The Industry of Avoidance: Identity (and the Cost of Escape)

A few nights ago, I took a photo of a painting that hung on the wall of a small restaurant. It was of a dog dressed in an outfit meant to make people laugh. But as I looked at it, I couldn’t stop thinking about how most dogs don’t look happy when dressed up. They look uncomfortable, sometimes distressed, yet people around them smile and call it cute. And to be fair, I have done it too. I have put sweaters on my dog and called it adorable. We all participate in it, the illusion that something uncomfortable can be made endearing if we decorate it well enough.

The truth is, I did the same thing to myself for years. In my addiction, I wore many costumes. I dressed my pain in productivity, humor, and self-control. I told myself I was fine, that I could handle it, that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Society validates that performance the same way it praises the dressed-up dog, by calling suffering “cute,” by labeling self-destruction as resilience, and by mistaking denial for strength. Drinking is treated the same way, marketed as relief and dressed up as celebration, even when the faces behind the glass aren’t smiling. It isn’t cute, but it is acceptable. It isn’t healing, but it is praised.

Recovery has also opened my eyes to the systemic failures and barriers that people face far beyond substances. 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. Recovery has taught me that what destroys us is rarely individual weakness, but a culture that benefits from keeping people broken.

Addiction and gender identity¹ often grow from the same soil, a culture that teaches us escape is the cure. They share the same root: the belief that changing our external reality will ease what is unbearable inside. They grow the toxic idea that the problem lies in suppression of who we are rather than facing the emotions underneath such as loneliness, fear, shame, and abandonment. Whether through substances, sex, shopping, hormones, or surgery, we are taught that changing form will silence pain.

Both of these impulses are fed by societal voices: the after-work happy hour that tells us we have earned our numbness, and the movements that promise salvation through self-reinvention. This is not an attack on recovery or authentic change; it is a warning about the systems that market relief as identity. True recovery asks us to face ourselves. Industry asks us to buy a new version of ourselves.

It’s not hard to see that these industries thrive on systemic profit incentives, models that reward volume, growth, and dependency over long-term healing. The solution is not in dismantling the branches but in finding the seed that grew the roots. Understanding where the pain began is what breaks the cycle, not selling new ways to escape it. Peer-reviewed research has shown that when health-care sectors such as addiction treatment and hospital systems become investor-owned, outcomes worsen and ethical concerns rise.²

The same economic forces appear in gender-affirming medicine, where measurable markets and documented ethical tensions reveal how financialization can shape care.³ The point is not conspiracy but structure, systems designed to sustain profit by perpetuating dependence.

There are laws protecting when and how a person can begin to destroy themselves with alcohol⁴, yet a missing link remains for children being destroyed by what has become a cultural experiment masquerading as compassion. The trans movement’s reach into childhood has outpaced both science and consent. Addiction and trans ideology are both profoundly misunderstood, each born from suffering⁵ that deserves truth, not exploitation. People are beginning to remove their rose-colored glasses, to see that what is sold as liberation often disguises dependency. Lives are being damaged, permanently. Lives are being lost.

I am not against people having choices. Adults have the right to make decisions about their own bodies, absolutely, and that’s true even when those choices carry risk. Whether it is drinking to escape pain or altering one’s body to rewrite identity, both are acts of autonomy that deserve honesty, not denial. But choice must coexist with ethics. There must be lines that protect the vulnerable while preserving freedom for those capable of consent. Children are not capable of informed consent; no ideology or institution should pretend otherwise. The same social systems that restrict alcohol until twenty-one and monitor narcotics so closely, should not allow irreversible medical interventions or identity indoctrination in schools. These subjects do not belong in elementary or high school classrooms. Developing minds cannot grasp the permanence of such decisions. They belong in adult spaces, where maturity and full awareness make consent possible. Psychological safety requires structure, not fantasy that’s confused as freedom.

These are only two of the illusions sold to us, but they are not the only ones. Everywhere we look, there are systems that profit from our confusion: wellness industries that turn insecurity into income, pharmaceuticals that promise peace in a pill, entertainment that numbs thought, and politics that market division as belonging. They all thrive on the same wound, convincing us that if we just buy, believe, or become something new, the ache will disappear. But every illusion demands the same price, our willingness to look away from ourselves. The longer we look away, the less we remember about what it was we once saw.

I truly believe that the greatest deception after what the world sells us, is what we sell ourselves. We convince ourselves we can outthink pain, outdrink loneliness, outgrow shame. But the truth waits, patient beneath it all. Recovery has taught me that the only way out of the cage is surrender. It is self-will that builds the bars around us, convincing us that control is safety when it is really confinement.

I will continue to be a voice for those I’ve loved and lost, and for those who are still suffering; offering only solutions in what I’ve found. Without returning the borrowed beliefs we’ve been given, we will not find what we thought was lost in the first place. There was never a cure for who we are, because there never needed to be one. No remedy exists, only a hoax sold by the same hands that stocked the sickness on the shelves for us to buy. Our consumption, silence, and hunger for comfort sustain the very systems designed to keep us sick. We become compliant in the harm, and the only way out is defection.

Recovery, in every form, isn’t about evolution; it’s about deprogramming. It’s the undoing of all that we were taught to worship. As the mirror clears, we see that the face looking back is ours, and beneath the wreckage, the self still remains. The only decision we have is to stop running from ourselves is so we can begin to reclaim exactly what the world tried its hardest to take.

Xo, Jules

From Jules, at MutedCulture — A Recovery Diary

References:

1. Surendran, S., et al. (2025). A scoping review of ethical issues in gender-affirming care. BMC Medical Ethics, 26(1).

2. Borsa, A., et al. (2023). Evaluating trends in private equity ownership and impacts on health outcomes. BMJ, 382, e075244.

3. Baker, K., and Restar, A. (2022). Utilization and costs of gender-affirming care in a commercially insured population. Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, 50(3), 456–470.

4. Alcoholics Anonymous. (2001). Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism (4th ed.). Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.

5. Kannan, S., et al. (2023). Hospital adverse events and outcomes after private equity acquisition. JAMA, 330(22), 2365–2375.