11 - Drugs and Vices

"Sometimes the drugs in your life aren’t alcohol or substances — they're anything that pulls you from your purpose."

When the Drugs Aren’t What You Expect
In this episode of Built for the Cold, I dig into the not-so-obvious vices that can pull us off course. It's not always alcohol, weed, or harder substances. Sometimes it’s TV shows, video games, people-pleasing, betting, even the gym. Anything that keeps you from your God-given purpose is a drug you’ve got to recognize before it owns you.

Facing My Own Distractions
I open up about my own struggles—how materialism, sports obsession, and even fitness once became my escape from facing deeper emotional pain. Recently, I felt called to give up watching sports completely, and it’s been wild how much more energy, peace, and clarity I’ve experienced since. True purpose demands space—and sometimes silence—for God to speak.

Living on Purpose, Not on Numb
The devil’s goal is to numb you through distractions. But real strength comes from facing life head-on, not running from it. If you’ve been caught in a vice, there's a bigger life waiting for you on the other side of letting it go. Don't numb yourself. Wake up. Step into your calling.

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Chapters
00:00 Understanding the Hidden Drugs in Our Lives
03:26 The Impact of Distractions on Purpose
06:18 Finding Purpose Through Silence and Reflection

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Go for the cold, you say that ain't right. Too cold for the average go to stop those two few to show and image greatest to a mail top of the world to be played. New generation, we're building, no victims, we're creating them haters, keep hating, test gen zero, we blazed.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Sometimes the drugs in your life are not what you anticipate, not necessarily alcohol and not necessarily substances, but different things that may pull you in a direction away from the purpose that higher powers in God has for your life, right? And hopefully many of you are not tired of all these, I guess, bad Ds, right, that come into your life, but understanding how you can let not blaming the G-O-D allow you to overcome the Ds a lot quicker so you can actually use it as a story for other people because sometimes it's your story that's going to touch someone's life that only you can touch. Welcome to another episode of Built for the Cold Podcast, right? Too cold for the average Joe, just right for me and the listeners of the show. Where today we're covering what are those drugs. Now, there are some different things. Now, fortunately for myself, I didn't get involved in any of those more traditional drugs, maybe alcohol or weed or mushrooms, Molly, whatever you want. Or I'm trying to even think of, unfortunately, I lost a friend to an opioid overdose. That sucked. But I would say, like, kind of in my Catholic grade school experience, even at a very young age, in like fourth and fifth grade, I had friends whose parents kind of weren't, they were involved in it. And so the kids naturally got involved in it too. And I remember being exposed at a very young age to just like, you know, people drinking and smoking. I'm like, we're in like fifth grade. Now kind of fast forward, I'm like, that's pretty wild, especially at a Catholic grade school. And unfortunately, like I said, lost some friends to overdoses, um, family and friends who've either like struggled with it or got close to dying from it. And I think the hardest part is just seeing it overtake them. Now, not to get crazy biblical for a second, but I also know that when you dance with the devil, it talks about this in the Bible, that and you kind of lean into those temptations, a lot of your actions don't become your own, right? And the devil actually kind of takes over. So I understand how addictions happen and how they just roll into someone's life, and it can ruin a lot of lives that way. But sometimes drugs don't show up just in the form of substances we take, right? The not so obvious things. I call a drug is anything that separates you from like your God-given potential and purpose, right? It could be TV shows. I'm gonna start to possibly trigger some of you here. So if you tune out, I'm sorry, but this is just like the truth. TV shows, video games, social media, watching sports and betting on sports, betting, gambling, people pleasing, saying yes to everyone, whichever way the wind blows, and even, yes, this is mine, the gym. The gym can be a drug when you let it overconsume your thoughts, how you show up every day, how you care so much about like your image, right? It's probably still something today that I may struggle with here and there, but I've created a more healthy environment around it, where I focus more on health. That's why I never competed. I'm not saying that people who compete, like the gym is like a drug. That's not what I'm saying, because I know plenty of people who compete, they're just like they just love it, right? But I know for some people it's gonna be an all-consuming like purpose and almost like vice that separates you from having to deal with anything else emotionally or mentally in your life. And so this was one of mine, or even like something, maybe it's a massive amount of materialism, right? I shared a story before of how like my parents took my shorts from Ross that I bought and it cascaded this whole like I always need to buy new clothes. Now it turned into a fashion thing for me, and I still love all my clothes, but not to the