Chemical Oblivion: Why So Many Would Rather Disappear Than Heal
A look at why numbing the mind is on the rise — and what it reveals about the struggles of a society drowning in overstimulation, stress, and unprocessed pain.
Last week we covered the fascinating world of designer sedatives — a class of drugs used to dim all conscious thought, rather than expand it.
This week, we zoom out to examine why so many people seek chemical oblivion through sedative drug use rather than clarity, connection, and healing.
We ask the question: how did feeling less become more desirable than feeling better?
Altered states have always offered two paths — one toward deeper understanding, the other toward escape.
Through psychedelics, meditation, and dreamwork, people seek to expand consciousness — to feel more, see more, and understand more.
But for many, altering consciousness isn't about understanding — it’s about shutting down or escaping the parts of ourselves we can’t bear to face.
Today, more and more people are turning towards substances that shut the system down — sedatives, hypnotics, dissociatives, deliriants, and, of course, alcohol.
In the US alone, over 92 million prescriptions for benzos are written each year — but far more are consumed off-script (too many to even derive a good estimate). Friends, dealers, Snapchat/Instagram accounts, and Telegram chats — these drugs circulate as DIY emotional anesthesia like candy to a generation that can’t afford therapy.
Ketamine, once confined to operating rooms and battlefield medic tents, now powers a booming clinic industry and a vibrant underground scene. It's sold as transformation, and while it certainly can be, it's also used for something much simpler — erasing the self, even if just for an evening.
Even gabapentinoids — drugs originally developed for nerve pain — have quietly become some of the most abused medications in North America. Usually combined with opioids to deepen sedation, blur awareness, and push users into chemical-induced detachment.
And then there’s alcohol — the oldest anesthetic of them all. Its overuse is a socially accepted drain on vitality, rotting relationships, and grinding down ambition — yet it remains the drug of choice for numbing the pains inherent to the human condition.
This week, we're asking why, in an age of unprecedented access to tools for growth, so many are choosing to fade into the quiet abyss instead.
How Pop Culture Romanticizes the Fade-Out
The urge to disappear — to mute the self rather than heal it — isn’t new. Pop culture has been romanticizing this fade-out for decades, often dressing it up as rebellion, heartbreak, or misunderstood genius.
It’s not so much about self-destruction, but as a kind of tragic beauty. It’s the idea that surrender is, in some way, more noble than collapse.
Trainspotting captures it best. Renton doesn't shoot heroin to feel good — he does it to escape feeling anything at all. “Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?” — he says, rejecting the hollow routines of modern life in favor of chemical silence.
The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails is another good example of using drugs to self-erase, rather than to get high. The song doesn’t celebrate the euphoria — it circles the existential hole. The “perfect drug” isn’t a thrill — it’s a way out. A method of disappearance.
Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd is a haunting ballad about what it sounds like to be faded. The lyrics don’t describe euphoria — they describe anesthesia. A warm, emotionless detachment. “I have become comfortably numb.”
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagines a society pacified by Soma — not through force, but by chemically killing the will to resist. Pain, grief, curiosity — all flattened into submission. This is a story of dystopia created not through fear — but through sedation.
Why We Seek Disconnection
Most people don’t start out trying to get high — they’re just trying to feel less.
Less overwhelmed. Less anxious. Less angry, scared, lonely, or lost.
In a world where everything feels too loud, too fast, too much… numbness becomes its own kind of relief.
It's not about joy or pleasure — but the quiet mercy of nothing.
1. Anxiety & Overstimulation
Our nervous systems are under siege. Social feeds, 24/7 news alerts, financial stress, climate dread, AI panic — all delivered straight to your pocket, all day, every day.
Our minds were never designed for this volume of input.
Sedatives offer instant silence — a chemical “off switch” in a world that never stops screaming for our attention.
Smartphone-related anxiety isn't just driven by screen time, but by deeper emotional dependencies and habitual retreat into digital escapism.
Recent meta-analyses show that people who overuse their smartphones are significantly more likely to experience anxiety and stress. This effect is amplified by factors like attachment to the device and fear of missing out (FOMO).
In a culture flooded with noise, overstimulation doesn’t just fray the nerves — it rewires the brain for distraction, numbs emotional depth, and conditions us to seek escape rather than engagement.
2. Emotional Pain & Avoidance
Some emotions aren’t just hard to feel — they’re impossible to face alone. Psychological pain becomes especially unbearable when it's unprocessed, unspoken, and unresolved.
Many people carry trauma without language for it — grief that was never named, abuse that was normalized, or chronic shame that's calcified over time.
Substances like benzodiazepines and alcohol act as emotional dampeners, blunting affect and disrupting memory consolidation. This makes them especially appealing for people trying to avoid flashbacks, guilt, or internalized self-loathing — even if the relief is temporary and corrosive.
3. Burnout & Existential Fatigue
When effort no longer leads to reward, the nervous system starts to shut down.
Burnout isn’t just personal exhaustion — it’s physiological dysregulation caused by prolonged stress, low autonomy, and unmet psychological needs.
In environments that demand endless productivity while offering little meaning or recognition, people don’t just get tired — they lose hope. Over time, this leads to something called learned helplessness — the sense that no matter how hard you try, nothing is going to change. That your life isn't something you have any agency or control over.
In this state, sedatives and dissociatives offer a kind of counterfeit relief — not rest, but escape. A way to mute the internal alarm bells and feel nothing instead of failure.
