Why Am I Doing This?

All of us together, no matter how small our contribution, can help achieve something great.

So why did I start The Asylum? It really goes back to the night of the 2020 election and the weeks following it. One of my overwhelming feelings at the time was one of helplessness. What could I do? I felt like all I could really do is wait to see what happened. For many things in life you have control, even if you fail at something you can still make the effort to try. With this, it just seemed so big, so beyond my influence that anything I thought about doing seemed useless.

Part of this was some intense general anxiety I had been dealing with for over five years, the details of which I won’t go into. But I know this anxiety contributed to my depression about the election and my general sense of hopelessness. My wife, who was worried about me, did some research and suggested I try a very low carb diet. Feeling as desperate as I did I started the diet in March of 2021. Within three weeks, my anxiety disappeared. I’m not kidding. It still seems unreal. But that anxiety has been replaced with anger, dare I say, righteous indignation about what transpired on November 3rd and 4th of 2020, the dates of the actual insurrection, the dates of the coup in our great country.

I started not wearing a mask. This was something I had thought about doing before, but again the anxiety about doing so was almost overwhelming. That all disappeared. It was both strange and empowering to be the only person in a grocery store not wearing a mask (I live in California) or only one of a few in Home Depot to be unmasked. But I still wanted to do something else. My wife has suffered a long illness so some of my options are limited. But I do like to write. And I am a web developer.

My site, thecorporateasylum.com, had been sitting dormant since about 2004 and the thought of bringing it back had been brewing in my mind. In December of 2021 it became a strong desire and so here I am. I began posting on substack in June of 2022.

One of the comforting things that I think about is that I’m just a regular dude. I’m married, I have a kid, I like Marvel movies, hiking and a good pizza. I was a delivery guy for 17 years. I have never been involved politically. Never even followed politics until Trump got elected (I’m almost 64). What’s the comforting thing, you ask? I figure there have to be thousands upon thousands of people out there just like me: never involved politically and now mad as hell about what has happened and ready to do whatever they can to help rectify the terrible wrongs we are enduring at the moment. So I think that all of us together, no matter how small our contribution, can help achieve something great.

I think often of a passage at the end of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch:

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Let’s do this, Friends.