I know that exact feeling, which is why I left home and been walking and writing ever since. I decided two years ago that I would never again work a job that contributes to the preservation of the capitalistic machine, a machine which roves over and destroys not only American soil, but the soil of all the earth. I've been living on next to nothing and completely converted my lifestyle to something more akin to an anarcho-primitivist lifestyle, though labels are limiting and that title wouldn't exactly be accurate since I live in an apartment at the moment, though only or a week longer before I hop a freight train to Chicago, my old home, visit with friends, record some songs, work on my novel, explore yet unexplored patches of my home town and surrounding purlieus, and then catch out to New York where my friend and I will trip on mescaline at the God Speed show before flying to London together to backpack Europe, India and Asia for the next year or two.
Before all this I had a 9-5 job (more like 6-2:30, but you get my drift), had a girlfriend of six years, had my car, my "things", my "toys" and was headed down the "prescribed path". Until I realized I fell under the same spell a lot of people fall under. Some people call it "coming to terms with reality", "growing up", "getting a life", but at least the honest ones call it "giving up" because that's what it is when you give up on pursuing a natural human life, at least as natural a human life that can be had within this unnatural construct we've created and called civilization.
I felt numb, just like you, driving to work everyday, working for a paycheck just to pay for the gas to fuel the car I only needed to get to work. I had dreams of going to the Pacific Northwest and exploring the mountains of California and Colorado and Wyoming, but with the two weeks of paid vacation my work allotted me each year, each venture out had that omega point and there was this sense of needing to get as much in as possible because this my only time away from that place, my job, everything and I need to fit in as much as possible. This is what a lot of vacation's become for people, stressful experiences away from home, sometimes more stressful than the job itself.
So I left, I left it all. I'm a musician and a writer and I felt sick to my stomach every time I had to hear "Well, you can get a job and still have your music and writing on the side". Why would I want to put the core of my being into the fingertip of my day? I couldn't take the numb feeling anymore and getting in my car for the first time after leaving my job and just taking off felt amazing. I went everywhere, Tennessee Smoky Mountains, Philadelphia, DC, everywhere in California, Seattle and Portland and all up and down the coast of WA and OR, but especially a lot of time in Big Sur, CA. I've been there four times now, spending anywhere from only a day or two up to a couple weeks at a time there.
You look up to god and find no consolation, but that's because you're looking up into the sky. YOU are God and the ground and the air and our lives are all partitions of a fractured mind, which is stuck in a depression called post-modern society. Your problem is you're looking in the wrong place. Prayer is that antediluvian panacea just as effective at solving life problems as the tarot or wishing on a star. God is existence and you must look to your own existence and ask not "What will it do for itself to change so that I can be happy?", but rather, "What can I do for it to change so that I can live with myself" because it's not about happiness either. Happiness is an emotional condition, which has a polar opposite, sorrow. We ought not ever strive to spend any prolonged amount of time in any emotional condition, or condition of any kind. We are nomadic creatures through and through! It is agriculture which has catalyzed this false need for "civilization" wherein people are not even "civil" to each other!
You also speak of home. I have been searching also for a home, but the whole time I have been fully aware that home is not a place you build on a plot of land, it is a consistent state of mind, which we strive to achieve with a certain balance of the things we put our energy into, the dynamics of our relationships, the love we receive and offer, overall the life we end up making for ourselves.
Our whole society is brainwashed, convinced that we need this material symbol of 'value' which we call money, which without we would simply starve and die. But I can't eat money! I can't build a decent shelter out of money! Money isn't even the real problem; it is the symptom of the true problem. The problem is the concept of value. Once you start placing specified values on objects and processes and functions you create imbalance because nature constantly fluctuates our values. For example, if I've just filled a jug full of water, then my value of water is fairly low. After I've drunk the water, and I am thirsty again, my value of water is fairly high. But in the marketplace, this value doesn't accommodate me as it does in the natural ecosystem, where symbiotic relationships that govern evolutionary dynamics rule the perception of value. We try to control this and economics employs advanced mathematics to try and get a firm grip on it and as much as they gloat and radiate confidence in their predictions of value in the marketplace, you get recessions like these which result in sorrow, literal displacement of people from their homes, even death. If we could control such a thing these things would never happen. But there are far too many factors that go into such a thing for me to fully explicate here.
What is clear though is that the whole thing is a bust and how long are we going to continue to sit back and allow people to die of starvation, and live empty, sterile lives fulfilling robotic functions to keep this thing going, which I don't think, really, anyone even wants! Capitalists will tell you that without money and competition there is no incentive to DO anything. And this is true to an extent. If you don't pay me money which I can exchange for food, I WON'T sit in front of a computer and crunch your god damned numbers all day long. But why do we need a society of number crunchers? Why don't we make art and grow our own crops and live harmoniously and work together to build a paradise? The vision of a paradise itself is incentive enough to achieve it. Money is superfluous and worse it is poisonous. Value, the precipitant of paper money, is not the idea our narrow, limited language defines it as. It is a force of nature, it is the ebb and flow of necessity in a system where entities are in constantly varying states of surplus and scarcity which determines value. But in our system, despite one person's surplus and an other's scarcity, the value of water and food and fuel remain the same. This is not the way in which nature works. It is the way in which an anomalous human emergence works, that emergence being greed and the desire for power.
It is my belief that our system, based on so much greed, is what makes people greedy. People themselves are not greedy in an ecosystem that supplies them with their basic needs. There is a small percentage of people so addicted to this anomalous emergence and they've been in power for so many hundreds, several thousands of years, they have the majority convinced their way is the ONLY way. But they have NO power unless we believe in their power. I, personally, don't.
I am sorry for the rant, but I too just felt the need to let something out.
