There is a fantastic way to rid yourself of superfluous Twitter followers. Here's what I did:
I posted "Like health and mental health--they cannot be defined--peace will never exist. I'll go as far as calling peace inhumane." Followed up with "Peace activists didn't end the Holocaust and other nightmares. Soldiers did. War is awful indeed. However, peace can be worse."
That helped. It doesn't matter how open-minded individuals believe they are. When you tickle a holy nipple of a holy udder of somebody's holy cow, you are dog meat! The peace peeps won't hesitate for a second: they'll kill you instantly by unfollowing.
Nobody is open-minded! Being open-minded is a myth of the smug crowd and so is the belief in peace on Earth. John Lennon, for instance, lured us into this type of self-deception: "Imagine all the people living life in peace ... I hope some day you'll join us and the world will be as one."
Right. You know what that means, don't you? Fascism. When you join us and decide to think like me, someday, there'll be peace. No kidding. Other people are the problem in the world. It's not me, and once they're all like me we'll have heaven on Earth and peace forever. We, the peace-loving hypocrites, are better than everybody else.
"Lennon's jealousy could manifest itself in violent behavior towards [Cynthia Powell, John's first wife], as when he slapped her across the face (hitting her head against the wall) the day after he saw her dancing with Stuart Sutcliffe." During their divorce, Lennon refused to give his wife any more than £75,000, telling her on the phone, "That's like winning the pools, so what are you moaning about? You're not worth any more." Also, [John] reportedly donated money to the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party. For entirely peaceful purposes, I am sure.
"Shortly afterwards, at McCartney's twenty-first birthday party on 18 June 1963, Lennon physically attacked Cavern Club MC Bob Wooler for saying "How was your honeymoon, John?". To Lennon, drunk, the matter was simple: "He called me a queer so I battered his bloody ribs in"."
I wholeheartedly agree: if the world population could just be like John Lennon, there would be peace. Not the kind of peace I'd imagine, though.
Don't get me wrong. I love peace. When I was eighteen the German army, die Bundeswehr, wanted me badly and, since I had no intention to learn how to kill people, I became a conscientious objector. My family was not proud of my decision and I lost friends over it. My love for peace caused war with some of those near me.
Jump with me to Afghanistan. During last week's election, the Taliban threatened Afghan voters to cut their inked voting fingers off. That's the kind of peace you will permit--and you'll have to live and sleep with--if you are opposed to the presence of U.S. and Nato troops in Afghanistan. And we are not even talking about the "peace" that women will have to endure under Taliban terror.
Malaysia: A Malaysian Muslim woman who had been sentenced to be caned for drinking beer in a hotel has been granted a reprieve until after Ramadan, religious official have said. Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, 32, will be beaten publicly after Ramadan. How merciful.
A clear sign that there is peace in Malaysia. John Lennon knew that already: if you slap a woman, there will be peace. Am I so utterly wrong with my statement that peace can be inhumane?
Was it wrong for U.S. soldiers to free the damn Germans from themselves? Had the allies remained in their countries, peacefully holding their dicks instead of evil guns, would that have meant peace for Jews and Germans, Russians, Poles, Scandinavia, and the French? Of course there was peace in concentration camps. Right? And order, too.
You, today, would you leave it alone because those dorks peacefully butchering each other means no immediate threat to you?
"Oh, I love people." Do you really? How much?
Had soldiers not ended the Nazi nightmare, my parents would not have married and I would not have been born. Third Reich type peace would have prevented my existence and you'd have been spared my diatribes.
Peace can be an attempt on people's lives. Peace murders and maims people. In 1994, U.N. peace troops withdrew from Rwanda to allow the Hutus to chop up approximately 800,000 Tutsis. Our cruel idea of peace is directly responsible for the most ghastly genocide in recent history.
Peace-no-matter-what may quickly turn into unspeakable horror, disregarding human life, freedom, and dignity. Refusing to blindly believe in peace as the be all and end all has nothing to do with warmongering.
Peace can take everything away from you that you may expect to gain from it--yep, including peace.
I promote happiness, happiness of the individual. But see: life is messy and if I am not too mistaken life will always be some sort of a mess, individually and collectively. We can't wait until everything is neatly sorted out before our "real life" may begin. Life has begun and happiness can only be had today, in the middle and the muddle of the mess.
I prefer today's murky happiness over tomorrow's seemingly ideal imagination. I hate war, but I cannot trust peace. Our childish dreams yearn for ideal circumstances. Sounds almost as boring as heaven, with all your hunchbacked toothless relatives sitting on a cloud barking one 'Hallelujah' after the other.
"Why are you so negative and cynical?"
I am? Wrong! Nothing is as adventurous and fun as reality. Add lust, risk, and freedom. Authentic individuality and freedom can't afford peace. Once again: no, war is not the alternative to peace, but war can't be excluded. War is a part of the human condition.
Forget war for now. Question is how well can you handle tension? Opposition? Disagreement? Forget peace. Enjoy tension! Explore it, exploit tension, and be ecstatic about your messy life just the way it presents itself today.
Egbert Sukop
P.S.: Buy my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job.'
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Darden's Dorky Dean
On August 20th, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the dean of the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, Professor Robert Bruner, and lessons he thinks students can take away from financial crisis. But does he really? Think, I mean?
Commonplace drivel is rather atypical for the WSJ, but Professor Bruner seems to be a master of trite statements.
"Ethics are always No. 1," he says. Since when? He continues, "It appears that the system rose to tolerate borderline or obviously unethical or illegal behavior." The system--of governmental oversight, I assume--did not tolerate unethical behavior: it grossly proliferated the suspension of ethics. What has Mr. Bruner been reading for the last twelve months? Certainly not the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, Professor B. does not trust the markets--you and me--to shake out the shady nor does he have much faith in our judicial system.
How do I know that?
If a certain behavior is illegal now, it can be prosecuted immediately with or without Bruner's moral lectures. Except, in the case of our recent crisis we are eager to let the true culprits go. It's too dangerous for some seemingly innocent folks to open that can of worms, and we don't want to inconvenience individuals who live in clouds above and beyond ethics classes.
Are we so retarded that we need the dean to tell us that the comprehension of his ethics can keep us from committing crimes? How naive is this gentleman? Does he believe those who violate ethics and/or laws are unaware of their behavior and its consequences?
It is silly to raise the moral index finger, as if to say that better ethical training will prevent future ethics violations. There will always be crime, dear Professor Bruner, and teaching your unbelievable drivel to "the next generation" with "more critical care and reflection" would not have prevented an army of banksters from feeling tempted by the sugar high of credit default swaps.
"The aftermath is a much larger role for government" because the benefactors of past ethics violations don't care to miss out on the fruits of unethical behavior in the future, and if they can exploit crises to increase the sum of money that goes around--they undoubtedly will. A fine reason for government to push for its own procreation. Professor Bruner knows as well as I do that (deliberate) incompetence of government oversight won't be magically eliminated by more government oversight.
If it's not working now we should do more of the same? Really? We have slept through moral theory since Socrates and Aristotle, but suddenly dean Bruner discovered the recipe to solve the remaining problems during Darden's next class? I am so impressed ... by his arrogance!
"It's always in the panic that the world settles up with unethical behavior. If you look at the discoveries of Ponzi schemes, they coincide with economic troughs," says Mr. Bruner. If a crisis is a tool to end unethical behavior we should be looking forward to the next crisis, shouldn't we? Or does he believe that Bernie Madoff would have never ponzied around had he had the pleasure of sitting through dean Bruner's ethics training?
Apropos Ponzi: We have known for a century that Ponzi schemes cannot work. Further, we are aware that Ponzi schemes are illegal. However, governments--and the individuals who do the governments' holy work--don't interrupt their donut breakfast for "more critical reflection." Charles Ponzi's dubious accomplishments have inspired our government more than Professor Bruner's ethics lecture ever will: illegal or mathematically impossible--governments don't hesitate to engage in activities that are STRENG VERBOTEN for everybody else.
Enter social security, the most grandiose Ponzi operation under the sun. How do you teach business ethics without cynicism or a heaping portion of intellectual dishonesty?
Dean Bruner goes on to embarrass himself by sharing platitudes "Good leaders are present and engaged and alert," or "The best leaders do the opposite [of playing Bridge]." How do you do THAT?
But Darden's dorky dean's $64,000 lie rolls off his tongue thusly: "I believe in pay for performance ..." Damn. I wasn't sure if business schools (B.S.) are still deceiving their students with such reprehensible nonsense. Now I know: they do and shamelessly so.
