarily on board with the idea of doing whiteface as part of gender-affirming care.

Case Seventeen

I once attended a Recovery Dharma meeting where the facilitator walked us through a form of breathwork that purportedly released natural DMT through what felt like guided hyperventilation rather than guided meditation. I was surprised that I did actually trip the fuck out for a minute.

Once, years ago during the vivid nightmares of cold turkey withdrawals, I dreamt that I had died and gone to Purgatory, a lone cabin in the middle of an ashen desert that looked something like out of Courage the Cowardly Dog. I saw before me a cast of the deities of every religion and then some. One demon appeared to be some fusion of a succubus and a siren, with manicured talons and folded wings and the tail of a snake, and she wore a predatory yet seductive smile. One demon appeared to be some Lovecraftian four-legged beast upon whose head sat a hurricane of snake-like hairs, like the Moon Presence out of Bloodborne. I saw something resembling a levitating gyroscope with eyes lining its rings and a sickly orange light at the center. Most horrifically, I saw a dancing tree made of hungry screaming mouths, each with rows of teeth, tied together in knots at the corners of the lips, extending towards the sky like the Tower of Babel.

I felt pinned to the floor by some invisible force as the Lovecraftian one loomed over me and extended a finger between my collar bone and almost surgically cut me open in a smooth clean line. The other entities gathered around me and began pulling out different organs, each of them thanking me for the gifts I brought them. I didn’t even thrash in futile resistance; I was simply paralyzed as I processed the buffet I became.

Then, all of a sudden, I woke up with my body intact. But I woke up in a bed in that cabin. The real horror then dawned on me, that I was going to repeat this for all eternity. Yet I was certain this wasn’t Hell. It was Purgatory. I was still between things, whatever those things may be.

Needless to say, when I actually woke up and realized I was still on Earth, I continued drinking. More nightmares had since ensued, though none so harrowing as that one. Instead I simply vowed to myself: if I was on the threshold of death, and that’s what awaited me in the afterlife, then the next time I went there, I’d become strong enough to kill them all. I was resigned to the fact that I didn’t deserve to go anywhere else. The only degree of freedom I could see was figuring out how to break through the paralysis and feast on the organs of my captors.

So I was not initially pleased that the result of the guided hyperventilation took me to a vision of that desert again. This time though, I wasn’t in the desert itself. I was standing on a cliff edge of a jungle resembling the Kilika Woods in Final Fantasy X (a game I will probably never finish, sorry), except there was a wooden bridge extending off the cliff into a doorframe hovering in the air. Through that frame, I could see the old desert and the old cabin. I wasn’t paralyzed though. I could move this time, and I felt empowered. This time, I could try to fight, and I could feel the rage, brutality, and confidence all surge through me. I don’t know how to quite explain this, but I could feel some sense that told me I was going somewhere I belonged if I stepped through, like an ancestral home I had never been but had always been saving a spot for me. Were my ancestors there? Was this a rite of passage for us all? Was it only Purgatory because I hadn’t yet fought those who sustain the realm, and by killing them, I’d finally bathe in both the blood of the convenant and the water of the womb?

But I also noticed behind me, along the path behind me that led up to this bridge, a couple of toddlers watching me from behind the bushes with expressionless curiosity. They were waiting to see what I would do. They wanted to know where I was going. In that moment, I felt something I had never felt before. I can only compare it to what it must feel like to see a color that you didn’t know existed. It wasn’t just a protective or compassionate impulse, but a primal, visceral need to go to them. It was just as powerful as the rage I had felt surge in me a moment before, though it pulled in the opposite direction. The two forces were so intensely contradictory that I felt my existence stretch across miles, and my awareness dissolved as it did.

Fuck DMT. All my homies hate DMT.

As time has passed, I can’t help but reflect on the end of Kevin Finnerty, when Tony stands before the house representing the afterlife with his deceased family while his daughter calls for him to stay, her voice carried through the winds and the trees. I truly do not have a superstitious bone in my body; I take a Jungian perspective on conscious contact with all things spiritual as having psychological significance independent of their metaphysical implications. I don’t think there’s a real Purgatory out there waiting for me or anyone. I guess my takeaway is understanding an intrinsic schism of the human condition. Part of us, or at least me, wants to chase the transcendental mechanisms to push past the boundaries of reality as I know it so that I can find a place of belonging if not peace. Another part of me feels I have to stay as long as I can to protect and nurture something or someone that needs me to feel complete. Rushing into the gauntlet of the abyss would mean abandoning them, even if it’s a dharmic path.