point where I'm kind of like overly obsessed, and it started to really um a lot of that money I was making started to go toward that. But I used that, and it was my drug. That's how I coped with the reality of kind of where my marriage was going, where financially I was, different things that I shared before about kind of the death I had faced in my life, the different despair and kind of like failing different businesses. Right. It's all drugs and distractions are there by the devil to cut off your access to infinite intelligence, which is the higher vibrations, which is like the higher energy frequency that you get when you're in a more creative state, a more purposeful state, a lot higher energy. People can feel that energy. But when you succumb to all these different types of vices, right? I'm not saying inherently TV shows are bad. I'm not saying video games are bad. I'm just saying watching sports are bad. None of these are inherently bad things, but when they become a massive distraction and you can't turn it off, because you constantly, and this is just I've seen a lot of people, even people close to me, fall to these things. And they consume you so much that how can you really say you're living a purposeful life if 20 to 30 hours a week you're doing any one of these things? I'm guilty of a lot of them. I had spurts where I played way too many video games. I had spurts where I watched so many sports, I knew exactly the score, which teams, and especially it's March Madness going on right now, which teams are where, which players were hot, which ones were not. Like one thing that God actually recently asked me to give up, and this is gonna blow a lot of your minds for those of you that know me personally. And for those of you who don't know me personally, this is just something that sports have been a huge part of my life. Ever since I grew up, I was always watching sports, I was watching NFL on Sundays, Monday night football, Thursday night football, Saturdays college football, watching all the NBA season, watching baseball, all those different things. I watched so much sports, always on the background. And as I'm going through my divorce, as I shared in a previous episode, when I was praying, God communicated to me, hey Joe, if you truly want to follow me, how can you how can you listen to me if there's no silence in your life? You need to give up sports. And I wrestled with it probably for about a day. And since then, I have not watched sports. That was the beginning of January of 2025. It's almost the end of March. Super Bowl, didn't watch it. All these NBA things going on, haven't seen it. March Madness is going on, not watching it. And my life actually almost feels like a lot more purposeful and energy driven than it ever has. It's pretty wild. So that's what I encourage you guys to do. If you ever are kind of wondering, like, should I give this up? What's on the other end of it? There's a lot of good things on the end of it. One thing I will encourage you to do is to go back to kind of the theme of this whole season we're in, is instead of getting distracted and falling to your advice, what if you just like took the time to actually feel what's going on in your life? Have moments in time in your life. Even if it's I'm reading a book right now, talks about strategic thinking. Just take one to two hours a week and just like sit in silence and think. I know it's gonna be very hard for many of you. Almost it's gonna feel almost impossible. So in that case, start with 15 minutes. Start with 20 minutes, then progress we get to 30 minutes and leave time for that space in your life to be self-reflective. Because it's not about how many years in our life we live, it's how much of our life do we actually live on purpose. And that's what separates you from so many people as like the days, weeks, months, and years go on, right? If you are distracted with different things and different vices, or even I pray for you if you're struggling with different addictions and drugs and everything, like if you feel you can't get through it, pray. Maybe if you don't even have a faith, let the universe or God speak into that and help you through it. Help heal you because you're you're you're doing it for some reason. There's some void you feel that's leading you to go to it, right? The devil wants to numb you. He wants you to go for those things so you can numb yourself so you don't have to face your reality, right? But you we make things in our reality so much harder than it needs to be if we just didn't allow God to speak into it, right? So allowing that to happen actually makes it a lot easier. That's just from personal experience. And then how can you use overcoming whatever that vice is, that drug is, maybe the video game addiction, or like watching so many TV shows? How can you overcoming that? You use that to eliminate other people's excuses. So then you not only discover your deeper purpose, you bring people to a deeper purpose in their life they haven't connected with in years. That's what I want to encourage you guys to do as we face one of the final deeds in this season, getting over our own drugs in our own life. And hopefully you can use this as a reason to get off your butt, stop listening to this podcast, go get another cup of Joe, and we'll see you on the next one.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Go for the cold, you say, that dance great. The lessons, the love, the insights from above. You take up and go, go for the cups of goals, take the process and lesson to the girl.