Do you believe in performance related pay? I won't laugh if you do because it's just as sad as it is funny, but I suggest the following:
Make a list of everybody you know, from your hunchbacked relatives and friends to your dry cleaner at the corner. Don't forget to add the famous (Simon Cowell), the droll (Paris Hilton), and the infamous (Michael Vick).
Then write down how hard and how many hours they work. Put numbers next to their names--each person's annual salary or wage--before you ask yourself whether the belief in "pay for performance" continues to make any logical sense. Does Beyoncé Knowles work 2,200 times harder than your car mechanic?
Too much underpaid work to figure it out?
I thought so. As an alternative, you may purchase a copy of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job.' It will thoroughly answer this question for you. Not enough: my book rudely rips into numerous uncomfortable issues and I solemnly promise it would make Professor Bruner's head spin.
Egbert Sukop
P.S.: Uh, before I forget: have you bought my book yet?
Commonplace drivel is rather atypical for the WSJ, but Professor Bruner seems to be a master of trite statements.
"Ethics are always No. 1," he says. Since when? He continues, "It appears that the system rose to tolerate borderline or obviously unethical or illegal behavior." The system--of governmental oversight, I assume--did not tolerate unethical behavior: it grossly proliferated the suspension of ethics. What has Mr. Bruner been reading for the last twelve months? Certainly not the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, Professor B. does not trust the markets--you and me--to shake out the shady nor does he have much faith in our judicial system.
How do I know that?
If a certain behavior is illegal now, it can be prosecuted immediately with or without Bruner's moral lectures. Except, in the case of our recent crisis we are eager to let the true culprits go. It's too dangerous for some seemingly innocent folks to open that can of worms, and we don't want to inconvenience individuals who live in clouds above and beyond ethics classes.
Are we so retarded that we need the dean to tell us that the comprehension of his ethics can keep us from committing crimes? How naive is this gentleman? Does he believe those who violate ethics and/or laws are unaware of their behavior and its consequences?
It is silly to raise the moral index finger, as if to say that better ethical training will prevent future ethics violations. There will always be crime, dear Professor Bruner, and teaching your unbelievable drivel to "the next generation" with "more critical care and reflection" would not have prevented an army of banksters from feeling tempted by the sugar high of credit default swaps.
"The aftermath is a much larger role for government" because the benefactors of past ethics violations don't care to miss out on the fruits of unethical behavior in the future, and if they can exploit crises to increase the sum of money that goes around--they undoubtedly will. A fine reason for government to push for its own procreation. Professor Bruner knows as well as I do that (deliberate) incompetence of government oversight won't be magically eliminated by more government oversight.
If it's not working now we should do more of the same? Really? We have slept through moral theory since Socrates and Aristotle, but suddenly dean Bruner discovered the recipe to solve the remaining problems during Darden's next class? I am so impressed ... by his arrogance!
"It's always in the panic that the world settles up with unethical behavior. If you look at the discoveries of Ponzi schemes, they coincide with economic troughs," says Mr. Bruner. If a crisis is a tool to end unethical behavior we should be looking forward to the next crisis, shouldn't we? Or does he believe that Bernie Madoff would have never ponzied around had he had the pleasure of sitting through dean Bruner's ethics training?
Apropos Ponzi: We have known for a century that Ponzi schemes cannot work. Further, we are aware that Ponzi schemes are illegal. However, governments--and the individuals who do the governments' holy work--don't interrupt their donut breakfast for "more critical reflection." Charles Ponzi's dubious accomplishments have inspired our government more than Professor Bruner's ethics lecture ever will: illegal or mathematically impossible--governments don't hesitate to engage in activities that are STRENG VERBOTEN for everybody else.
Enter social security, the most grandiose Ponzi operation under the sun. How do you teach business ethics without cynicism or a heaping portion of intellectual dishonesty?
Dean Bruner goes on to embarrass himself by sharing platitudes "Good leaders are present and engaged and alert," or "The best leaders do the opposite [of playing Bridge]." How do you do THAT?
But Darden's dorky dean's $64,000 lie rolls off his tongue thusly: "I believe in pay for performance ..." Damn. I wasn't sure if business schools (B.S.) are still deceiving their students with such reprehensible nonsense. Now I know: they do and shamelessly so.
Do you believe in performance related pay? I won't laugh if you do because it's just as sad as it is funny, but I suggest the following:
Make a list of everybody you know, from your hunchbacked relatives and friends to your dry cleaner at the corner. Don't forget to add the famous (Simon Cowell), the droll (Paris Hilton), and the infamous (Michael Vick).
Then write down how hard and how many hours they work. Put numbers next to their names--each person's annual salary or wage--before you ask yourself whether the belief in "pay for performance" continues to make any logical sense. Does Beyoncé Knowles work 2,200 times harder than your car mechanic?
Too much underpaid work to figure it out?
I thought so. As an alternative, you may purchase a copy of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job.' It will thoroughly answer this question for you. Not enough: my book rudely rips into numerous uncomfortable issues and I solemnly promise it would make Professor Bruner's head spin.
Egbert Sukop
P.S.: Uh, before I forget: have you bought my book yet?
Sunday, August 9, 2009
circulus vitiosus
"The only happy people I know are people I don't know well." --Helen Telushkin (via Dennis Prager)
The more details we discover about another person's life, the clearer it becomes that other people have at least as much adversity to deal with as we do. Some individuals appear exceptionally lucky on first sight, before we learn about the heavy burdens they are carrying. Nobody's life is free of challenges and pain. Every single human being has plenty of reasons not to be happy.
There it is: if you are not as happy as you wish to be, it is because feeling awful makes more sense. Is being miserable logical? Is the absence of happiness a natural function of nasty, happiness-smothering circumstances?
A vicious circle of desire keeps us from enjoying life as intensely as we could. For instance, we wish to be happy and we want to make money, but instead we develop weird habits of exclusive thinking:
Large percentages of the population think that they cannot be happy while being at work. Hence making money excludes happiness, and being happy excludes making money. We want both, but we're making damn sure that it won't occur. We can't handle both simultaneously. Our ability to multi-task is rather limited.
Combining the two appears nearly impossible. Work is not supposed to be fun. If it's too enjoyable it can't be that hard and if our work lacks hardship, its perceived monetary value drops to levels of insignificance.
People are afraid of having too much fun at work. When that happens--and we're happy on the job despite our intentions to suffer for money--feelings of guilt can kick in swiftly.
Our belief in sweat equity is similar to blood sacrifices of ancient cultures. Of course we don't kill the annual virgin to persuade our gods that we deserve a decent crop. Nevertheless, we are a superstitious bunch. How else do you explain the unwillingness to abandon human sacrifices?
People trade their lives for a house. Individuality is easily surrendered in exchange for our brats' education and for comfort. Right, we pay for comfort with emotional and physical discomfort. Pain is a common currency for the purchase of luxury and highly questionable symbols. Cars are often seen as symbols of freedom and mobility, and we're willing to relinquish true freedom to do what we want in exchange for $1,000 rims and an iPhone.
Symbols of freedom and happiness can be more important than raw freedom and happiness. After all, we are sophisticated people and we prefer freedom secondhand.
The idea that fun and enjoyment may be valuable commodities or even capable of producing money seems absurd. Can't we work our behinds off WHILE we are happy? Can you?
Imaginary lists lurk around our heads, lists of potential happy makers, 'Happy Lists,' and lists of events with supposedly depressing character, 'Unhappy Lists.'
Money--preferably lots of it--appears in prominent positions on people's list of happiness causing events. Restored health, grandchildren, vacations, completion of education and other projects, world peace, a lower tax burden, raises, marriage, divorce, a day of sunshine, or a good deal--almost anything can serve at one time or another to sucker us into the belief that we'll be happier once X has happened.
The majority of lottery winners eventually experiences the undoing of their pre-jackpot lives, yet the unlikely occasion of winning the lottery remains on many people's Happy Lists.
Children are on plenty of Happy Lists, but will children “make" you happy by definition? Unloading responsibility for your happiness onto the small shoulders of your kids—born or unborn—would be an unspeakable cruelty. We may experience an abundance of happy times with children, but the inhumane expectation that your offspring owes you an increase of your personal happiness will be punished by the universe. Trust me.
Childless individuals often believe with children they would be happier. I know of parents who think without children they could have been happier. We are nuts.
Divorce is on the average Unhappy List. Wish lists and LOA treasure maps don't usually include divorces. “Oh, I want to meet a nice man and share a devastating and humiliating divorce with him.” Bizarre? Surprisingly, approximately half of those who get married will look forward to their divorce sooner or later. Indeed, divorces can make us happy or at least they may lead us back to the road toward happiness.
Birthdays appear on Happy Lists, cancer commonly on Unhappy Lists. Gout, death, repair bills, or a cleft lip: Unhappy List. Beer, tax hikes, celibacy? Depends on you.
