The insatiable need for stimulation for the psychopath can lead to the greatest of thrills or the greatest of disaster. What is left is recklessness and a disregard for ourselves and others. Chasing the newest and greatest thrill, we push the limits of safety (frankly we speed past those limits) and sanity. Eventually it all becomes tired and we move on, trying to find our next fix. Just one is not enough; if we’ve got the opportunity each day will be filled with adventure and thrillseeking that dwarfs the day before.
Give me a V6 or a V8 and I’ll try to get my thrill for the day. Weaving in and out of traffic at ninety-five miles per hour doesn’t faze me in the least. Nor does the knowledge that if I pissed off Johnny Law as a result that my day would quickly turn quite bad. Having my life, and by proxy – others’ as well, in my hands is the most exhilarating feeling. However, it quickly grows tired. What was once ten over became twenty. What was twenty became thirty-five. At all times, I’m chasing the impossible: the complete satisfaction of my lust for the dangerous and the thrilling. What would satisfy others’ needs for thrills strikes me as juvenile in comparison to the thrills I seek.
Sometimes I do learn, however weak the lesson may be. My younger days were filled with drugs and other reckless behavior. Once, I did nearly lose my life to such chases. All that taught me, however, was that the one activity in question that almost caused me to dirtnap was to be avoided. The activities to briefly satisfy my void merely changed – the underlying cognitive process of what is safe and what is terribly dangerous did not change. I merely went from putting my hand on the stove of a gas range to putting my hand on the stove of an electric one. I did not learn a generalized lesson from those experiences.
All of this could lead to the inevitable conclusion for the psychopath. Force = mass x acceleration. We are constantly accelerating and eventually the destruction my be total – either for ourselves or someone else. We are chasing mirages of an oasis. We speed toward the image hoping to satisfy our thirst, but ultimately we get no drink. We just move on to the next sight out in the distance and remain forever unsatisfied.
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