Systems That Profit From Suffering and the Lives Lost

My battle with addiction has opened my eyes to the systemic failures and barriers that people face far beyond substance abuse. There is a correlation created both by social structures and by institutions that profit from human suffering. These systems are designed to reward dysfunction, to turn pain into profit, dependence into data, and confusion into currency. Living a life alongside a strong recovery meant I had to seek the closest thing to truth I could, in all things, and then reflect that back to both my actions and core concepts about who I am. This is where motive sits, in the place between awareness and choice and in the decision to do the next right thing, even when it’s hard. I have developed a belief that often what destroys us is rarely due to an individual weakness or deficit alone, but from a culture that benefits from keeping people broken and calling it “normal.”

Much like how I lost my father to alcoholism, my partner lost his cousin, and around the same time, my mother lost her cousin to the same disease. They were all far too young: 49, 36 and 64 years old respectively. Their deaths were excruciatingly painful, as alcoholism does not lead to a peaceful end.

In 2024, I lost my youngest cousin to suicide. He was only 19 years old. He was brilliant, kind, and searching for acceptance. Like many, he had become caught between who the world told him to be and the person he no longer recognized. His devastating death was a different kind of self-destruction, but it was born from the same hollow place that breeds addiction. Searching for the desperate need to stop feeling what seemed impossible to face. His pain was much like mine, much like my father’s, much like anyone who suffers and cannot find a way to bear it. His mask looked different, but it hid the same wound. His life did not end in a slow, self-inflicted decline like alcoholism, but in a single, impulsive moment that offered him relief. When we step back it’s easy to see that addiction and suicide grow from the same soil, both share how temporary suffering can be answered by instinct, and choices can be made before awareness ever arrives.

Before his death, he had been groomed and influenced by adults and systems that should have protected him. Teachers and classmates convinced him he was born in the wrong body and the school allowed him to use a female name against his parents’ wishes. Their rights were dismissed in the name of inclusion. His pain was never about gender; it was about belonging. He grew up far away from the rest of our family, separated not by choice but by distance, and that distance became a kind of exile. I experienced distance from my once very close family too, but for different reasons. Neither of us chose that separation willingly, so it was easy to recognize the pain that develops from missed connections. He left home after high school graduation and completely cut off contact with his parents. He had become convinced they were his enemies, and manipulated into believing that the people who loved him most were out to harm him. We spoke occasionally, but I never brought up his feelings around his identity. I stayed quietly complicit, grateful for the few words we shared, because they were proof he was still out there somewhere in this world.

The truth is, I didn’t want to affirm him, and I didn’t think sharing my perspective would help either. I thought if I did, he’d run from me the same way he was already running from everyone else. That thought terrified me. I know too well that the more isolated we become, the easier it is to see distance as something that was always inevitable anyways. Plus, let’s face it, I’m a runner too, and one that became built for endurance in all the wrong directions. I’ve spent years perfecting the escape routes inside of my own mind, learning how to vanish before the truth can reach me. Maybe this is why I couldn’t let go of the small thread that was left between us, too afraid of where he might end up if it snapped.

He was gone for over a year, and when he came home, the people who had once praised his courage turned their backs on him. Losing their approval meant losing the only community that had ever made him feel seen. To admit he was not trans was to be exiled again, to be cast out for choosing honesty over allegiance. On top of that rejection, he had to face the body that hormones had changed, the mirror that no longer matched the boy he remembered. The shame was too deep, the fear of never belonging anywhere was painfully too familiar, and for him, he looked at it as an endless cycle of hopelessness.

Losing him has been one of the most life altering experiences of my life. It tore away what I thought I understood about equality, compassion, and trust in the systems built to protect us. My heart aches for him every day, and for my aunt and uncle who are now childless. Their house is now quiet in a way that time no longer touches, and maybe that’s what eternal really means. How the silence he left behind has its own heartbeat in a way; a reminder that love does not end, it just changes form. And now, it’s about finding a way to accept that the world took him before he ever had the chance to see that belonging was never something he had to earn. But acceptance in losing him doesn’t mean staying quiet about the truth and I refuse to be quietly complicit any longer.

I will make this clear that this story isn’t an isolated tragedy. It’s a mirror held up to a culture that rewards avoidance and sells us comfort disguised as freedom, embedding the illusion that conformity brings safety, indulgence brings connection, and both promise peace.

We are groomed to numb ourselves and then told it is freedom, forgetting that every illusion of peace demands a piece of us in return.

For more on this author, at MutedCulture — A Recovery Diary