"Those who seek happiness in pleasure, wealth, glory, power, and heroics are as naive as the child who tries to catch a rainbow and wear it as a coat." --Dilgo Khentse Rinpoche
No, that does not mean you should make do without pleasure, wealth, or power! Mr. Rinpoche doesn't say anything against having fun or the acquisition of cash per se. But he is correct: to seek ecstasy in the warm and fuzzy, in the cracks of the notoriously positive, is as limited as it is hopelessly immature. If the good is "making" you happy and the bad is "causing" unhappy feelings, negative experiences will cancel out happiness and on average your life will trickle away at an emotional level of plus/minus zero.
Being happy when life goes well and complaining when the going gets tough is not that creative, or is it? Happiness cannot expand without venturing out into hostile territory, the dark and the negative. Every 4-year old knows that fun is fun. Duh. The real challenge is to connect the dots between happiness and the common cold, between cancer and ecstasy, or to respond to an impertinent boss with boundless lust for work!
Forget the new age rubbish, the brain-phlegm coughed up by recycled dork religions: "there is a positive side to everything," or that smug "what is this pain teaching you?" No, no, no--that is not happiness. It's a miserable wretch grasping for that last straw of meaning to hold on to, a nanosecond before filing for intellectual bankruptcy.
I am not asking you to prospect for kernels of wisdom in negative experiences. The negative, the reprehensible, or the outright painful is indeed ugly and I don't suggest you cover it up with a mountain of fudge. The last thing on my mind is peddling positive thinking.
But: Even ugly experiences can be lived with style, excitement, and passion!
If you need help entering your form of ecstasy when you are facing one of life's less than desirable surprises, I am happy to teach you for a hefty fee. Yet I don't believe that's necessary. Why?
We are naturally born happy entities!
You don't need to teach 2-year olds how to be happy. They know how it works. From then on people learn how to not be happy. We have learned what we can gain with misery and what we forgo by being happy too often. And ecstasy is an absolut no-no. Makes you look crazy.
What am I talking about? When you are unhappy, you get attention. We knew how to milk that before we could speak. Being unhappy increases a person's perceived importance. Others latch on with there own problems or they are compelled to help. At the very least, individuals feel compassion with the unhappy. Unhappy fellows are considered deeper, more sophisticated, and thoughtful.
Being unhappy puts you in a control position! A superior angrily barking at his subjects gets immediate respect and more so than a boss who invites you to be merry and to join his ecstatic dance around his desk.
Happiness is suspect! We hate pain and misery, but we're not as scared of it as we are opposed to ecstasy. True happiness is associated with loss of control and must be avoided at all times. People don't even laugh uncontrollably because they are afraid how others may judge them.
Overtly happy people are an embarrassing sight. They are shallow freaks. They cause jealousy and resentment quickly. The happy person obviously doesn't control himself and neither do we expect that he can control others if necessary. You cannot trust a happy man. You want power? Forget being happy!
Everybody knows how to be happy at all times. If and when we aren't, we are scheming. Misery is artificial and those feigning it have ulterior motives. The unhappy person takes the feelings of the few happy freaks hostage. Unhappiness works by way of extortion.
When you are unhappy, you are intent to control your human environment by intimidation. And damned, it often works and we permit misery to bully our happiness into a tiny corner. Twice a month--maybe--at night, in bed, in the dark, when hardly anyone notices we are willing to be happy for 10 seconds.
Pathetic.
Never again trust unhappy people! And that includes an unhappy moody you.
Egbert Sukop
P.S.: That should not stop you from buying my damn book. So? What are you waiting for?!
Sunday, June 14, 2009
poor people suck
Poor people suck. We know that. With their very existence they destroy everybody's happiness, and it's probably a good idea to get rid of them. Robin Hood was not the first to fight the poor by giving them money he had stolen from the rich, and President Obama won't be the last. Such attempts are heartwarming but doomed to fail eventually.
Oh, I don't mean that taking money from the rich is impossible. It works every time but it won't help. Trying to eliminate the poor is such a challenge. Apparently, these guys are a resilient pest and most likely matters are trickier than you may expect:
The poor are an evasive species. Kind of like Sasquatch. Try to find Sasquatch. Then give him money and he will disappear? He won't but that's what we hope the poor will do, don't we?
We want the poor to disappear, and we sheepishly believe that bribing them will support their vanishing act. If we don't try to manipulate the poor into going away there is something wrong with us, we think, and we feel mightily guilty.
My Sasquatch allegory is stupid and inappropriate? About six billion people on earth are poor and you don't need to 'find' them? Of course I am pretty dense but consider this: just as you can't put a finger on Big Foot's big toe, you cannot pick out one single poor person and transport her to life's greener pastures at will.
Looking for a poor individual you could depoorify may not be as easy as finding a needle in a haystack. Besides, there are a bunch of fun things to do in a haystack once you'll tire of the needle business. For centuries we have been eager to whack the poor out of their embarrassing existence, with the result that there are a few billion more of them today than at any time in the past.
We try to get rid of something unwanted, and the inevitable result will be its proliferation.
When I was a little girl, my mom told me I could catch rabbits by dropping salt on their bushy tails. I believed her, loaded up on salt, and went into the field to hunt rabbits. Alas, my dad took the salt away from me, believing it was a potentially dangerous substance (which it was, but only for rabbits). Hence I never caught a rabbit and they have been hastily procreating ever since.
For similar reasons we may never catch a hairy specimen of Big Foot. Does that mean he will never disappear? If we can't find poor people, will they go away? I know you are questioning my sanity, but who are 'the poor?' The homeless guy with a Facebook page, powering up his Dell laptop with a generator (Wall Street Journal, June 4th 2009)? More than a billion people who live on less than a dollar a day? That is some form of financial stability at least, isn't it?
I can hear the howling of the do-gooders from here. I am cruel, you say? Hey, you want to eliminate the poor, not I. Admittedly, from the perspective of the religion of poverty I am committing heresy. I deny the existence of the poor. True. But the nanny activists are denying the poor their existence. What is worse: denying God or making an attempt on his life?
What makes the poor poor? There are plenty of people with little money who refuse to be called 'poor.' Similarly, there are folks with enormous assets but they would rather bite off a chunk of their tongue before they'd admit to being 'rich.' Money doesn't make people rich, as lack of money can't make anybody poor.
Judgment creates both groups, the so-called rich and the allegedly poor. To be precise, it's commonly the judgment of other people. The existence of the poor and the rich is caused by discrimination.
Not even those we think must be poor are likely to call themselves poor. The rich and the poor live in our heads only. Not two individuals will agree on the dividing line between poor and rich. When does one cross that line? What will it take, exactly? If you knew that, it could be done perhaps. Alas, nobody seems to know.
The line between the rich and the poor is individual and imaginary. So is Sasquatch.
The poor are serving a public purpose. We don't talk about poverty out of compassion, we do it because political mileage is to be gained from being seen as helping the poor. Recently I did an unlikely thing--unlikely for me, that is: I volunteered, distributing food and household staples to families in dire need. The organizers were incredibly concerned about properly sucking up to the media. The compassionate journalists were fed with fine foods that could not be wasted on a poor person. The organizers wanted to be photographed with the unfortunate, but they were hardly willing to have any direct business with that unwashed unkempt crowd of trash.
We love this mythological creature: the poverty stricken peasant. We have a romance with our helper's syndrome and the more poor losers we can identify, the more heroic we will look eliminating them. Poor people are as much of a godsend to those fighting poverty as blind children in India were for Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa needed the poor at least as much as the poor needed her. She died with coffers full of charity millions. Collecting the money was important for her. Making it available to those in need who provided the purpose for its accumulation was apparently not that pressing an issue.
We love problems and we nourish them. Problems that we cannot solve give meaning to our otherwise empty lives. And we are suckers for meaning, aren't we? Obviously we need the poor and--thank God--there is a simple solution. Not easy, but simple enough to be executed. We simply invent more of them than we can handle!
Apropos 'execution.' The Nazis knew how handy the Jews could be and sure enough, they loved them to death. Of course the Germans didn't invent the Jews per se. But the Nazis painstakingly invented how the Jews were perceived by a population that quietly permitted--and actively participated in--the bizarre joys of government issued murder.
Artificially altered public perception was powerful enough to turn the population of several countries into willing exterminators. And sleight of hand is what makes people appear as poor as needed. It's not about the lack of money. The sentimental value of emotions you can trigger is what counts. The sap quotient is key. No money is just no money and that experience is not exclusively owned by 'the poor.'