4. Doomerism & Collapse Culture
When hope dies, long-term thinking dies with it.
A growing number of people believe the future is already lost — and that belief is deeply demoralizing.
This isn’t just abstract fatalism; it’s part of a growing mindset known as doomerism — the belief that civilization is on an unstoppable decline and that individual or collective efforts to reverse it are ultimately futile.
For many, this outlook isn’t based on paranoia — it’s drawn from observation:
AI & automation threaten to render human labor — and perhaps even human creativity — obsolete.
The cost of living has outpaced wages for decades. For many, even basic survival — housing, food, healthcare — requires going into crippling debt to attain.
Climate change, ecosystem collapse, and resource scarcity paint a bleak picture for future generations.
Emerging technologies — like autonomous weapons and synthetic biohazards — raise existential risks we’re barely equipped to understand, let alone prevent.
Why Numbing Doesn’t Work (For Long)
Numbing can feel effective in the short term. It reduces anxiety, quiets intrusive thoughts, and offers temporary distance from emotional pain.
But this relief is superficial. It doesn’t resolve the root cause of distress — it only delays confrontation with it. The longer discomfort is avoided, the more it tends to accumulate beneath the surface.
Unprocessed emotions don’t just disappear — they resurface later, often with greater intensity.
Meanwhile, the substances used to dull our minds create a series of new problems — tolerance, dependence, emotional blunting, blackouts, reckless behavior (disinhibition), and cognitive impairment.
Many users find themselves increasing their dose just to maintain the same baseline level of numbness. Over time, this compounds the original problem and adds new layers of dysfunction.
Most importantly, numbing doesn’t create space for actual healing. It blocks the very emotional processing required for a resolution to take place.
Painful memories remain unexamined. Stressors go unaddressed. Patterns repeat.
Chemical Switches for the Soul
Consciousness — the fact that you're aware right now — is one of the strangest, most fragile phenomena in the universe.
You’re not just reacting to stimuli. You’re experiencing them. You have an inner world. A stream of thoughts, memories, feelings, dreams — all somehow emerging from electrical signals and neurotransmitters firing in a soft, three-pound lump of tissue.
And yet… all we need to scramble, mute, or shut off that inner world entirely is a pill the size of a grain of rice.
One pill and your thoughts slow. Two, and your anxiety dissolves. Three, and you may forget who you are.
There's nothing abstract going on here — one minute you're you, a conscious, self-aware entity gently observing your thoughts, steering your actions, and carrying your sense of identity — the next, you’re gone, scattered into silence.
Even the in-between stages before complete obliteration come with a detached blurring of the self.
You're not important, and neither are any of your problems.
Because when you no longer care, nothing can hurt you — not money, not failure, not even death. All suffering depends on the part of you that still gives a damn.
Most consciousness-suppressing drugs operate through one of 3 key systems:
GABAergic drugs (like alcohol, benzos, barbiturates, and GHB) inhibit nerve transmission within the brain — literally turning the volume down on neural activity.
Opioids dull the emotional tone of consciousness, suppressing pain and anxiety by binding to mu-opioid receptors.
Dissociatives (like ketamine and DXM) block NMDA receptors, disrupting the integration of sensory input and causing a split between perception and identity.
Together, these systems regulate how much of yourself you’re able to access. They don’t just sedate the body — they fragment the self, silence the ego, and sometimes erase large swaths of time altogether.
It’s the kind of psychic split Carl Jung might have called a dissociation from the Self — not just forgetting, but losing touch with the deeper structures of who we are deep down.
The big question neuroscience is still trying to understand is: where do we go when awareness disappears?
We Need Wider Windows, Not Thicker Walls
Most of the lasting benefits psychedelics offer — improved mental health, trauma integration, addiction recovery, and a renewed sense of meaning — come not from avoiding the self, but from facing it.
This is the crucial difference: sedatives shrink consciousness to spare us pain. Psychedelics widen it, even when that means confronting everything we’d rather not see.
When we take sedatives, we’re buying time — but that time comes at a cost. We don’t heal. We pause. And while we’re disconnected, things often get worse. The problem festers, the body weakens, the debt piles up. We wake up hungover, more anxious, and, often, ashamed of the chaos left in our wake.
With psychedelics, the discomfort comes up front. But so does the clarity — and with it, the potential for real change.
And yet, even within the world of psychedelics, the escapism mindset creeps in.
Ultra-potent, fast-acting substances like DMT vape pens are being used not to explore, but to escape.
Now, as we've always asserted, no drug is inherently evil or good. They’re tools — levers that shift our consciousness — for better or worse.
Our relationship to them determines the outcome. Whether we use them to face ourselves or flee ourselves is the difference between growth and escape — between healing and harm.
What Can We Do Instead?
There’s no quick fix — but there are better choices than checking out.
Real healing starts by turning toward what you’re avoiding, not away from it. That means learning to sit with discomfort instead of silencing it. It means choosing connection over isolation, even when it feels easier to shut down.
It means acting where you still have power — in your routines, your relationships, your attention — rather than surrendering to despair.
Psychedelics can help, but only when used with intention and followed by real integration. Without that, they’re just another form of escape.
The shift begins by asking yourself a different question — not “How do I escape?” but “What am I trying to escape from?”
Further Reading
Rising Tides of Hopelessness: The Emergence of Doomer Culture
The Void Starer: How Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist Discovered Cosmic Love
"Euphoric Nothingness:" The Dichotomy of Dissociation & Healing
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