Circular Limbo

Erratic and undirected behavior comes from inner pain and emptiness, usually initially imposed by others, whether deliberately or accidentally, and then sustained by repeated self-inflictions to maintain a baseline of misery and coping. It then grows into self-preservation like a clever opiate habit creating phantom pain to invent a premise for the necessity of further drug consumption, which when mixed with stimulants becomes a dramatic closed circular roller coaster track rich with rousing highs and lows cycling continually in a perpetually moving limbo.

To help them escape, you have to smash the habitual apparatus that enables these rides. Intervening to stop a particular excursion will just mean another misadventure soon thereafter. To solve this violence, you just remove the thirst for pursuing false beliefs about what could or will be reached.

There is a cause, but not a reason -- at least not what can be fixed by acknowledgment of reason or quests to gather additional information. Thus those avenues must be discarded as we are surely not solving a problem lacking information or reason. Its foundation is irrational circuitry faulty in its processing of patterns, followed by an elaborate justification of behaviors based on valuations that are patently unrealistic and untrue.

With enough analysis we could assign proximate cause, fault, and blame to third parties, and still this looking backwards and ascribing long cultivated problems to the past actions of others, even if accurate, doesn't help or begin to address present dysfunction. Just as almost no religious adherent believes in the actuality of the supernatural reality they profess, but rather believes in the charming idea of that faith as the justification for upholding it, the broken are desperate not for a solution as much as relief from the hopelessness of eternal nothingness. Yet a solution that removed them from bankrupt investments in surrogates would also allow them to return to a meaningful existence.

Accordingly, rehabilitation requires brutal acceptance of all things with their plain and actual properties, disavowal of magical thinking along with recognition of its past primacy, and separation from dependence on stimulation, immediacy, and belief in need.

You watch people spend their whole lives on the roller coaster and begin to wonder that maybe they don't really want to get free and fix anything. They've become accustomed to the cyclical ride and after many rounds have accepted it as normal. Its regularity is soothing, and even the predictable spots of jarring roughness becomes part of the meditative regimen.

It's not really yours to fix anyway, but you should at least recognize it, point out the example to others, and maybe once explain why it won't work. With total Schopenhauerian faith, trust that everyone gets what they deserve, as nothing in the world could be otherwise.