Naturally, nobody wants to kill the poor. We just want to get rid of them, for their own sake and for the common good. It'll be good for them to be gone. Not even the poor need the poor. To be exact, we don't really want to get rid of the poor. We just want to be seen as the ones working on such a sacred task.
Nobody gains brownie points from the absence of poverty and the poor. May they never go away completely. See, that's were the parallel between Sasquatch and the poor is undeniable. We are eager to curb their existence but we cannot afford to kill them off.
Now, are there any real poor people or not? I am not so sure. Agreed, there are several billion people with very little or no money as well as you can find folks who have plenty of assets and decent piles of cash.
I won't deny the existence of people with empty bank accounts and pockets, but the imaginary line we evoke to separate the so-called poor from the so-called rich is nonsense. Politicians gain from that mind game, the so-called poor sure won't.
I will go an inch further: the poor don't exist! The poor are a myth, and so are the rich. You can't get rid of either mythical group, for the same reasons you won't purge the world of Big Foot. Give up the fight, and drop the sick idea that the world would be better off without the poor. Contrary to popular opinion, the world is a great place and Sasquatch doesn't have to become extinct.
A play of perceptions. We have learned nothing about the poor besides myriads of colorful perceptions packaged in sappy stories. The idea of poverty helps journalists sell copy. New age geezers drove their human environment up the walls with poverty thinking and prosperity thinking. Poverty has been used to instigate revolution, to murder Czars, and to control societies. In other words, hardly anything is as valuable as poverty. It offers a wealth of opportunities. What would we do without the poor?
We can't afford to lose the poor and therefore we shall never eliminate poverty. Too many of us want the poor out of our sight AND to stay right where they are, simultaneously. The Jews were a temporary asset for the short sighted Nazis. For our society, the poor are a gift that keeps on giving--a cash cow to be exact.
Talking about racism: conversations about the rich and the poor are as ignorant and derogatory as disparaging talk about different "races." Meanwhile, we have figured out there is only one human race. Duh. But the fascist in us craves the fun of judging. Hence both the poor and the rich have become immortalized, as projections of the unwanted.
'The poor' are not other people. The poor are us. Our ideas of despair have been formed along the lines of nonsense that comes to our mushy mind when we think about poverty with a Hollywood perspective. We are utterly selfish when we evoke the image of poverty. We love thinking about the poor poor as an exercise in secondhand self-pity. The poor have done more for you than you will ever do for them. They give you reason to whine between beers.
It is not intelligent to parrot vague terms ad nauseam. Dividing the population into poor and rich people is separatism. We may choose to continue at our peril. If you really don't enjoy looking at someone's dire circumstances, write her a $500 check. But we'll do more for a vibrant economy when we stop milking each other's moral code under the pretense of doing good. As a species we are too creepy to ever do the right thing. Let's not even try.
If we truly cared about the poor we would have eliminated Malaria by now. We know we can, simply because we have done it in other regions. But we don't give a rat's ass. And that is o.k. as long as we don't pretend otherwise.
Arrogance permits us to address other people's poverty. In our hubris we think we have something to offer. Do we, really? We have adjusted the term 'Third World Country' to the politically more correct 'Developing World,' while we have advanced to becoming the 'Developed World.'
You mean it's a sign of development that more than 90% of our society works in lifelong dependency and despises every day of work? We should export our brilliant accomplishments? We would feel so much better about ourselves if we butchered the individuals and their potential also in the developing world on a grand scale, so they may live in voluntary slavery like we do?
If I were poor I would hide from the nannies who want to save me. But fortunately there are no poor people. Only individuals with differing amounts of cash in their pockets. And then, there are some things that mysteriously unite us all: the right and the freedom to have as much as we have.
Last but not least, we share a great equalizer: the fun of trying to make another buck.
Egbert Sukop
P.S.: Buy my book! And good grief, do it now: http://to.ly/7cx
Oh, I don't mean that taking money from the rich is impossible. It works every time but it won't help. Trying to eliminate the poor is such a challenge. Apparently, these guys are a resilient pest and most likely matters are trickier than you may expect:
The poor are an evasive species. Kind of like Sasquatch. Try to find Sasquatch. Then give him money and he will disappear? He won't but that's what we hope the poor will do, don't we?
We want the poor to disappear, and we sheepishly believe that bribing them will support their vanishing act. If we don't try to manipulate the poor into going away there is something wrong with us, we think, and we feel mightily guilty.
My Sasquatch allegory is stupid and inappropriate? About six billion people on earth are poor and you don't need to 'find' them? Of course I am pretty dense but consider this: just as you can't put a finger on Big Foot's big toe, you cannot pick out one single poor person and transport her to life's greener pastures at will.
Looking for a poor individual you could depoorify may not be as easy as finding a needle in a haystack. Besides, there are a bunch of fun things to do in a haystack once you'll tire of the needle business. For centuries we have been eager to whack the poor out of their embarrassing existence, with the result that there are a few billion more of them today than at any time in the past.
We try to get rid of something unwanted, and the inevitable result will be its proliferation.
When I was a little girl, my mom told me I could catch rabbits by dropping salt on their bushy tails. I believed her, loaded up on salt, and went into the field to hunt rabbits. Alas, my dad took the salt away from me, believing it was a potentially dangerous substance (which it was, but only for rabbits). Hence I never caught a rabbit and they have been hastily procreating ever since.
For similar reasons we may never catch a hairy specimen of Big Foot. Does that mean he will never disappear? If we can't find poor people, will they go away? I know you are questioning my sanity, but who are 'the poor?' The homeless guy with a Facebook page, powering up his Dell laptop with a generator (Wall Street Journal, June 4th 2009)? More than a billion people who live on less than a dollar a day? That is some form of financial stability at least, isn't it?
I can hear the howling of the do-gooders from here. I am cruel, you say? Hey, you want to eliminate the poor, not I. Admittedly, from the perspective of the religion of poverty I am committing heresy. I deny the existence of the poor. True. But the nanny activists are denying the poor their existence. What is worse: denying God or making an attempt on his life?
What makes the poor poor? There are plenty of people with little money who refuse to be called 'poor.' Similarly, there are folks with enormous assets but they would rather bite off a chunk of their tongue before they'd admit to being 'rich.' Money doesn't make people rich, as lack of money can't make anybody poor.
Judgment creates both groups, the so-called rich and the allegedly poor. To be precise, it's commonly the judgment of other people. The existence of the poor and the rich is caused by discrimination.
Not even those we think must be poor are likely to call themselves poor. The rich and the poor live in our heads only. Not two individuals will agree on the dividing line between poor and rich. When does one cross that line? What will it take, exactly? If you knew that, it could be done perhaps. Alas, nobody seems to know.
The line between the rich and the poor is individual and imaginary. So is Sasquatch.
The poor are serving a public purpose. We don't talk about poverty out of compassion, we do it because political mileage is to be gained from being seen as helping the poor. Recently I did an unlikely thing--unlikely for me, that is: I volunteered, distributing food and household staples to families in dire need. The organizers were incredibly concerned about properly sucking up to the media. The compassionate journalists were fed with fine foods that could not be wasted on a poor person. The organizers wanted to be photographed with the unfortunate, but they were hardly willing to have any direct business with that unwashed unkempt crowd of trash.
We love this mythological creature: the poverty stricken peasant. We have a romance with our helper's syndrome and the more poor losers we can identify, the more heroic we will look eliminating them. Poor people are as much of a godsend to those fighting poverty as blind children in India were for Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa needed the poor at least as much as the poor needed her. She died with coffers full of charity millions. Collecting the money was important for her. Making it available to those in need who provided the purpose for its accumulation was apparently not that pressing an issue.
We love problems and we nourish them. Problems that we cannot solve give meaning to our otherwise empty lives. And we are suckers for meaning, aren't we? Obviously we need the poor and--thank God--there is a simple solution. Not easy, but simple enough to be executed. We simply invent more of them than we can handle!
Apropos 'execution.' The Nazis knew how handy the Jews could be and sure enough, they loved them to death. Of course the Germans didn't invent the Jews per se. But the Nazis painstakingly invented how the Jews were perceived by a population that quietly permitted--and actively participated in--the bizarre joys of government issued murder.
Artificially altered public perception was powerful enough to turn the population of several countries into willing exterminators. And sleight of hand is what makes people appear as poor as needed. It's not about the lack of money. The sentimental value of emotions you can trigger is what counts. The sap quotient is key. No money is just no money and that experience is not exclusively owned by 'the poor.'
Naturally, nobody wants to kill the poor. We just want to get rid of them, for their own sake and for the common good. It'll be good for them to be gone. Not even the poor need the poor. To be exact, we don't really want to get rid of the poor. We just want to be seen as the ones working on such a sacred task.