I don’t know. It was trippy. I’m glad I did it, I suppose.

Case Eighteen

Stubborn confusion is the most valuable thing I’ve seen in recovery circles, way more than the self-aware bullshit from clients who know what group leaders relying on manualized CBT/DBT protocols and acronyms want to hear. Yes, I’m heavily guilty of this.

I really appreciate someone who says, “I tried this, it didn’t work, and my life continues to suck. I’m not retarded, I can use what I’ve learned here. It just isn’t working at making a life worth living.” I can wax poetic and analyze those who wax poetic about addiction all day like a literary cartographer, and I can dump a synthesis of cherry-picked scientific studies for a living, but I will always envy someone who knows how to communicate the direct line from point A to point B. Seeing that just tickles something in me and brings a smile to my face.

I’m an overthinker with a bleak transactional formulation of the world. I don’t take a shit without calculating the opportunity cost of stepping away from a method to record my current train of thought. If you put me through some institutional oversight that’s intended to evaluate me as per the discretion of authorities, I will attempt to draft a rubric and satisfy the authority figure to the best of my abilities. I bank the goodwill generated from those exchanges as social capital so that when I really need something, I can cash in on the good student or compliant client reputation. In my experience, this gets me further than being honest upfront. Everyone says they want you to be honest until you actually are.

It is the most refreshing thing in the world to see someone be honest because they’re simply too tired of reading their script in the polite fiction. I love to see them shoot down everyone’s solutions that emerge from their own projections as coping mechanisms.

“I bet you haven’t tried X,” says a well-meaning suggester. “I’ve tried that for 3 years,” replies the exasperated struggler. “Well, the way X works is…” continues the suggester on their script. “I know what X is, I’m saying it didn’t work,” insists the struggler.

The suggester is then faced with a choice: admit they proposed something unhelpful or double down on the solution by claiming that the struggler simply hasn’t tried hard enough (usually thorugh platitudes like “sometimes we need a good kick” or “everything happens for a reason, just keep trying because the failures are part of the journey”). Guess what happens nearly every time?

“If I’m honest, your tone strikes me as resentful,” says the suggester, attempting to reframe the problem in new terms.

“Resentful? Towards what?” inquires the flabbergasted struggler.

“Well, what would you say you’re resentful towards?” asks the suggester with a hint of relief in their safe return to the position of questioning rather than answering.

Maybe I’m just cracked, but I enjoy dysfunction. You can often learn more from how things break down than how they work as intended.

Case Nineteen

I will not ever be interested in attending an orgy with you, especially not if my brown ass has to cross a border to do it. The exceptions already know who they are. The waitlist is closed.

Case Twenty

I am once again baffled at what passes for psychoeducation or group therapy that’s covered by insurance as a treatment program in 2026.

“I don’t have time for that shit” is not what you expect to hear from a facilitator after someone expresses that the facilitator is providing a complete contradiction to what they’ve heard from other facilitators and therapists. This person was very justifiably confused that the facilitator was telling them certain emotions are unhealthy, period.

“Well going through something like grief is healthy-,” this person said, cautiously but with a dash of critical thinking.

“I know people around here who have grief disorders,” the facilitator shot back, immediately trying to shut the line of questioning down.

When the person wasn’t convinced and had paused for a moment to discuss the framing of emotions as healthy or unhealthy, no doubt drawing on previous groups that explicitly framed emotions as information to take feedback from, the facilitator simply shut it down: “I don’t have time for that shit.”

