Addiction: Entrepreneurship as a Coping Mechanism
The goal of a writer is to dispose the inner feelings of a character, an idea or a story onto a reader, or as Chuck Palahniuk would describe it, affect a reader “cognitively, physically and emotionally.” It’s a way to connect disparate concepts which create a sympathetic response for both the writer and their respective audience.
A common theme in Chuck Palahniuk’s writing is this idea of an obsessive addiction. His work typically contains human characters that develop implicit scams to trick others into meeting the emotional, addictive needs of the scam artist. It’s a sick game beyond reason that Chuck accentuates through the use of psychological extremes such as addiction to brutal, physical violence or addiction to unstable, emotionally and sympathetically empty sex. The stories are raw, layer-free metaphors used to make a point about human relationships.
The writing style contains parallels to a method used in most redundant Hollywood tales, except directors riddle them with the necessary layers to keep a shallow audience dimly entertained for two hours. The story unravels like this: a group of hustlers attempt somehow, someway, at the dismissal of a higher ranked power, to get their hands on a vault full of cash. The prized money, the audience must assume, will be used to buy fancy addictive things like drugs, sex, clothing, surgery or vehicles, all which would have been otherwise previously unattainable. Presumably, these things have the purpose to meet a temporary emotional need of the character which the audience is purposely made ignorant of.
Chuck, a frighteningly talented emotional poet, understands the layers better than we do. He guts the organs, slashes the flesh and injects flasks of emotion into his character’s twisted narrative. The glittery walls of Hollywood are torn to the ground, and a path ending with a prize of hope and control is paved. On the path lies the emotional need–a brave addiction–the character is attempting to fool others into offering. The cost to the other characters is usually their failing sanity. If you’ve read any Palahniuk, you get it.
Entrepreneurship can become an obsessive passion, or, a coping mechanism for dealing with this operation we call business. It’s a way to trade one compulsive behavior or habit, many of which we have, for another. The difference is that the obsession can become choice. The story can become yours, not someone else’s. It’s about choosing a future, instead of relying on a past, without an appearance orchestrated by an externality.
The engine of an entrepreneur runs like the prose of a Palahniuk piece. The layers of excess, the masks of deceit, the rules of the office and the suits of common professionalism are removed to bring the courageous entrepreneur one step away from their prize of emotional security. The entrepreneurial journey itself becomes a coping mechanism for what’s generally accepted as business. It doesn’t matter what you do, but if you view it from the perspective of the entrepreneur, I guarantee you’ll be one step closer to whatever it is you’re after.
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