Nobody gains brownie points from the absence of poverty and the poor. May they never go away completely. See, that's were the parallel between Sasquatch and the poor is undeniable. We are eager to curb their existence but we cannot afford to kill them off.
Now, are there any real poor people or not? I am not so sure. Agreed, there are several billion people with very little or no money as well as you can find folks who have plenty of assets and decent piles of cash.
I won't deny the existence of people with empty bank accounts and pockets, but the imaginary line we evoke to separate the so-called poor from the so-called rich is nonsense. Politicians gain from that mind game, the so-called poor sure won't.
I will go an inch further: the poor don't exist! The poor are a myth, and so are the rich. You can't get rid of either mythical group, for the same reasons you won't purge the world of Big Foot. Give up the fight, and drop the sick idea that the world would be better off without the poor. Contrary to popular opinion, the world is a great place and Sasquatch doesn't have to become extinct.
A play of perceptions. We have learned nothing about the poor besides myriads of colorful perceptions packaged in sappy stories. The idea of poverty helps journalists sell copy. New age geezers drove their human environment up the walls with poverty thinking and prosperity thinking. Poverty has been used to instigate revolution, to murder Czars, and to control societies. In other words, hardly anything is as valuable as poverty. It offers a wealth of opportunities. What would we do without the poor?
We can't afford to lose the poor and therefore we shall never eliminate poverty. Too many of us want the poor out of our sight AND to stay right where they are, simultaneously. The Jews were a temporary asset for the short sighted Nazis. For our society, the poor are a gift that keeps on giving--a cash cow to be exact.
Talking about racism: conversations about the rich and the poor are as ignorant and derogatory as disparaging talk about different "races." Meanwhile, we have figured out there is only one human race. Duh. But the fascist in us craves the fun of judging. Hence both the poor and the rich have become immortalized, as projections of the unwanted.
'The poor' are not other people. The poor are us. Our ideas of despair have been formed along the lines of nonsense that comes to our mushy mind when we think about poverty with a Hollywood perspective. We are utterly selfish when we evoke the image of poverty. We love thinking about the poor poor as an exercise in secondhand self-pity. The poor have done more for you than you will ever do for them. They give you reason to whine between beers.
It is not intelligent to parrot vague terms ad nauseam. Dividing the population into poor and rich people is separatism. We may choose to continue at our peril. If you really don't enjoy looking at someone's dire circumstances, write her a $500 check. But we'll do more for a vibrant economy when we stop milking each other's moral code under the pretense of doing good. As a species we are too creepy to ever do the right thing. Let's not even try.
If we truly cared about the poor we would have eliminated Malaria by now. We know we can, simply because we have done it in other regions. But we don't give a rat's ass. And that is o.k. as long as we don't pretend otherwise.
Arrogance permits us to address other people's poverty. In our hubris we think we have something to offer. Do we, really? We have adjusted the term 'Third World Country' to the politically more correct 'Developing World,' while we have advanced to becoming the 'Developed World.'
You mean it's a sign of development that more than 90% of our society works in lifelong dependency and despises every day of work? We should export our brilliant accomplishments? We would feel so much better about ourselves if we butchered the individuals and their potential also in the developing world on a grand scale, so they may live in voluntary slavery like we do?
If I were poor I would hide from the nannies who want to save me. But fortunately there are no poor people. Only individuals with differing amounts of cash in their pockets. And then, there are some things that mysteriously unite us all: the right and the freedom to have as much as we have.
Last but not least, we share a great equalizer: the fun of trying to make another buck.
Egbert Sukop
P.S.: Buy my book! And good grief, do it now: http://to.ly/7cx
Thursday, May 28, 2009
crappiness of happiness
A friend asked me how I would sum up the content of my new book in one sentence. The short answer: "Ecstasy in Hell!"
Yeah, but how ... yeah, butt what?
The pursuit of happiness is overrated. Happiness is not. See, as long as you pursue happiness you can't have it. So, why would you want to pursue happiness instead of enjoying it? You are happy or you aren't--there is no middle ground. Nobody is almost happy or half depressed.
The experience of happiness is rather sparse. We have developed myths about the proper pursuit of happiness, and our belief in happy-making myths is more important to us than actually being happy. Let's bludgeon three of these myths out of existence.
Life is messy, and it will stay that way. If we must fix the world before we can relax and enjoy a moment of happiness, we are doomed. Miserable people, on a mission to make the world a better place, will make the world more miserable. I don't trust unhappy do-gooders.
The supposedly meaningful maxim: "Leave the world a better place!" is frighteningly meaningless and in the incompetent hands of the unhappy, anything that seems better to them is guaranteed to take a turn for the worse. If you are unhappy with the universe, take a nap. But please don't do anything to make it better.
Do you know why you don't like your bloody world? Because every dork has tried to improve it. That includes--but is not limited to--Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. They wanted a better world as well. By all means put horse manure under your rose bushes if you so desire, but don't screw with my world. I don't need more of other people's harebrained ideas to improve the law "for my safety." What am I talking about? Health Nazis, like NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, want to outlaw salt. Salt? Yes, salt! I am confident it'll be illegal for me to pick my own nose, soon.
If you are unhappy with your reality, the world is not the cause of your misery. You are. And don't even consider improving yourself to take care of that problem: you are beyond help. The situation is hopeless and nothing better could happen to you.
Hopelessness is the portal to expanded happiness!
Dopey Hope No. 1: "One day I shall be sane and because of my healthy noodle, my world will be more enjoyable."
You will never be sane.
The DSM-IV (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) lacks a definition of sanity, but it describes you and me in excruciating detail. We are nuts, all of us, in different departments and on a variety of intensity levels.
We are a bit cuckoo, and some of us a little more than others. So what? Call it eccentric if you prefer but quit tinkering with your noggin'. You are doing fine. Few things are as liberating as the realization that you will never be normal or like other people. Other people will always be nuttier than you can imagine. Trust me, you don't want to be like them.
Putting an end to your quest for sanity translates to instant relaxation and provides a crucial foundation for happiness. Go for it. You can be there before noon tomorrow.
Dopey Hope No. 2: "One day I shall be surrounded by individuals who truly understand and respect me. Feeling understood will make me think better of myself."
You will never find a person who understands you!
I don't know how to break it to you, but you will die alone. Nobody cares to croak with you. A couple of teary-eyed folks may hang around, but the performance of the day will be yours.
We were alone when we were born. No matter how creepily "loving" and feng shui the atmosphere during your water birth was, the crappy pain you had to experience while transitioning from mom's pot belly to a rather cold environment akin to Siberia was exclusively yours. Since then, you have been on death row and it won't be commuted. Sorry!
Apropos, if waterboarding is torture, so is child birth. If newborns could talk, they would scream for a lawyer and the Geneva Convention. Put an adult through the same procedure that every baby experiences during birth, and pregnancy would be outlawed as a crime against humanity. Under a multitude of risks to life and limb, each one of us was cruelly tortured into this life. To add insult to injury, the entire blasted family was looking forward to our most painful experience of a lifetime.
I acknowledge that our mothers had their heaping share of pain to deal with, but they volunteered to participate. We did not. However, individuals live through this mandatory event in gruesome loneliness. It's great to have company, but pharmaceuticals are better suited to move this chapter quickly into the past.
Some of us develop the idea that life becomes more bearable in a group. 'Bearable' doesn't equal happiness for me, but who am I to judge the lemmings? You mean dying will be more fun when we "belong?" The only thing that improves in a group is the stupidity of each individual member. It can jump up exponentially in fact. Think committee decisions.
The first tree you ever saw in your life differed from my first tree. Somebody innocently mentions the word 'tree,' and you and I believe we have an idea of what she meant. Each of us imagines a different tree, and we could bombard each other with descriptions for days without success: we shall never get a congruent image of the other person's tree into our head.
Trees or chairs are relatively easy to communicate about. Tangibles are child's play compared with more complex subjects such as peace, love, freedom, or the existence and consistency of a soul. Good thing that I don't bother maintaining one. A soul that is. I don't even care for peace or love, but that is a separate story.
It is practically impossible for two people to agree on a precise definition of 'love' or 'God.' What is torture, for instance, and what is not? After half a decade of heated debates we aren't closer to agreement, are we?
Giving up the idea of finding your damn soul mate or someone who truly understands you can relieve you of the tension you were trying to eliminate by trying hard to meet understanding friends. I have felt most lonely while I was surrounded by dear friends, and I have felt outright deserted in the midst of family.
You can only discover, express, and enjoy your kind of freedom alone. Don't be so dense: of course you can be close to great individuals, but you'll never cross the chasm of individuality. Between individuals there can't be understanding. I shall never know you.
Dopey Hope No. 3: "One beautiful day the world will be as desired and all my insipid wishes will come true."
