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I’ve struggled with mental illness for much of my life. I started experiencing symptoms of depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder in middle school and high school without being aware at the time that I was experiencing anything out of the ordinary. I and my family and teachers chalked it up to the difficulties that everyone experiences in growing up, though looking back now, I’m able to recognize those problems for what they were. A military deployment to Iraq compounded those issues with post-traumatic stress disorder, and I compounded all of it even further with rampant substance abuse. It got bad enough that I went AWOL. Just by way of providing some context, I had been transferred to the reserves after the deployment and was working a graveyard shift during the worst winter that I have ever seen in my life, at a job which required me to mostly just drive around the city by myself. On a typical night I would get home a little before 5 in the morning and drink until I passed out. Not that it would take much. I’d perfected a system where I would start drinking in the office at the end of my shift and continue drinking on the short car ride home so that I’d be sober enough for the drive itself but drunk soon after I walked through the door. I’m not at all proud of this and I don’t recommend it. Then I’d sleep fitfully until about 6 or 7 in the evening and get up and do it again. I never saw the sun and I rarely saw other human beings. I began to honestly believe that I had died in Iraq and that I was in some kind of purgatory.

But that aside, going AWOL is something I can now say from personal experience that the Army takes very seriously. So now the mental illness and substance abuse were compounded further still by my being in very serious trouble with the United States Department of Defense. At that point I was ready to cut my losses and shuffle off this mortal coil, and so I started working actively towards ending my own life. Fortunately, one of the other soldiers in my unit tracked me down, brought me in, and convinced my commanding officer that it would be better for me and for the Army if they got me some help and sent me on my way with the thanks of a grateful nation for my otherwise honorable and commendable service, rather than giving me a dishonorable discharge and sending me to prison, as stipulated by the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

And so I was given an honorable discharge and sent into the pipeline of the hospital network managed by the US Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which was at the time (and still very much today) overwhelmed with casualties from the two wars, including a large number of other veterans suffering from PTSD. Wait times for appointments were anywhere from three to six months and turnover among the staff was high, so I never saw the same therapist more than once. I would have to go over my story repeatedly and bring up my trauma over and over again without ever being able to get beyond it. To make matters worse, the therapists themselves were overwhelmed at best and incompetent at worst. One of them called me by three different names during our session, none of which were my actual name or even very close to it, which is especially bizarre given that she spent the entire session with her nose buried in my file and didn’t actually look at me once. Civilian counselors were better, but also considerably more expensive than I was able to afford. I’ve been through well over a dozen therapists now and I’ve never gotten the hang of it; I think the VA may have ruined me on the whole thing. I’ve responded better to pharmacotherapy, but the struggle to find a cocktail of medications that would manage my symptoms without turning me into a zombie is one that took me a full eleven years. When I finally landed on something that works, it was a huge game changer for my life.

All this to say that mental health is something that I’ve had to strive and struggle towards for most of my life and I’ve had to do a lot of it on my own. That’s not to say that I haven’t had any help and also not to say that I am today the model of mental stability, but I’m in a better place now than I have been at any prior time in my life.

Not everyone has had to struggle this much to attain some measure of happiness in their lives, and many people have had to struggle a great deal more, but I’d venture to say that almost no one in this life shows up and gets a free pass at happiness. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, a full fifth of all Americans experience some sort of mental health issue every year (Mental Health By the Numbers | NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness, n.d.), and that’s just what gets tracked. As I mentioned, I was experiencing symptoms of mental illness for years without knowing it; I think it’s safe to assume that there are many others who have likewise experienced mental health issues without being at all aware that what they’re experiencing is, in fact, a medical issue.

And let me be clear on that point: these are medical issues we’re talking about, as real and as life-threatening as any other. I still see the “it’s all in your head” argument floating around social media on a regular basis, and while that’s technically true, it’s also entirely unhelpful and misrepresentative of the nature of the problem. I’ve always found it strange that mental illness is the one illness that people dismiss by describing its location. Try that with any other illness and the argument quickly falls apart. “Lung cancer? Pfft. That’s not a real health issue. It’s all in your chest!”