Note that this same facilitator opened the group announcing “I’m probably the most fucked up person in here” while later encouraging the idea that responding to threats to “women and children” with violence was justifiable, demonstrating how they’d curb stomp someone who hurt their hypothetical kid. We might begin to understand why this same person feels that anger might be unhealthy, and how they arrived at the conclusion that avoiding it or diffusing it immediately is the way to to be healthy in their emotional sobriety - though some more self-awareness might help them. They also announced that they personally message over 100 people a day with spiritual quotes about sobriety,

As a general observation, far too many people in the recovery space project their own needs, insecurities, and past failures onto others. I especially observe this in men giving advice to other men through some misguided notion of tough love and breaking someone down to build them back, as if most people dealing with substance use disorders and mental health struggles have simply been too coddled into expecting too much from life. There are certainly some people who need firm rules, consequences, and hands-on guidance, but a diet version of AA pushed by someone who has elevated themselves from a peer giving empathetic advice to a facilitator running on derived institutional authority is not a good model for that.

As always, if something keeps you sober, you should feel free to completely toss out anything I say that contradicts it. The facilitator certainly had significant time being sober, though as we discussed above, that doesn’t necessarily mean time being healthy.

Case Twenty-One

Top three jankiest ways I’ve been transported:

1. a rickshaw of eight people, meant to seat 3 people, where I was on the lap of the driver and an uncle was hanging out the side of the door, speeding on the wrong lane of the highway to get around a traffic jam

2. a camel

3. hitching a ride with an entire sober living house in the backseat of a BMW of someone’s Tinder match on their first date, who by all accounts was a lovely young woman

Case Twenty-Two

Please do not cite Charlie Kirk as a source on intergenerational trauma in a recovery group.

Case Twenty-Three

Please do not market cryptocurrency pyramid schemes in a recovery group.

Case Twenty-Four

Please do not share your opinions on the (ongoing, as of 9/11/26) Iran War as an example of healthy or unhealthy conflict in a recovery group.

There is no greater combination of ignorance and arrogance than that of the median voter who informs themselves through TikTok and Facebook memes. Seriously, you guys are making me reconsider my support for this whole democracy thing.

Case Twenty-Five

No, using 100% of your brain will not unlock telepathy. In fact, we already use every part of our brain constantly, otherwise strokes and aneurysms that occur in small parts of the brain wouldn’t be such a big deal. Even when some parts are more active than others, all of it has blood flow and some neurons firing.

If 100% of your neurons were actually firing at once, you would be having a grand mal seizure, which translates to “very bad seizure” because the effects are very bad. This is not desirable.

I don’t expect the average attendee of a recovery group to necessarily know this. That movie Lucy did a lot to popularize this myth in its marketing material, as did a preface added to How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Case Twenty-Six

No, someone talking about “white privilege” is not the same as you using racial slurs. The fact that you felt comfortable saying that in a recovery group is a pretty good argument for the existence of white privilege, and I say that as someone who dislikes that term a lot while agreeing with the general concept. Also, “I sometimes use racial epithets I should not, but I am an equal opportunity discriminator” is a batshit crazy thing to say with a laugh.

Case Twenty-Seven

There are few things that make a man seem less masculine than being worried about seeming gay. If you can’t handle a 5-year old wanting to put makeup on you or your partner asking you to hold their purse in public, you are functionally a large child. Grow the fuck up. You are not going to survive sober if these are the hills you choose to die on.

Case Twenty-Eight

I can’t believe I’m saying this as someone who has been a big critic of the way Large Language Models (LLMs) have been deployed, but I legitimately could have been homeless if it weren’t for having an LLM explain the clusterfuck of bureaucratic stupidity that is the modern American healthcare system. It’s crazy, but an LLM genuinely does not have the “look, I’m here to get paid” mindset that you will find in every corner of any modern institution.

Case Twenty-Nine

I think coming to rehab was probably the best thing ever for my imposter syndrome. When you grow up in a hypercompetitive Bay Area bubble, you might begin to think any middle schooler can spin up a meaningful software product and grab the attention of some angel investor. I recently had to help someone spell “green peas” because they spelled it “green pees.” I can’t blame them too much because logically, the “ee” sound is the same in both words and English is profoundly stupid language at times with its exceptions. Really, it’s the education system to blame. On the other hand, I never learned to drive, so I’m profoundly ignorant in my own ways. But on the other hand, fuck cars. There is nothing as dangerous that we have normalized in society as driving, except maybe drinking, which fuse together into drunk driving. Build some goddamn trains, teach people to read more, and make weed more accessible. That’s my platform for President. Thank you, and God bless these United States of America.