Not!
By the way, do you know what people hate most about the markets? The fact that markets behave as unpredictably as the world does. The notion that free markets don't work is as absurd and feeble minded as the idea that reality must be wrong.
"The world"--our collective experience of planet earth and your personal reality--will never be as neatly organized and pleasant as we wish for it to turn out. It matters not how many cutesy treasure maps the faithful Claw-of-Attraction dorks will nail to their bedroom walls. Even Hitler tried that and failed miserably.
You will never like your present day in its entirety, your future, or your past. And if you can be happy with the rosy parts of reality only, you are doomed to a dull existence, baby. Happiness about everything going according to your plan is for greenhorns. Gathering positive events in your life and trying to eliminate more of the negative stuff is a zero sum game.
Positive thinkering is maxed out. You won't prevent a quarter of a billion annual Malaria infections by thinking "good" thoughts and Malaria won't become more palatable by "seeing the glass half full." If your teenage son happens to impregnate your neighbor's 16-year old daughter--The Secret this or The Secret that--you won't like it one bit.
Conditional happiness is a setup for depression. "I am willing to be happy only if and when X occurs." Well, good luck with that! Why would you want to deprive yourself of happiness between highly improbable events? Are you so superstitious that you believe your self-chosen misery will convince the universe to have mercy with your rotten soul? You think sacrificing your happiness will guarantee better circumstances for your future?
If you are not happy, you have made a childish deal with the universe: "Dear universe, if you provide me with XYZ eventually, I am willing to be miserable in exchange meanwhile." People literally choose misery now to be happy later. It's pathetic.
I know I am exaggerating. I am wrong. It's not true. I lied. Funny species that we are, we can't be that droll ... or can we?
Your life's circumstances will rarely be conducive to prolonged happiness. If you care to be happy, you must pry it out of the iron grip of daily adversity. You must shorten your bitch lag!
Say wha ...?
Bitch lag.
There it is. The happy-maker par excellence.
Bitch lag is the time it takes to regain your composure, your productivity, and your happiness--after a disruptive unpleasant event triggered you to complain about reality.
We are useless while we're bitching about our lot. We are not making money and we're not aware how much fun we are having. But we are having fun indeed while we are locked in complaining mode. In fact, bitching about the world animates us so that we could go on for hours. Honestly, you don't want to defend the position that hating event X in your life is an expression of misery, or do you?
Bitching is bitching. We love it!
When things go wrong in our lives, when we are upset, pissed off, and red-faced in glowing anger: we are in our element. That, too, is happiness. Unadulterated ecstasy. We enjoy the crap in our lives more than we do its lame positive sides. Gets the blood pressure going.
You cannot expand your happiness by by increasing the nice and pink stuff. That's ninny theory. Leave The Secret and mind numbingly boring self-improvement to the baby boomers. Hardcore happiness wants to be experienced around the clock and because they don't have access to it, the baby boomers can't be weened off their weed.
I am not interested in inhaling five minutes of happiness on weekends. I want all of it all the time, or nothing! So can you. And damned, it's free!
Zero bitch lag: you realize you're bitching about something and--Bingo!--you are there. THAT is your current expression of ecstasy.
Reality sucks once-in-a-while for everyone of us. So what? Exploit it, all of it, for fun and profit. And you'll have one hell of a grand time.
Egbert
P.S.: Have you bought my book yet? No? Geez, pick it up at http://moneybymistake.com
Yeah, but how ... yeah, butt what?
The pursuit of happiness is overrated. Happiness is not. See, as long as you pursue happiness you can't have it. So, why would you want to pursue happiness instead of enjoying it? You are happy or you aren't--there is no middle ground. Nobody is almost happy or half depressed.
The experience of happiness is rather sparse. We have developed myths about the proper pursuit of happiness, and our belief in happy-making myths is more important to us than actually being happy. Let's bludgeon three of these myths out of existence.
Life is messy, and it will stay that way. If we must fix the world before we can relax and enjoy a moment of happiness, we are doomed. Miserable people, on a mission to make the world a better place, will make the world more miserable. I don't trust unhappy do-gooders.
The supposedly meaningful maxim: "Leave the world a better place!" is frighteningly meaningless and in the incompetent hands of the unhappy, anything that seems better to them is guaranteed to take a turn for the worse. If you are unhappy with the universe, take a nap. But please don't do anything to make it better.
Do you know why you don't like your bloody world? Because every dork has tried to improve it. That includes--but is not limited to--Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. They wanted a better world as well. By all means put horse manure under your rose bushes if you so desire, but don't screw with my world. I don't need more of other people's harebrained ideas to improve the law "for my safety." What am I talking about? Health Nazis, like NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, want to outlaw salt. Salt? Yes, salt! I am confident it'll be illegal for me to pick my own nose, soon.
If you are unhappy with your reality, the world is not the cause of your misery. You are. And don't even consider improving yourself to take care of that problem: you are beyond help. The situation is hopeless and nothing better could happen to you.
Hopelessness is the portal to expanded happiness!
Dopey Hope No. 1: "One day I shall be sane and because of my healthy noodle, my world will be more enjoyable."
You will never be sane.
The DSM-IV (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) lacks a definition of sanity, but it describes you and me in excruciating detail. We are nuts, all of us, in different departments and on a variety of intensity levels.
We are a bit cuckoo, and some of us a little more than others. So what? Call it eccentric if you prefer but quit tinkering with your noggin'. You are doing fine. Few things are as liberating as the realization that you will never be normal or like other people. Other people will always be nuttier than you can imagine. Trust me, you don't want to be like them.
Putting an end to your quest for sanity translates to instant relaxation and provides a crucial foundation for happiness. Go for it. You can be there before noon tomorrow.
Dopey Hope No. 2: "One day I shall be surrounded by individuals who truly understand and respect me. Feeling understood will make me think better of myself."
You will never find a person who understands you!
I don't know how to break it to you, but you will die alone. Nobody cares to croak with you. A couple of teary-eyed folks may hang around, but the performance of the day will be yours.
We were alone when we were born. No matter how creepily "loving" and feng shui the atmosphere during your water birth was, the crappy pain you had to experience while transitioning from mom's pot belly to a rather cold environment akin to Siberia was exclusively yours. Since then, you have been on death row and it won't be commuted. Sorry!
Apropos, if waterboarding is torture, so is child birth. If newborns could talk, they would scream for a lawyer and the Geneva Convention. Put an adult through the same procedure that every baby experiences during birth, and pregnancy would be outlawed as a crime against humanity. Under a multitude of risks to life and limb, each one of us was cruelly tortured into this life. To add insult to injury, the entire blasted family was looking forward to our most painful experience of a lifetime.
I acknowledge that our mothers had their heaping share of pain to deal with, but they volunteered to participate. We did not. However, individuals live through this mandatory event in gruesome loneliness. It's great to have company, but pharmaceuticals are better suited to move this chapter quickly into the past.
Some of us develop the idea that life becomes more bearable in a group. 'Bearable' doesn't equal happiness for me, but who am I to judge the lemmings? You mean dying will be more fun when we "belong?" The only thing that improves in a group is the stupidity of each individual member. It can jump up exponentially in fact. Think committee decisions.
The first tree you ever saw in your life differed from my first tree. Somebody innocently mentions the word 'tree,' and you and I believe we have an idea of what she meant. Each of us imagines a different tree, and we could bombard each other with descriptions for days without success: we shall never get a congruent image of the other person's tree into our head.
Trees or chairs are relatively easy to communicate about. Tangibles are child's play compared with more complex subjects such as peace, love, freedom, or the existence and consistency of a soul. Good thing that I don't bother maintaining one. A soul that is. I don't even care for peace or love, but that is a separate story.
It is practically impossible for two people to agree on a precise definition of 'love' or 'God.' What is torture, for instance, and what is not? After half a decade of heated debates we aren't closer to agreement, are we?
Giving up the idea of finding your damn soul mate or someone who truly understands you can relieve you of the tension you were trying to eliminate by trying hard to meet understanding friends. I have felt most lonely while I was surrounded by dear friends, and I have felt outright deserted in the midst of family.
You can only discover, express, and enjoy your kind of freedom alone. Don't be so dense: of course you can be close to great individuals, but you'll never cross the chasm of individuality. Between individuals there can't be understanding. I shall never know you.
Dopey Hope No. 3: "One beautiful day the world will be as desired and all my insipid wishes will come true."
Not!
By the way, do you know what people hate most about the markets? The fact that markets behave as unpredictably as the world does. The notion that free markets don't work is as absurd and feeble minded as the idea that reality must be wrong.
