Why escape isn’t the same as healing
When life grows heavy, numbing calls to us like a mirage.
A drink to quiet the nerves. A screen to scroll the hours away. A purchase to fill the hollow. A burst of workaholism to silence the questions.
For a moment, numbing seems to help. The ache dulls. The noise fades. But then the mirage evaporates, and we find ourselves not refreshed but emptier, further from the wellspring of life.
Anesthesia vs. Therapy
There’s a difference between anesthesia and therapy. Anesthesia dulls sensation; therapy restores vitality. One closes us off; the other opens us again.
Soul therapy can be hard: sitting in grief, going for a walk instead of collapsing, journaling when it feels easier to scroll. But therapy leaves us clearer. Numbing leaves us blurrier. Therapy steadies us. Numbing leaves us fragile.
When we anesthetize too often, we become spectators of our own lives, half-there, fogged over. We stop being participants in the drama of existence.
The Aesthetic Experience We Miss
Life is not just to be survived. It is to be felt. To savor is to treat existence as art — colors, sounds, textures, moments that flood the senses. This is the aesthetic experience that makes life rich.
Numbing steals it. When the glass is always refilled, when the scroll is endless, when the noise never stops, the subtle beauty is drowned out. The taste of bread, the timbre of a laugh, the quiet of dusk — all become background static.
We cannot savor while sedated.
A Brutal Day
Picture someone after a brutal day. Exhausted, they collapse on the couch, phone in hand. An hour passes, then two. Videos blur together, faces flash by, news scrolls endlessly. At the end, they feel duller (yet more tense) than when they began.
Contrast that with another choice: stepping outside into the evening. The air cool, stars faint, crickets sounding. The problem is not gone, but the spirit has inhaled something real. This is therapy. That was anesthesia.
Mortality and Presence
We only get one life. Numbing doesn’t just waste time — it wastes the time. It eats the irreplaceable chance to feel, to see, to taste, to experience. Mortality makes this stark: every hour anesthetized is an hour of the one and only existence we will ever have.
That doesn’t mean we must never rest or distract ourselves. It means we must know the difference: is this restoring me, or is this stealing me?
Honest Compassion
We all numb sometimes. That’s not failure; it’s human. The point isn’t to scold but to see clearly. To notice when the habit has shifted from refreshment to chronic evasion. To ask: is this helping me live, or helping me hide?
With honesty, we can turn back. We can choose the therapies that open us instead of the anesthetics that close us.
Closing Thought
The mirage of numbing tempts us with ease, but what we crave is not ease — it’s life. And life is aesthetic: vivid, textured, sensory, filled with meaning.
So when the fog calls, pause. Ask whether the choice before you is anesthesia or therapy. Choose what restores.
Because you don’t just want to survive this life. You want to savor it — fully, awake, alive.