Today’s blog entry will be about one of the most amazing Cracked articles ever.

It’s called Six Harsh Truths That Will Make You A Better Person, and believe me, it is harsh as hell.

But it’s harsh in a good way. It’s strong medicine that can cure you if you let it, but it tastes horrible and doesn’t exactly feel good going down either.

A lot of people who read it will feel like they have been personally attacked by it. Personally attacked by an article written by someone who has never met them and probably never will. Someone who has no idea they even exist. And yet, it will still feel personal.

That’s because the article contains a lot of the sort of thing that people like me, people suffering from an acute case of failure to launch, don’t want to hear. They don’t want to hear that it’s not enough just to be a nice person. Like I have said in this space, sooner or later, you have to produce. You have to make or be something the world wants, and then trade that for what you want.

A lot of the time, that takes the form of money, but maybe not as often as people think.

And it’s the inability or unwillingness to accept this basic truth – that the world doesn’t owe you anything but mere survival and everything else, all your hopes and dreams and desires, is up to you – that causes the failure to launch in the first place.

When you are a kid, you don’t have to earn anything. Your family loves you, you have a roof overhead and food to eat, school is free, and you probably even got an allowance without having to do anything for it.

But society does a poor job of conveying to us that this period of getting things just for being you ends. Your parents and your siblings will always love you unconditionally, but the world will not. How could it? It doesn’t even know you are there.

And if you think that means the world is a cruel, harsh, unfair place, ask yourself this : Would I want to give away everything I have and everything I can do for free? No? Then why should everyone else give you what you want for free?

If the world is a harsh place, you’re as much of that harshness as everybody else.

The article mentioned the infamous speech from Glengarry Glenn Ross :

A lot of people respond to that speech by thinking about what an asshole Alec Baldwin’s character is, and there’s a lot of truth to that.

But when you really thinking about it, all he is saying is that all the matters in your job is that you do your job. That might not be what people want to hear, but it’s true. Think it’s harsh that the business in the movie expects the people to do what they are paid to do? You’d want people to do what you paid them to do, wouldn’t you?

Now obviously, it’s more complicated than that. But fundamentally, that speech is life telling you the truth. It’s not that being a good person doesn’t matter – it matters a lot. It’s just that it is not the only thing that matters.

Here’s one of my favorite bits from the article :

Saying that you’re a nice guy is like a restaurant whose only selling point is that the food doesn’t make you sick. You’re like a new movie whose title is This Movie Is in English, and its tagline is “The actors are clearly visible.”

Pretty much nails it on the head.

And I am saying this as someone who is a really nice guy. If that was all the world required of people, I would be set for life. I am a sensitive, understanding, caring guy, and people tend to like me. If the world was a nice-ocracy, I would live like a king.

But it isn’t. Being a nice person gets you the rewards of being a nice person. That’s it. Other strengths get other awards. You can’t expect to pay for everything simply by being inoffensive.

And the sooner you learn to accept this, the sooner you can get on with your life and become a much, much happier person. Nobody can respect themselves if they know, deep down, they aren’t contributing. Wanna know why your self-esteem is so bad? That’s why. We are born to be part of a society, and that means both receiving and contributing. If you don’t contribute, you feel like a burden, and that causes corrosive guilt and that destroys self esteem faster than anything else in the world.

So what do you do now that you know that you will get nothing from the world if you do not produce?

Learn to produce, obviously. Everybody can, the barrier is thinking you don’t (or shouldn’t) have to. Maybe you think you can’t, or maybe you are worried you won’t be able to keep it up, or maybe you have chemical issues in your mind that make it hard for you to imagine that going down the road of producing something someone can use will be anything but a massive loss of something precious inside you.

And the truth is, you will have to let go of something : your childhood. You will have to grow the hell up. And if you are worried about how big a step that is and how much of a commitment it will be, you have every right to be. It’s a big deal to go from caterpillar to butterfly.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a step worth taking. I’m finally taking that step by going back to school. I wish I had done it a decade or more ago. I could have saved so much time.

And that is point of posts like this and articles like the one it’s based on : it’s the closest we can get to sending a message back in time to save ourselves from wasting our lives.

It’s too late for us… but maybe it isn’t too late for you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let me tell you about vitamin B-12.

I recently read an article about the symptoms of vitamin B-12 deficiency. So I went down the checklist.