"The world"--our collective experience of planet earth and your personal reality--will never be as neatly organized and pleasant as we wish for it to turn out. It matters not how many cutesy treasure maps the faithful Claw-of-Attraction dorks will nail to their bedroom walls. Even Hitler tried that and failed miserably.
You will never like your present day in its entirety, your future, or your past. And if you can be happy with the rosy parts of reality only, you are doomed to a dull existence, baby. Happiness about everything going according to your plan is for greenhorns. Gathering positive events in your life and trying to eliminate more of the negative stuff is a zero sum game.
Positive thinkering is maxed out. You won't prevent a quarter of a billion annual Malaria infections by thinking "good" thoughts and Malaria won't become more palatable by "seeing the glass half full." If your teenage son happens to impregnate your neighbor's 16-year old daughter--The Secret this or The Secret that--you won't like it one bit.
Conditional happiness is a setup for depression. "I am willing to be happy only if and when X occurs." Well, good luck with that! Why would you want to deprive yourself of happiness between highly improbable events? Are you so superstitious that you believe your self-chosen misery will convince the universe to have mercy with your rotten soul? You think sacrificing your happiness will guarantee better circumstances for your future?
If you are not happy, you have made a childish deal with the universe: "Dear universe, if you provide me with XYZ eventually, I am willing to be miserable in exchange meanwhile." People literally choose misery now to be happy later. It's pathetic.
I know I am exaggerating. I am wrong. It's not true. I lied. Funny species that we are, we can't be that droll ... or can we?
Your life's circumstances will rarely be conducive to prolonged happiness. If you care to be happy, you must pry it out of the iron grip of daily adversity. You must shorten your bitch lag!
Say wha ...?
Bitch lag.
There it is. The happy-maker par excellence.
Bitch lag is the time it takes to regain your composure, your productivity, and your happiness--after a disruptive unpleasant event triggered you to complain about reality.
We are useless while we're bitching about our lot. We are not making money and we're not aware how much fun we are having. But we are having fun indeed while we are locked in complaining mode. In fact, bitching about the world animates us so that we could go on for hours. Honestly, you don't want to defend the position that hating event X in your life is an expression of misery, or do you?
Bitching is bitching. We love it!
When things go wrong in our lives, when we are upset, pissed off, and red-faced in glowing anger: we are in our element. That, too, is happiness. Unadulterated ecstasy. We enjoy the crap in our lives more than we do its lame positive sides. Gets the blood pressure going.
You cannot expand your happiness by by increasing the nice and pink stuff. That's ninny theory. Leave The Secret and mind numbingly boring self-improvement to the baby boomers. Hardcore happiness wants to be experienced around the clock and because they don't have access to it, the baby boomers can't be weened off their weed.
I am not interested in inhaling five minutes of happiness on weekends. I want all of it all the time, or nothing! So can you. And damned, it's free!
Zero bitch lag: you realize you're bitching about something and--Bingo!--you are there. THAT is your current expression of ecstasy.
Reality sucks once-in-a-while for everyone of us. So what? Exploit it, all of it, for fun and profit. And you'll have one hell of a grand time.
Egbert
P.S.: Have you bought my book yet? No? Geez, pick it up at http://moneybymistake.com
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
I love what I want
My friend Tom Volkar brought up the issue of love in regards to work. Should we pursue work we love or is it better that we do what we want? To get a deeper understanding of where I am coming from, I suggest you visit Tom's fabulous essay 'Loving Your Work is Overrated.' Now.
Here's my response:
Thank you, Tom, for shamelessly plugging my book! Your kind compliments are making me blush.
Roughly 50% of our marriages end in divorce, and we are falling out of love at an even higher rate. Love has a poor track record, especially as the basis for a flourishing long term business relationship with oneself.
Granted, love doesn't always look like Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah's sofa. But elements of insanity or at least manic behavior are lurking in the shadows of every romance. We love being in love to a level of addiction, and here is the opening to unavoidable pain. Our love for love usually dissolves it ... if we are lucky.
Unless we talk about love for our brats, that is--but that kind of caring is hardwired into our DNA. Any damned ostrich can do that.
Love is a terminal illness. Your love will end or it will end you. Love can literally kill people, and it is healthy to keep in mind that most homicides take place between individuals who once loved each other.
When we are tired of "loving" destruction and self-destruction, we can simply resolve the relationship entirely or we may opt for transmuting this mushy monstrum into something of durable consistency: able partners can transcend seizures of love and derive from it what they WANT!
Decades ago I loved my work. I was on a mission ("They're not gonna catch us. We're on a mission from God." --Blues Brothers), and I didn't believe that this love could end. The stuff we love is fraught with too much meaning. You mentioned 'the horns of angels:' "If the horns of angels and blinding white light don't announce their epiphanies, they often question their discoveries."
Frequent questioning of our discoveries is an integral part of a healthy mental diet. People get heart attacks over the impertinent self-importance that's covered up by their calling. Yep, God's Will can be a severe case of covert hubris. It serves us well to relax and to re-discover the playful character of old fashioned trial and error.
Beginning a new business venture can be fun. What's so wrong with lust? And if it works, why wouldn't you want to continue?
Today, I embrace the fact that I am somewhat detached from my projects. Distance makes the heart grow fonder? It does. Emotional distance supports free choice and thickens your bond with everything you really want.
The next occurrence of love is likely going to be a temporary phenomenon. Worse, our love suspends free will. Freedom of choice is impaired by love, and that can be as sickening as a commitment. Apropos, commitment to psychiatric wards is usually perpetrated by--you guessed correctly--loved ones, in the name of love. Is the sleepiest Saint out there finally snapping to attention?
'Doing what we love' is just another holy cow on the chopping block: ultimately we don't do anything we don't want. Feelings and emotions are always subject to our will. The baby boomers have used their sacred feelings as the most powerful tool to manipulate and to subjugate their environment. The infatuation of a teenager is an intense expression of what she wants.
So is our love and our hatred for our work.
Egbert Sukop
P.S.: Are you twittering yet? Follow me on twitter.com at http://twitter.com/esukop
P.P.S.: And don't forget to visit Amazon to purchase a copy of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' at http://tinyurl.com/dyal4y
Here's my response:
Thank you, Tom, for shamelessly plugging my book! Your kind compliments are making me blush.
Roughly 50% of our marriages end in divorce, and we are falling out of love at an even higher rate. Love has a poor track record, especially as the basis for a flourishing long term business relationship with oneself.
Granted, love doesn't always look like Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah's sofa. But elements of insanity or at least manic behavior are lurking in the shadows of every romance. We love being in love to a level of addiction, and here is the opening to unavoidable pain. Our love for love usually dissolves it ... if we are lucky.
Unless we talk about love for our brats, that is--but that kind of caring is hardwired into our DNA. Any damned ostrich can do that.
Love is a terminal illness. Your love will end or it will end you. Love can literally kill people, and it is healthy to keep in mind that most homicides take place between individuals who once loved each other.
When we are tired of "loving" destruction and self-destruction, we can simply resolve the relationship entirely or we may opt for transmuting this mushy monstrum into something of durable consistency: able partners can transcend seizures of love and derive from it what they WANT!
Decades ago I loved my work. I was on a mission ("They're not gonna catch us. We're on a mission from God." --Blues Brothers), and I didn't believe that this love could end. The stuff we love is fraught with too much meaning. You mentioned 'the horns of angels:' "If the horns of angels and blinding white light don't announce their epiphanies, they often question their discoveries."
Frequent questioning of our discoveries is an integral part of a healthy mental diet. People get heart attacks over the impertinent self-importance that's covered up by their calling. Yep, God's Will can be a severe case of covert hubris. It serves us well to relax and to re-discover the playful character of old fashioned trial and error.
Beginning a new business venture can be fun. What's so wrong with lust? And if it works, why wouldn't you want to continue?
Today, I embrace the fact that I am somewhat detached from my projects. Distance makes the heart grow fonder? It does. Emotional distance supports free choice and thickens your bond with everything you really want.
The next occurrence of love is likely going to be a temporary phenomenon. Worse, our love suspends free will. Freedom of choice is impaired by love, and that can be as sickening as a commitment. Apropos, commitment to psychiatric wards is usually perpetrated by--you guessed correctly--loved ones, in the name of love. Is the sleepiest Saint out there finally snapping to attention?
'Doing what we love' is just another holy cow on the chopping block: ultimately we don't do anything we don't want. Feelings and emotions are always subject to our will. The baby boomers have used their sacred feelings as the most powerful tool to manipulate and to subjugate their environment. The infatuation of a teenager is an intense expression of what she wants.
So is our love and our hatred for our work.
