I have has this video open in a tab for ages :

There’s a lot of excellent points in it, and I’ve been meaning to addrress them, but have never gotten around to it until now because there is always something new on mny mind when I sit down to blof tha takes precedence.

But I just woke up and therefore there’s nothing but jack and shit on my mind – and Jack left town. So today’s the day.

I will follow the structure of the piece then make more general comments after.

1. Meritocracy. This is basically the Just World fallacy reworded, and it’s a fallacy that will never die because it’s easy, Assuming that every gets and is getting what they deserve really reduces your need to think because it gives you permission to bypass the entire issue of social justice. You can write off the entire issue of human suffering and social injustice all it takes it making a very easy assumption about the world. So no matter what the dominant religion, economic system, or form of government people are living under, they will think the same thing if they are doing reasonably well. But as the video says, this places a great deal of unnecessary stress, anxiety, and depression which is only compounded by the fact that the more connected we become, the more humanity we are competing with socially according to our social instincts and the higher above us the socially supreme  – famous people – seem.
2. Individualism.  I am definitely a victim of the cult of the special. In my case, it’s because I am keenly aware that I have extraordinary abilities and therefore cannot settle for an ordinary destiny. This is probably not good. But I, like the rest of my generation, was raised with the belief that we could be whatever we wanted if we tried hard enough. But no amount of ambition and industry will turn a snake into an eagle. Big time success is not in the cards for most people. We would be better off if we told kids that it is fine to dream big and follow those dreams, but it is also okay to merely seek to find a career and a niche and an ordinary life. And that doesn’t make you a “loser”. It makes you human. And take it from a disabled person : I know what it is like to look up to normal people and want to be like them, with a real life and a real job and a real family.
3. Secularism. This is a big one for me because of the opening sentence about how without religion and under individualism, we lack a conception of something bigger than our individual selves. That’s exactly true! Bang, nail hit on head. I had never thought of it in quite that way before, but it’s so true. Without a feeling of being part of something bigger and greater than ourselves, we are stuck in an egoist dead end with no idea why we are so unhappy. We nude monkeys need to feel like we are valued part of a strong tribe and an excess of individualism such as we have now blocks that. To the point where it makes people feel bad for even wanting that because we are all supposed to be rugged self-sufficient individuals.
4. Romanticism. I hate the idea that we all have that special perfect someone out there waiting for us. It puts unachievable ideals in people’s heads and tells them that real love is easy, requires no sacrifice or compromise, and that you are free to abandoned any relationship the moment it becomes less than perfect because obviously that person was not “the one” for you. People need to set their sights way, way lower and stop looking for a soulmate and start looking for someone whose company they enjoy enough to get over the rough patches.
5. The media. We all know this story well. The media knows that humans are wired to be more interested in the negative than the positive because in a state of naturte, it is way more important to know where the saber toothed tiger lives than where that nice patch of berries was. So that’s the kid of content they give us. They are, in that sense, only giving us what we want. The solution proposed is laughable though. Nobody will watch the Happy Things newscast because it’s boring. News, unfornately, has to be entertaining before it can be anything else, and emphasizing solutions will simply result in a newscast full of “Here’s a serious problem, but it’s already being solves, so why am I even telling you this?”. The real solution is to educate people on the difference between the news and reality. And remind them that the news shows them what is unusual, not what is typical.
6. Perfectability. What this hints at is one of the most deadly of the “shoulds” that make us miserable – the idea that we ‘should’ be much happier than we are, and that if we are less than blissfully happy at any point, it’s an emergency at best and a horrible personal failure at worst. People are not meant to be happy all the time. All our emotions are valid and necessary and when we attempt to avoid the ones we deem negative, we only end up making ourselves even more miserable.

All of these factors, plus other things I have spoken about in this space, contribute to the spiritual malaise of our day and age. The most obvious manifestation of this malaise is the rise in the number of people with depression like myself, but depression doesn’t always look like depression. It can look like addiction, or domestric abuse, or trolling, or any number of other ways people try to fill the void inside that modern life does not address. The true damage of this disease is massive.

Personally, I think what is needed is a new religion. One that actually fulfills people’s needs and does not burden them with inane guilt or otherwise make them feel bad for being human beings.

Barring that, what people need is to be educated on the limits of individuality and where to look when the “success” shit just is not doing it for them any more.

Maybe I should write a book called “What To Do Now That You Have It All”.

