Spiritual training is the most important element in life... Why? Well, it's because it is the one thing that allows us to mitigate our misdeeds and karmic pitfalls from a past life. Nothing in life is an accident, cause, reaction. People will say the act of god this act of god... But it's just karma. People in the disaster world especially may hate me for saying this, but there are no innocent victims. We are our own ticking time bombs. Everything we have ever done or not done within our lives follows us like a cloak... Does that mean that we cannot do stuff to actually help ourselves or other people? Of course not, we can help all the people we like and that will,l in turn, be good for us as humans. There are also advanced spiritual practices that allow people to make progress despite crappy past karma. But, really nothing is easy. Even with all the help in the world, you still have to put in the effort and look in the right direction to truly help yourself.
But whoever life is tumbling down the rabbit hole there is a reason for this. I can say this matter of factly because I have experienced it. I have tumbled down the rabbit hole myself. I don't think its fun to hold yourself accountable. But everything has a reaction in this life. You can spend your life looking for hell, or you can spend your life looking for heaven. I spent a good portion of my life looking for hell because I found hell interesting. But in the end, hell isn't interesting, disaster isn't uplifting and love is hard to find in these places. When I was looking for actual meaningful purposeful work in life, I many times was looking in odd places for it.
When I was young I looked for it in terms of my party friends, when I was in my twenties I looked to it in terms of my Buddhist compatriots, when I got older I looked to it in terms of the people I worked with or had other interests with... But you can't find anything positive in places where negative people hang out. This is just a fact. You won't find true friends who are drug addicts any more than you will find amazing love from a serial player. You have to look towards positive good things to find things of value. If you can't find any positive cultural things, then sometimes you have to create your own. This is where I have found myself in the last few years, and this has been the toughest challenge of my life...
On any spiritual path, there will come a time where you have to. go it alone into an unknown future. This world is very passing or fail. So when you step out, you have to. have the rock-solid faith that something will catch you. But Really the whole time you are just catching yourself. Your belief in your life is really what is making it work. Fearing the darkness just because it is dark is childish, but in essence, many children do just that. As adults we do the same thing, we may not fear the dark, but we fear the void... So no matter where you run in life, you cannot avoid the space between your ears, that is where the biggest forms of both battle and healing take place.