Against painkillers

Namely the triple curse of our modern age: cheap sentiment, fundamentalist religion and reflexive cynicism. All three serve a common purpose of distancing ourselves from the scary reaches of our infinite, passing, ephemeral experience. All avoid living with loss, avoid giving hostages to fortune, to time. They offer easy escapes from our human predicament. But to turn away from experience is to avoid living, of being in the world - a cruel, random place surely, where all of us, quickly passing in any case, offer our loved ones, ourselves to a daily barbaric lottery of life and death, yes, but without that offering how could we perceive this sharp, harsh, amazing beauty of existence, the breathtaking vistas that open before our eyes, the ice cold, purifying shock of water as we plunge into every day? Without that sense of living without any false comforts, without any safe conducts, how can we live truly - and if we don't truly live, how could we live ethically, esthetically?