Among the many concerns of the Greek philosopher Aristotle was how one could live their best possible life. To this end, he talked about something called εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia). It’s a difficult word to translate. I’ve most often seen it translated as “happiness,” but this misses the mark somewhat. Breaking down the etymology, the Greek prefix eu- means “good” or “well” and daimon means “spirit,” so “good spirit” or “good-spirited,” and Aristotle uses it as a term to mean living well. By way of summary on what Aristotle believes makes for a well-lived life, I don’t think that I could do any better than the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I will quote them here:

No one tries to live well for the sake of some further goal; rather, being eudaimon is the highest end, and all subordinate goals—health, wealth, and other such resources—are sought because they promote well-being, not because they are what well-being consists in. But unless we can determine which good or goods happiness consists in, it is of little use to acknowledge that it is the highest end. To resolve this issue, Aristotle asks what the ergon (“function”, “task”, “work”) of a human being is, and argues that it consists in activity of the rational part of the soul in accordance with virtue. One important component of this argument is expressed in terms of distinctions he makes in his psychological and biological works. The soul is analyzed into a connected series of capacities: the nutritive soul is responsible for growth and reproduction, the locomotive soul for motion, the perceptive soul for perception, and so on. The biological fact Aristotle makes use of is that human beings are the only species that has not only these lower capacities but a rational soul as well. The good of a human being must have something to do with being human; and what sets humanity off from other species, giving us the potential to live a better life, is our capacity to guide ourselves by using reason. If we use reason well, we live well as human beings; or, to be more precise, using reason well over the course of a full life is what happiness consists in. Doing anything well requires virtue or excellence, and therefore living well consists in activities caused by the rational soul in accordance with virtue or excellence. Kraut, 2018

And what constitutes “virtue” and “excellence” for Aristotle are matters of further complexity that I won’t delve into here, but the important take-away here for me is that, being human, we live our best lives by doing that which is uniquely human, using reason.

For a more specific look at what makes us happy, we can look to another Greek philosopher, Epicurus. Epicureanism is largely synonymous with hedonism—the pursuit of pleasure as the highest good—which is in turn associated with Satanism, as a defiance of religious moralities which would have us nihilistically deny ourselves pleasure and happiness in this world in return for the promise of rewards in some future world. Regarding LaVeyan Satanism, the scholar of religion James R. Lewis said in a paper written for the Marburg Journal of Religion that it “advocates a blend of Epicureanism and Ayn Rand’s philosophy, flavored with a pinch of ritual magic” (2002, p. 2). But Epicurus’s hedonism is often widely misunderstood. The television show Futurama depicts this popular understanding of hedonism through the character Hedonismbot, but in reality, Epicurus advocated for a life of moderation and reflection, considering these to be the highest possible pleasures. Little of Epicurus’s own writing survives today; what we know of him comes to us, in part, from a poem titled The Nature of Things by Lucretius. In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the work, translated by A.E. Stallings, Richard Jenkyns writes:

Epicurus argues that certain moral truths follow necessarily from [the scientific facts also described by Lucretius in his poem]. No one can rationally pursue anything other than his own pleasure. Epicurus is thus in the strict sense a hedonist. However, he places a fairly low value on pleasure as the… man in the street is likely to conceive it. Hunger, thirst and sexual desire are necessary appetites, but we should try to moderate them as far as our natures allow. Romantic love, for example, is to be avoided, as it involves a loss of rationality and self-control… All pleasures of the senses are inferior to such abstract pleasures as friendship and philosophical contemplation. Accordingly, this philosophy, often caricatured as a religion of sensuous self-indulgence, is in reality rather austere. 2015, p. ix

I present this only by way of demonstrating that the philosophy of hedonism is not what it is often made out to be; I don’t advocate for abstaining from romantic love, but I do agree with Epicurus and Lucretius that the highest pleasures in life are not necessarily the obvious ones like tasty food and sexual pleasure.