Egbert Sukop
P.S.: Are you twittering yet? Follow me on twitter.com at http://twitter.com/esukop
P.P.S.: And don't forget to visit Amazon to purchase a copy of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' at http://tinyurl.com/dyal4y
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
dream life
Dreaming happens whether we like it or not. We don't dream actively. We can ride a bicycle but we cannot intentionally dream. Dreaming "happens." It is an event we have no or extremely little control over.
But then we invent dreams we care about. We believe they are important. We want to turn them into reality. We are becoming attached to the outcome. Our dream--of how reality should be--morphs from innocence into a necessity, and we swear we shall never be happy again without getting what we want.
That's the moment when your finest dream has gathered sufficient power to reduce your life to a pile of rubble. The more we want something, the less freedom we have. A specific goal or a dream can kill the ecstasy you are capable of enjoying this very moment. Dreams that are meant to improve your life may become roots for its destruction.
Let's back up a notch. I am aware there are different types of dreams and goals, and I admit that I am simplifying. But what the hell, why shouldn't I?
Reduced to two kinds of goals, we can pursue one that is supposed to better our lives or a different kind that expresses our enjoyment of life. The former--"I want x, so that my life will be better, more meaningful, healthier, richer, etc."--evokes the image of a dog chasing a rabbit.
The outcome is impossible to predict. We expect to increase happiness in the future, and that imaginary level of happiness is linked to success or to the failure of our projects. We deny ourselves to be content at this moment because we are using misery as the motivator to achieve what we want in the future.
That is self-improvement at its worst. To be honest, where is the improvement in reaching such a goal? When I have to deprive myself of current joy as a psychological technique to get what I want, I am likely to repeat this effective--but nevertheless idiotic--'success' pattern in the future.
Say wha?
Once you have reached goal x, you will find ways to make yourself feel miserable again (re-charging your motivational battery) as a starting point for the pursuit of a new goal y that "will make you so incredibly happy." Pretty sick, don't you think?
Angry people crave to change the world. And when the world changes they are still angry. Anger is their childish tool. Anger is what they enjoy the most, and they will continue to be angry no matter what they'll achieve.
My happiness does not depend on luck and on the decisions other people are making. The outcome of my projects, my success rate or my bank balance, determines how much I can enjoy myself at the moment? That would be a fine reason for blowing my brains out. Sure, it's nice when things go well and when our projects are flourishing. I love when that happens, but I won't permit a fickle universe to steal my happiness.
Does goal setting work? Sure, why not. Is it advisable for the purpose of self-improvement? I am sorry, I have too much self-respect to suggest such a harebrained idea. If you love your life, beware of self-improvement. And if you don't enjoy being you, you have bigger problems to deal with than those that simplistic self-improvement can solve.
The other type of goal I mentioned is based on current contentment. It's not aimed at causing happiness. On the contrary, existing happiness is the foundation for this kind of goal. No retail therapy necessary. There is nothing you need to buy, do, or accomplish before you are willing to respect yourself by being happy and relaxed. You are exercising because you are feeling so good, instead of exercising for the purpose of reaching workout goals.
Playfulness versus dead serious cut throat behavior toward yourself. You can start the same business playfully and you can build the same house. But when contentment is the basis for setting material goals, they are easier to accomplish because it's just matter and free of emotional attachments. Making money is more fun when that money doesn't have to make you happy.
Not being happy is childish.
Children use misery and pain to get attention. When so-called adults continue that pattern, it becomes awfully pathetic. Pursuing dreams in order to be happy 'one day' is futile, and it is useless to work on goal achievement with the purpose of being free to to what you want afterward.
As far as happiness is concerned, I promote instant gratification. We can't make ourselves dream the right stuff in our sleep, and we don't control whether we'll have nightmares or pleasant dreams in pink. Neither are we capable of forcing a particular dream into existence during our waking hours.
'Follow your dream' does not mean that your will is the measure of all things and that you must subjugate reality at any cost. Forcing your will on your environment would be a fine recipe for misery, almost a guarantee that you will never be satisfied again.
In my dreams I never get to do what I want. Hence I rather wake up, be happy, and do what I want. How does that work, 'being happy first?'
Good question! I thought you'd never ask. It's easy: attend my seminar. Oops, I forgot that I don't offer seminars ... at least not now. But you can purchase a copy of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job.' That will answer questions about instant happiness. Not exhaustively but in ways you don't expect.
A happy day to you,
Egbert Sukop
P.S.: Are you twittering yet? Follow me on twitter.com at http://twitter.com/esukop
P.P.S.: And don't forget to visit Amazon to purchase a copy of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' at http://tinyurl.com/dyal4y
But then we invent dreams we care about. We believe they are important. We want to turn them into reality. We are becoming attached to the outcome. Our dream--of how reality should be--morphs from innocence into a necessity, and we swear we shall never be happy again without getting what we want.
That's the moment when your finest dream has gathered sufficient power to reduce your life to a pile of rubble. The more we want something, the less freedom we have. A specific goal or a dream can kill the ecstasy you are capable of enjoying this very moment. Dreams that are meant to improve your life may become roots for its destruction.
Let's back up a notch. I am aware there are different types of dreams and goals, and I admit that I am simplifying. But what the hell, why shouldn't I?
Reduced to two kinds of goals, we can pursue one that is supposed to better our lives or a different kind that expresses our enjoyment of life. The former--"I want x, so that my life will be better, more meaningful, healthier, richer, etc."--evokes the image of a dog chasing a rabbit.
The outcome is impossible to predict. We expect to increase happiness in the future, and that imaginary level of happiness is linked to success or to the failure of our projects. We deny ourselves to be content at this moment because we are using misery as the motivator to achieve what we want in the future.
That is self-improvement at its worst. To be honest, where is the improvement in reaching such a goal? When I have to deprive myself of current joy as a psychological technique to get what I want, I am likely to repeat this effective--but nevertheless idiotic--'success' pattern in the future.
Say wha?
Once you have reached goal x, you will find ways to make yourself feel miserable again (re-charging your motivational battery) as a starting point for the pursuit of a new goal y that "will make you so incredibly happy." Pretty sick, don't you think?
Angry people crave to change the world. And when the world changes they are still angry. Anger is their childish tool. Anger is what they enjoy the most, and they will continue to be angry no matter what they'll achieve.
My happiness does not depend on luck and on the decisions other people are making. The outcome of my projects, my success rate or my bank balance, determines how much I can enjoy myself at the moment? That would be a fine reason for blowing my brains out. Sure, it's nice when things go well and when our projects are flourishing. I love when that happens, but I won't permit a fickle universe to steal my happiness.
Does goal setting work? Sure, why not. Is it advisable for the purpose of self-improvement? I am sorry, I have too much self-respect to suggest such a harebrained idea. If you love your life, beware of self-improvement. And if you don't enjoy being you, you have bigger problems to deal with than those that simplistic self-improvement can solve.
The other type of goal I mentioned is based on current contentment. It's not aimed at causing happiness. On the contrary, existing happiness is the foundation for this kind of goal. No retail therapy necessary. There is nothing you need to buy, do, or accomplish before you are willing to respect yourself by being happy and relaxed. You are exercising because you are feeling so good, instead of exercising for the purpose of reaching workout goals.
Playfulness versus dead serious cut throat behavior toward yourself. You can start the same business playfully and you can build the same house. But when contentment is the basis for setting material goals, they are easier to accomplish because it's just matter and free of emotional attachments. Making money is more fun when that money doesn't have to make you happy.
Not being happy is childish.
Children use misery and pain to get attention. When so-called adults continue that pattern, it becomes awfully pathetic. Pursuing dreams in order to be happy 'one day' is futile, and it is useless to work on goal achievement with the purpose of being free to to what you want afterward.
As far as happiness is concerned, I promote instant gratification. We can't make ourselves dream the right stuff in our sleep, and we don't control whether we'll have nightmares or pleasant dreams in pink. Neither are we capable of forcing a particular dream into existence during our waking hours.
'Follow your dream' does not mean that your will is the measure of all things and that you must subjugate reality at any cost. Forcing your will on your environment would be a fine recipe for misery, almost a guarantee that you will never be satisfied again.
In my dreams I never get to do what I want. Hence I rather wake up, be happy, and do what I want. How does that work, 'being happy first?'
Good question! I thought you'd never ask. It's easy: attend my seminar. Oops, I forgot that I don't offer seminars ... at least not now. But you can purchase a copy of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job.' That will answer questions about instant happiness. Not exhaustively but in ways you don't expect.
A happy day to you,
Egbert Sukop
P.S.: Are you twittering yet? Follow me on twitter.com at http://twitter.com/esukop
P.P.S.: And don't forget to visit Amazon to purchase a copy of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' at http://tinyurl.com/dyal4y
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