The Importance of Being Fed Up
What Sam Rockwell's White Lotus scene says about personal growth
Spoiler alert: I reference a scene from the fifth episode of the most recent season of White Lotus below.
A friend recently messaged me, looking for advice.
He had the opportunity to do psychedelic therapy with two trained, respected therapists. He was excited by the prospect but daunted by the price: a single session would cost several thousand dollars.
Was it worth it?
The answer depends on a bunch of factors. Did he have a few thousand dollars to spare? What else would he be spending that money on? What if he needed more than one session?
But I said the most important variable is this one: How fed up are you?
In my experience, the biggest difference between someone who has their life transformed by a psychedelic experience and someone who doesn’t is their willingness to actually change how they live. Ketamine therapy might make you feel more relaxed or equanimous for a few days or weeks, for example, but it will only improve your overall life if you make actual changes to your life. And the only way you’ll do that is if you’re sick of how your life is.
In sobriety that’s called hitting rock bottom. Elsewhere it’s called a spiritual crisis or dark night of the soul. In general it’s called being fed up, and there are a lot of ways to get there.
“Trying to fuck my way to the answer”
In S3E5 of White Lotus, Sam Rockwell appears out of nowhere and steals the show.
I love this scene for all kinds of reasons, but what it’s really showing is a path to awakening through fed-upness. It’s about getting fed up with desire: Following the tantric/left-handed path of unifying masculine and feminine energies and realizing there is no end to the path — no fulfillment of desire.
The character changes his life (presumably for the better) only after getting totally fed up with the way he’s living it. And we’re all like that. We’ll keep running the same scripts until they become completely unbearable.
I’m not saying you have to move to Thailand and fuck your way to fed-upness. But for psychedelics to work as a catalyst of change, they have to be paired with an unwillingness to maintain the status quo.
Participants in psychedelic trials are pre-screened for fed-upness. They’ve exhausted every orthodox method for overcoming their depression, PTSD, or addiction; they’re at the end of their ropes and willing to try something experimental and weird. And that’s the perfect place for psychedelics to have maximum impact.
Expect funny looks
In addition to being fed up, we also need the courage to face social stigma when we make change. My favorite part of that scene in White Lotus was the look on Walton Goggins’ face throughout.
If you do what your inner wisdom revealed through psychedelics tells you to do, people will look at you like that. And the only way you’ll be able to break out of the prison of your current mental models is if, like Sam Rockwell’s character, you don’t give a fuck.
A few years ago, I realized how much tension I carried in my body during long flights. I was traveling across the country for work frequently, so all that tension was seriously affecting my wellbeing. My solution was to do yoga before my flight. Like, right before my flight, in the airport.
That might not seem like a big deal until you try it. There’s an invisible social stigma against doing anything healthy at an airport. Stretching, meditating, or really doing anything other than sitting and looking at your phone feels deeply weird.
Our deeply grooved social conditioning tells us to keep our head down and doomscroll. Our inner wisdom tells us to do dancer pose by the food court. We’re only going to listen to the latter after we’re completely fed up with the former.
Getting fed up with “mental health”
We’ve been taught the biological model of mental health for so long that it’s easy to believe that the only thing standing between our current situation and wellbeing is some pesky neurotransmitters. A little more serotonin here, a little less dopamine there, and everything will click into place.
That model is appealing because it puts the problem out there. If we find the right medicine for our brain, or do the right series of morning exercises, we’ll feel better.
But it’s also hugely disempowering. It removes us from the great story of our own growth and discovery and makes us subject to meaningless chemical forces. We’re no longer seeking meaning, we’re seeking biochemical balance.
Growing takes courage. It requires getting way out of our comfort zone and doing shit that our former selves would have found crazy. It’s not in a pill. It’s not on our phone. It’s not even in a psychedelic experience.
It’s letting the ladyboy1 fuck us.
If we break out of our societal groove, we’ll find ourselves in a situation where we have to decide whether to let the ladyboy fuck us or not. We’ll have an inner voice that says, “I donno, that seems scary,” and another voice that says, “let’s see what happens.” Our decision will depend on which voice we have learned to trust.
I understand this is an offensive term, but it’s what the show used. Isn’t it interesting that we allow HBO shows to do shadow work that we condemn in all other media 🤔?
"I’m not saying you have to move to Thailand and fuck your way to fed-upness." But you're not not telling us that, right?