But I think that the ultimate practical guide on how to pursue happiness comes to us from the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His book Flow, originally published in 1990, is subtitled “The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” and presents an approach to the pursuit of happiness that is grounded in reason and empirical research. There are few books that I recommend as strongly and as universally as this one. Everyone should read it. I’ll quote some of the key points relevant to this discussion here:

Contrary to what we usually believe… the best moments in our lives… are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. 2009, p. 3

And elsewhere: “The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action” (p. 6). I’ve certainly found this to be true for myself. I’m rarely more happy than when I’m writing, whether it’s for this project or my novel manuscript or for something else. I forget myself and the various anxieties of my life, lose track of the time, and completely lose myself in the work. Actually, the experience is so transcendent that saying “I’m happy when I write” somewhat misses the mark. The most I can say in truth is that when I’m writing, the writing is all there is, and I’m happy having that in my life.

Csikzsentmihalyi has a section at the end of his book on finding meaning in life, which is certainly a necessary component of having a stable, happy, fulfilling life. The meaning of life is something that would require much more than a couple paragraphs to really delve into properly, but Satanists being a largely atheistic bunch, or at least agnostic with regards to the claim of the existence of God, don’t accept that which was, for most of human history, the primary source of meaning in the lives of most people. The major turning point there, after centuries of increasing secularization, was 1882, when Friedrich Nietzsche published his book The Gay Science, in which he proclaimed the death of God. This is something else that has been widely misinterpreted. The statement first appears in section 108, but I’ll quote here from section 125, which I think offers a clearer picture of what Nietzsche means:

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” 1974, p. 181

The death of God is Nietzsche’s metaphor for the increasing secularization of his society, and while he was himself no fan of Christian religion, this is not something that he celebrated. In fact, it seemed to terrify him, because he recognized the importance of finding meaning in life—this was one of his central and oft-repeated themes throughout his life—and was concerned that, in the absence of that source of meaning, people would become nihilistic, unable or unwilling to find meaning in anything, which he saw as being a far worse prospect. Or, as Nietzsche’s faithful translator Walter Kaufmann wrote in his excellent book on the philosopher: “…while [Nietzsche] was keenly aware of the sense in which the existence of God might diminish the value of man, he also felt that the death of God threatened human life with a complete loss of all significance” (Kaufmann & Nehamas, 2013).

This notion that there is no inherent meaning in life is one of the central tenets of the philosophical school known as existentialism, in which Nietzsche is often included, along with Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others. I’m doing a great disservice to an entire school of philosophy by summing it up so pithily, but the conclusion of many of the existentialists is that, in the absence of inherent meaning, we can and perhaps must create meaning for ourselves. And this is something that is much easier said than done and not something that I can even attempt to give advice on in the short space available to me here. That’s something I’ll have to delve more into another time, but I highly recommend both Nietzsche’s book The Gay Science and Csikzsentmihalyi’s book Flow to those who want to explore that question further.

One of the things I still struggle with is what I call “the strength to feel bad.” Here’s how this works: let’s say I have a day off that I’ve been looking forward to for whatever reason, and I wake up that morning and I’m just not feeling life that day. I feel bad. And that happens. For me, there are mental health issues that play into that, but anyone could wake up one morning not feeling great. At some point I’ll have to delve into what I believe the Satanic virtues are and why, but for our purposes today, let’s just go from the premise that personal strength is indeed a Satanic virtue. Real strength is being able to feel what you’re feeling and experience that without having to run away from it. If we could just make ourselves feel good then everyone would be doing that all the time; that’s not the way things work. But what’s worse is that we often let our second-order emotions—our thoughts and feelings about our feelings—interfere with our first-order experiences. We’re not having a good time at something, and then we make it worse by piling on top of that a bunch of guilt and anxiety because we’re supposed to be having a good time doing the thing, and that prevents us from just falling into the moment and experiencing the thing for what it is. The key, then—though this is much easier said than done—is for me to accept and even embrace that I’m going to feel about it however I’m going to feel about it. Maybe the second-order stuff will drop away and I’ll start to enjoy myself and maybe it won’t, but either way I’ll be demonstrating my strength and power through radical self-acceptance and a stoic tolerance of my unpleasant emotions.

