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TOM:   I   paid   my   dues   this   month,  instead   of   the   light   bill.  JIM:   You   will   regret   it   when   they   turn   the   lights   off. TOM:   I   won't   be   here.

"Yeah it's overwhelming, but what else can we do?
Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?

Forget about our mothers and our friends
We were fated to pretend."

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MGMT - Time to Pretend (Official HD Video)

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He copes with his feelings by buying a new vape because his latest one died by using it too much. He is out on a Tuesday however! That means $5 movie night! He gets out of a few showings and what do you know? The bar is still open! So he goes in and drinks his hopes and dreams away.

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With his warehouse job, he would only be bringing home approximately $26,905 on a yearly net income. That means he has a monthly net income of $2,242. He would have to spend at most $924 a month on rent and have $1,318 left. He could afford a place such as this:

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“I'm getting a cigarette”

Another way Tom decides to cope with his feelings is by smoking. This can be seen multiple times throughout the play when he goes onto the terrace and smokes while he looks out into the city. Usually he is accompanied by somebody that likes to voice the reasons why he uses this method of coping indirectly.

With his way of smoking, it would only be reasonable that he would use the latest in smoking fashion. The Juul, Vape, E-Cig, or whatever you want to call it. Bars are also a more common thing so it wouldn't be out of the question that he would want to go and drink his problems away.

"I’m going to the movies"
Another way Tom likes to cope with himself is by going to the movies alot. Even when he's most likely already seen the movie before.

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We now live in an age where things like therapy and mental help from doctors is a common practice. While that isn't liked very much by the person that is in question, I believe that Laura would want him to get some help. Amanda though is a different story. As sad as it is, parents abandoning their child is also a common practice. It can go both ways. Either the parent abandons the child or the child abandons the parent. In this case, it was both of the same thing. I believe that if this was in a modern setting, Tom and Amanda would never speak, meet, or even gesture to each other again.

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“All right I will! The more you should about my selfishness to me the quicker I’ll go and I won’t go to the movies!” (Tom)

“You don’t know things anywhere! You live in a dream; You manufacture illusions” (Amanda)

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“Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be” (Tom)

Towards the end of the play, it can be inferred that Tom has be struck with deep grief. Grief can look different for people who experience it. but one thing is certain: we do feel it, in body and soul. As real as the skin that covers us and the bones that keep us upright. Grief can, quite literally, sicken us. Grief can turn you into a life of chasing down Xanax with some whiskey. More so in this day and age. Tom would most certainly fall into this area. It even implies it by the end of the play.

"I reach for a cigarette,  I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink,  I speak to the nearest stranger  -anything that can blow your candles out!"

Tom would turn out to be a heavy chronic drinker in his later years.

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“ I   haven't   enjoyed   one   bite   of   this   dinner   because   of   your   constant   directions   on   how   to   eat  it.   It's   you   that   makes   me   rush   through   meals   with   your   hawk-like   attention   to   every   bite   I   take.  Sickening  -  spoils   my   appetite  -  all   this   discussion   of  -  animals'   secretion  -  salivary   glands  - mastication

Even though Amanda was being annoying that night at the dinner table, Tom starts showing his true colors early on in the play. In this day and age, I could see Tom being abusive almost to his parents because that is a real problem that happens in a common household. Parents abusing their child? It would be much worse if your kid did it to yourself.

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It is also important to note that Tom is the only one that works for the family.

"...apartment building… cellular living-units...of lower middle class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American Society" (Narrator)

"House, house! Who pays rent on it,  who makes a slave of himself to-" (Tom)

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Tom: "Tom enters dressed as a merchant sailor"

Reading this can make us infer that he wears a overcoat and possibly a trench coat some days.

Tom: "...takes off his sailor overcoat and skull-fitting knitted cap…."

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"[He   goes   through   a   series   of   violent,  clumsy   movements,  seizing   his  overcoat,  lunging   to   do   door,  pulling   it   fiercely   open."

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"I’m right at the point of committing myself to a future that doesn’t include the warehouse and Mr. Mendoza or even a night-school course in public speaking" (Tom)

Numerous times in the play, Tom talks to any of the characters or us about how he wants to leave his currently life to partake in being a writer. However, he had to give up this life for his family that I'm pretty sure he doesn't even like (Only Amanda is holding him back)

It seems as though he is doing this because he is actually ashamed of himself. As Amanda calls him out on

"I think you’ve been doing things that's you’re ashamed of. That’s why you act like this. I don’t believe that you go every night to the movies"

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"I didn’t go to the moon. I went much further - for time is the longest distance between places. Nott long after that I was fired for writing a poem on a lid of a shoebox."

It greatly implies that he is on the track to becoming like his father and that is a bad thing. It's not something that he wants to do and he greatly regrets leaving.