Why are certain people drawn to destructive things? There is an allure to violating the rules of society, as we are conditioned to think that there is some romantic drama that goes along with it. People readily watch criminals doing various criminal things on TV (who then suffer the consequences of their actions). In the game of life, most people are on the side of the cops, and it's only in more recent years that the notion of being on the side of the robbers has seemed like something people have sympathy for.

I was not too terrible of a criminal; not in the grand scheme of things. I did not feel that society worked for me; I seemed like the proverbial square peg into the round hole of socialization. I was quiet, and I did as I pleased within arbitrary limits. The idea of using my intelligence to bring down society appealed to me, and I will confess that my admittedly minor crimes made me feel spectacular and dangerous.

For one thing, I learned how to use computers to get what I wanted. Fortunately for everyone, what I mostly wanted was to have fun. I had dreams of being some underground anti-hero, but it was not quite realized, at least in the way I expected it to be. I had my pirated software, and other arcane computer skills, but it didn't quite amount to much other than aimless hedonism.

This aimless hedonism of moral reprobates is what prevents the ones who indulge in it from becoming too dangerous. A constant diet of drugs doesn't make people dangerous, it makes them irrelevent as they sideline themselves with their own pleasures. It seemed that embracing life without law just drove me further and further into irrelevance.

Peoples' embrace of and successful adaptation to society gives them a structure to their life that helps them to accomplish things. Without law, you have none of that. You're on your own, usually lost in your own desires. You have fellow travellers on your way to obscurity, for sure. There's no shortage of people who think that by engaging in self-destruction that they pose some kind of threat to the status quo and are doing some kind of harm to people other than themselves.

Let's be fair though: harm was done. Fellow travellers on the path downward shared secrets that opened doors that were best left unopened, helping each other become utterly eye-roll-inducing. We shared lies as well, those little justifications for doing dangerous things that eventually ruled our habits. I remember riding in the passenger seat of a car smoking a blunt, and a friend "pointed out" that it was OK to ride in a car smoking marijuana because it was night-time and all the other cars couldn't see what we were doing.

Now, on the surface, this seems like a valid point. It is indeed difficult to see what someone is doing in a car while winding down a forest road at night. The problem with this is that smoking a blunt while driving around at night is stupid and dangerous for many other reasons.

In these little justifications we had, there were always glaring misunderstandings of the reality of the situation we were in. There was much dismissal of wisdom, as we sought to be seen as living on the edge, doing what we pleased, and in the process, devolved into some kind of disgusting sludge that only thought of its desires to do disgusting sludge things.

When one is tired of one pleasure, what does one do? One moves on to another pleasure. This process repeats itself until the pleasures put you in a place that is highly questionable, if not unspeakably dangerous. Little by little, one tempts the grim reaper, the police, or whatever or whoever else has the nature of putting one's pleasures to an end. The fact is, you're risking your health, freedom, and sanity when doing drugs and doing crime, and while your crew of people might seem like big shots in the ocean of crime, you're nothing compared to the bigger fish and those who can pull you out of the ocean on a moment's notice.

Here's another take on hedonistic crimes: while you're doing something illegal, you are very often inebriated, which affects your judgment and ability to evade both the police and others who wish you harm. When you turn yourself over to wreckless abandon, you might as well wear a T-shirt that says "Arrest Me or Rob Me, I Have Drugs".

One is also fundamentally putting themselves in a crowd of people who only care about themselves and have no compunction about breaking the law. Is this a wise thing to do? Of course not, but the successful wolves all know that it's easier to pretend to roam around normal society and stay away from other wolves unless it's absolutely necessary to be around them, as they will turn on you on a moments notice, and constantly having to worry about this and take this risk is very annoying.

What drives one to indulge in self-defeating hedonism, however, is low self-esteem and boredom. Really, it is boredom that gets people itching to do something illegal, to steal something and get a rush or to ingest some substance into their body. When mundane pleasures provide too little satisfaction, one can open oneself up to a wide world of illicit pleasures.

There is also the human tendency toward curiosity. Because these pleasures are illicit, they pique the curiosity of some of us, who seek them out simply to see what they are like. Due to their nature, it tends to be the case that one enjoys the pleasure, but then one becomes curious about a different pleasure, and tries it for a while as well. There is a phenomenon that has been called "increasing efforts for decreasing returns" when it comes to addictive behavior. One needs to do more to get less of a rush out of something. The more one does, the less one eventually gets out of it until the pleasure is utterly exhausted and one moves on to the next stage of self-destruction.

Viewed from a distance, this kind of behavior seems almost obviously stupid. We are spoken of with derision, and people roll their eyes when we enter the room. Through a cannabis-induced haze it seems as if everyone in the room who is laughing is laughing at us, and while they usually aren't, there's a part of ourselves inside our minds where we feel utterly contemptible.

When you're young, you don't realize just how stupid you are in the grand scheme of things. You may be smart at this or that task, you might have a high IQ, but you have no idea just how the world will chew up you and your friends and spit you out until you see the consequences of your actions first hand, and even then there is the ever-present lure of denial. It is so easy to deny reality in the name of pleasure, because you desperately want to do so. Desire deludes us into denying basic facts we have learned about how things are in order to give us the momentary comfort of a lapse in reason that takes away the sting of harsh, cold reality.

So, there are many reasons I have given that one may be drawn toward destructive behaviors. There is boredom, dissatisfaction, desire for pleasure, and curiosity foremost. These, however, are all things that can be turned toward positive ends, and they need not lead us onto dark paths that strangle us. They are in their nature corruptions of healthy drives that can be harnessed toward more positive ends.

If one can take the boredom and use it to create something interesting, the dissatisfaction to find something that really satisfies oneself, the desire for pleasure to find something nicer which pleases oneself, and the curiosity to learn exciting things about the world, one will have used the same drives that leads one down a dark path to create a healthier life for oneself.

This, however, requires the untangling of years of tendencies in the opposite direction, and accomplishing this is no small feat.