As usual, I’ll take a quick look at this point at why I might be wrong. I think that the notion that one should work hard and struggle to attain one’s own happiness is fairly self-evident, but if certain religions are correct about what happens to us after we die, then happiness in this life is not a goal in itself and actually may be a distraction. If eternal happiness or eternal torment awaits us after we die, then we should concern ourselves primarily with that and not with the transient happiness or suffering that is to be found in this life. However, I have yet to see any convincing arguments that that is actually the case.

One might also argue that there’s a certain selfishness to pursuing one’s own happiness as the primary goal in their life. And yes, that is true, but first of all, I don’t think that there’s a way around it. I want my partner to be happy, just to take an example, because their happiness makes me happy. I want people in general to be happy for the same reason. While my happiness is not dependent on others and is ultimately my own responsibility, I recognize that the happiness of others is intimately intertwined with my own. And second, I don’t think that we can effectively help others until we’ve first helped ourselves. It’s like when you’re on an airplane and you get the pre-flight safety briefing: if you’re traveling with a child, they tell you to put your oxygen mask on first, because then you’re in good shape to get the mask on the kid and to help those around you. If you pass out, you’re no good to anyone.

If there’s one thing I want to convey with this essay more than anything else, it’s that the struggle for happiness and good mental health is a challenging pursuit that may take years to pay dividends, and that there are many options for doing so. There’s no magic bullet and what works for one person may not work for another. But most importantly, I want to convey that this pursuit is also very much worth the time and the effort. I’ll also mention that it isn’t weakness to get help wherever you can find it. To the contrary, it’s arrogant and stupid to not utilize the various resources at your disposal. And it’s not as if anyone else can ever make you happy, so your achievements in that regard will always be entirely your own. Here’s the thing: you’re going to die anyway; might as well stick around and see how good you can make it while you’re here. For me, it’s been a very long road, and one that I’m still walking, but I’m going to turn forty this year and at the same time I feel that I’m living the best years of my life. So no matter how bad things are for you right now, no matter how bleak things seem, know that it is at least possible that, given time and perseverance, you could be living a life that you are truly glad to be living and to have lived, even with all the pain that you have suffered up until that point taken into account.

I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and to sign up for my mailing list (form on the sidebar) so you can stay current on my latest work. And if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content. I’ll be publishing new work every Friday evening. I also have a reading list, which contains links to the books I used to research this and all of my other stories. Clicking through and buying books is a great, easy way to support my work.

Works Cited

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience (Nachdr.). Harper [and] Row.

Kaufmann, W. A., & Nehamas, A. (2013). Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist, antichrist (First Princeton classics edition). Princeton University Press.

Kraut, R. (2018). Aristotle’s Ethics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/aristotle-ethics/

Lewis, J. R. (2002). Diabolical Authority: Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible and the Satanist “Tradition.” Marburg Journal of Religion, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.17192/mjr.2002.7.3733

Lucretius Carus, T., Stallings, A. E., & Jenkyns, R. (2015). The nature of things. Penguin Books.

Mental Health By the Numbers | NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness. (n.d.). Retrieved January 5, 2020, from https://www.nami.org/learn-more/mental-health-by-the-numbers

Nietzsche, F. W., & Kaufmann, W. A. (1974). The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (1st ed.). Vintage Books.