The Man Who Got Addicted To Quitting Things,

A Frog Prince Fairy Tale for the Modern Intellectual.

Once upon a time there was a man of bad habits. All day, every day, he would do all kinds of bad things. Soon this lead him to various forms of physical addiction, to alcohol and nicotine and all kinds of illegal drugs, but even to smaller things, like coffee. He found himself addicted to certain foods, then certain social behaviours, and eventually, he even found himself addicted to anonymous sex with strangers.

Every little thing he would turn into a ritual, and every ritual would involve consuming some kind of Thing that forcibly changed his Doors Of Perception. Uppers to wake up, downers to fall asleep, provoking strangers to anger online to feel like he existed, provoking his friends to feelings of guilt or shame, to feel like he had an impact, anonymous sex with strangers, to feel like he had sexual value - Every moment of the day, devoted to drugs. Every aspect of life compartmentalised and facilitated through the injection of a mind-altering chemical agent. Rather than waking up, he took pills to wake up - rather than waking up, he would enforce a state of being-awake.

One day while he was eating forty cakes off the ass of a hooker while also pushing a finger into his left eye, just for the sensation of it, his cocaine guy told him, “you know, they say the sum of addictions is constant, so u exchange a bad one for a good one, but you can’t just lose a bad habit, you have to change it into a different one. So instead of fucking chocolate cakes, for example, you “get addicted” to, like, lifting weights or long distance running or something”

“seems like crazy talk to me”, he said, out of breath from huffing glue. But later, when he was eating ice cream sundaes, watching anti-humor “dark comedy” irony tv shows about being in "awkward misunderstandings” and drinking wine from a jug, he found that the thought kept coming back to him. He couldn’t let it go.

At first, he figured, he’d just try it a little bit. Just a little bit to see what happens. For the novelty, for the experience. Just a one time thing. A cooky crazy summer fling, enjoying the springtime of his youth.

He decided to try quitting “getting severely autistic guys he knew at university to sell him their prescription Ritalin”, and shift it with, going for a jog around his apartment complex. It was all very exciting to him, and he was very impressed with himself, and he thought about how the BPD jewish girl who was fucking him for drugs would probably be impressed with his newfound athleticism, and how he turned his life around, and she’d probably fall in love with him for realsies and forget all about that time he showed her synecdoche new york and started crying and drank himself to sleep while awkwardly using her as a pacifier and a security blanket.

He kept running for a little, and although it was no more than a couple of weeks before he quit running, it was already too late. He had stopped buying autism pills, and now, running too - he was hooked.

It took a while before the next thing. He kept making excuses for himself. “Oh I just don’t feel like having any right now” “I just don’t really have a good supply” “it’s not like I decided to stop doing it forever or whatever, just, maybe not right now. sometime in the future maybe, like next summer or something”. First came the psychedelics. “I don’t know man I just don’t feel like mushrooms”. “I love psychedelics but I just don’t want to go all crazy with 2C-B or Ayahuasca or whatever, but just some nice and simple little dose of lsd sometime I dunno lol” - even as he said it, he felt it deep in his heart: He knew he was lying. He had already Quit.

“I can take acid or amphetamines literally anytime I want, I don’t have a problem, I could walk out the door right now and get some. I could start right now.”, he would say to himself.

Days turned to weeks and weeks turned to years, and little by little, things were left by the wayside. “Not tonight, I’ll just have 20 beers. 20 beers for me tonight”, he’d excuse himself when his friends offered him. He’d drink the 20 beers while they were all getting their heads completely fucked, and he’d pretend to be playing along with their paranoid delusions, puking and screaming and crying. But they all knew. He had a problem.

After a year he realised he had not done either psychedelics or amphetamines in a year, and the notion filled him with a terrible dread - Soon, he thought, some time soon. “I’m no square. I’m a hip and cool and edgy career-counter-culturist.”

Thing kept spinning out of control. He quit pills, quit smoking pot, quit huffing and sniffing and eating and injecting and vodka enemas. His friends could barely recognize him. He quit selling drugs. He even quit his real job. He quit having sex.

Throughout his descent, he had tried picking up new habits - long distance running, writing a diary, weight lifting, teaching himself to play the piano, the guitar, becoming a world famous artist - but none of them seemed to stick, and eventually, he would always end up quitting them too.

He was beginning to realise that he had a problem. He swore to himself; “I’ll quit drinking and that’ll be that. This’ll be the last thing I quit. I’ll quit drinking - I’ll quit something one last time. After this, I’ll never quit anything else again.“

Through much heartache, he quit drinking. He moved in with his dad to get sobered up for the first time in years. All he had left now was smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, and anonymous posting on the internet.

For years, this was enough. It seemed stable, like he had found a golden mean of sorts, a kind of functional anti-alcoholism.

Or so he thought. Eventually, the Hunger for Quitting Things stirred in him once again. And so he quit posting on the internet for likes. He quit drinking coffee. And finally, at the very end of it all, on a sudden spur of the moment decision, a madness, he quit cigarettes.

And he was miserable. He had never felt more unhappy - not in the darkest moments of his many addictions. Not only from his liver and brain chemistry struggling to adopt to lacking the nicotine he had been dependant on since he was 14, but also because - well, it was the last. There was nothing else to do now. Nowhere left to go. Nothing left to quit.

In this moment he achieved enlightenment. One moment of perfect autonomy, one final moment of perfect, autonomous choice. To decide that either the sum of addictions was indeed constant, as the guy had said, and continue along the path of suffering. Or, to prove him wrong: To quit his final addiction, the addiction to quitting, by refusing to quit quitting, and quit it.