1. Weakness, tiredness, or lightheadedness – Yup, yup, and yup.
2. Heart palpitations and shortness of breath – Got those too
3. Pale skin – Neutral on that. Probably not.
4. A smooth tongue – Only on and around the tip.
5. Constipation, diarrhea, a loss of appetite, or gas – All of those. Thought that was IBS.
6. Nerve problems like numbness or tingling, muscle weakness, and problems walking – I get random pains and cramps or spasms a fair bit. So, sorta, a little. The problems walking are rare and are due to the above mentioned lightheadedness.
7. Vision loss – Lately, um…. yeah.
8. Mental problems like depression, memory loss, or behavioral changes – Definitely the first two. No behavioural changes, but then again, I have been eating a low B-12 diet (unintentionally) for a really long time now. So I dunno.

See, the body needs B-12 for little minor functions like synthesizing DNA, making healthy blood cells, and maintaining your nervous system.

Ya know. Little things like that.

So I read that article (can’t link, don’t remember where it was from) and started to get pretty concerned. But I am a recovering hypochondriac and so I know to restrain my panic before I had all the facts. I suspected that my diet was extremely poor in B-12, but before I went off the handle, I decided I had better look up what kinda of foods are good sources of B-12.

That chart lists a lot of things, but here’s the gist of what foods have B-12 : everything a vegan doesn’t eat^[1]. I am serious. Everything on there is an animal product or something made to resemble an animal product then artificially fortified with B-12.

Technically, that means vegans (not vegetarians) are wrong about humans being able to survive without the exploitation of animals. We can’t. But that’s hardly important, although it does make me worry that there’s a lot of woozy, blurry eyed vegans out there who are depressed and absentminded for no good reason.

If you know someone like that, show them the list.

Anyhow, after reading the article then reading that list, I figured I had a lock-on diagnosis for myself : vitamin B-12 deficiency. My average meal is a peanut butter sandwich (possibly with jam), a bowl of junk food (boo!), and a piece of fruit.

Note the absence of animal products. I don’t even drink milk, and cheese appears in my diet randomly and never all that often.

So where the hell would the B-12 come from? I knew my diet sucked, but…. this is science here.

But there’s a reason people should not diagnose themselves. Hypochondriacs know that better than anyone. You’re too close to the problem. That’s why we need doctors.

At least, that’s what I told myself, until I read about possible causes for B-12 deficiency and smack dab in the middle of them was : metformin.

Also known as “metformin, that drug I have been taking regularly for over a decade”.

So yeah. So ends my resistance to the idea. I might still be a hypochondriac but there is not a thing I can do to resist it now. So I might as well assume I might be right.

Luckily, I had an opportunity to take positive action about the problem right away. Yesterday, after therapy, I went to London Drugs to spend a gift card Felicity gave me for Xmas (thank you dear!), and I found some B-12 supplements that were not only fairly cheap, they were on sale, 2 for 1, that day.

So now I will be taking 250 micrograms of B-12 twice a day. The chart says that I need at most 2.4 micrograms a day, but nobody really knows whether your body can even use the vitamins and minerals from supplements, so the idea is to give the body way more than it needs and hope the right amount gets through.

Don’t get me started on the “science” of nutrition.

Obviously, the only way to be sure I am getting enough B-12 in my diet is to up my animal product consumption in one way or another. The simplest thing would be to start drinking milk, but I am not sure I can digest it any more. Last time I tried it, my sensitive stomach did not like it at all.

So I could accomplish the same thing with cheese. On the surface of it, there is no problem with it. I like cheese. It would be no huge trial to put more of it into my diet.

But I couldn’t do it every day. That would be too much. So the only thing left (besides ice cream, which is definitely a possibility… sugar free, of course) is meat. I need to live a meatier life.

And that means upping the richness of my diet considerably. That’s the problem. I realized now that I have been, in part, keeping my stomach happy by not feeding it much in the way of rich foods, and as a result, it accept that as normal now.

I am worried that if I try to up my meat intake too fast, my tummy will throw a tantrum, and when it’s your stomach doing that, you can’t just ignore it until it realizes tantrums don’t work on you.

On the other hand, I can’t go on living a life where I only eat meat once a week, when I eat out. I need to have at least one meal a day where I get my recommended 2.4 micrograms from whatever.

Right now, I have 7 cans (I ate one tonight) of Chunky beef soup. And there’s canned chicken breast in the cupboard. So I have access to meat.

So it’s really just a matter of getting my body used to more of it.

And who knows? If I really am B-12 deficient, maybe correcting it could make life a lot easier for me.

I sure could use that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.