Maybe then I could be someone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Welp, it is 10:39 pm, which means that I have 1 hour and 21 minutes to write this blog entry and still have it technically be one I wrote today.

So it’s time to throw the fllodgates wide open and get that streamn of consciousness flowing. Full steam ahead!

Today was an unusually active day for me. First I had therapy, which I had to get to via cab due to Joe’s eye issues. Costs me $15 each way, but what the hell, what is money for if not to make your life easier?

Therapy went quite well. I talked about a lot of deep painful shoit. I have come to recognize the icy cold feeling I get when I get into my deep stuff – like I am wearing armor made of ice on the inside, and especially around my heart – as not just being a good thing in general but specfifically the feeling of the ice inside me melting.

So I am willing to seek it out now. I want as much of it as I can get. Because while it feels terrible at the time and I general still feel terrible immediately after, once I recover I will feel better than ever for having calved another iceberg from my glacier of pain.

And if enough of that happens, my internal ice age may finally end.

After therapy, I took a cab to my bank so I could cash this month’s check. The teller was either new or just not very confident/competent because there was some small amount of excess hassle involved.

But whatever. Everyone has their off days.

I also found out at that time that a student loan payment had been deducted from my account. Oops. In retrospect, I think I was supposed to tell them I am still on social assistance and therefore still can’t afford such a payment.

Yes, you read that right. Somehow the onus was on me to tell them I am still disabled, as opposed to them just assuming that I still was until they heard otherwise.

So technically, my card and my savings account got cleaned out plus I had to pay a 44 dollar overdraft today. Yikes.

But I know I will be able to get my moolah back. This happened once before. I just have to call them up again and tell them I am still on social assistance and they will refund my money without a hassle.

Stiil, it’s stress that I do not need.

After I cashed my cheque, I went to the nearby White Spot for lunch. I had skipped lunch except for a tiny snack because I knew I was going to do that, and that would have been a perfectly sane decisions were I not diabetic.

As is, by the time I sat down to eat, I was already feeling lightheaded and I was beginning to shake, which is my number one sign that my blood sugar is now dangerously low and I had better eat SOON.

Lunch fixed that. But not ritght away. In retrospect, I would have been better off if I had bought something small and sugary to eat and thus kick off the more complex carbs in my fries and my Caesar chicken wrap.

Kind of like carbo kloading for longer workouts.

But whatever. I had a pleasant lunch despite being alone and having nothing to read. I seem to be slowly developing the ability to simply zone out and be perfectly happy in my thoughts sans stimulation lately.

So I ate, and thought, and watched the world go by from my favorite seat in my favorite White Spot. and was content to simply Be.

One dark cloud over my picnic : they don’t have the comfy high-backed squishy chairs at that White Spot any more. Dammit. That was a large part of what made it my fave. I have strong feelings about comfortable seating and I feel betrayed.

Everything gets worse.

Otherwise, though, I had a good time, and it was a lovely summer day, so I decided to walk home instead of bothering with the bus.

Don’t think me too heroic, though. Home was only like five or six blocks away.

And it was a pleasant walk. It was hot but not miserably so. I soaked up some sunshine and fresh air and felt pretty good when I got home, apart from slightly sore feet and being fairly dehydrated.

Now normally on Thursdays, I blog when I get home from therapy. After all, all the stuff stirred up by therapy is still fairly fresh on my head and that makes it a good time to get some decent quality therapeutic writing done.

Kind of a “working the metal while it’s still hot” thing.

But not today,. It was too goddamned hot. The heat that had not bothered me outside was quite oppressive once I was inside and no longer feeling the summer breeze. It was too hot and I couldn’t think straight and couldn’t concentrate so I said to hell with it and punted the task to now, when it’s good and dark outside,.

No regrets. I made the right call.

Instead, I had a brief and unsatisfying siesta and then ended up playing Secret World Legends in a desultory fashion for a while.

It’s a game my friend Maelkoth is very into and I can see why. It has a modern setting, loads of atmosphere, a truly creepy twist on the real world, pretty decent writing and quite good voice acting, and it has a great spooky mood to the whole thing.

However, compared to my previous fave, Warframe, it’s slow and clumsy and the battle system is a little on the simplistic side and of course, being MMO, it is bogged down by the usual bullshit with a dozen different currencies and hundreds of weapons and dosens of ways to upgrade your shit and so forth and so on, all designed to emotionally manipulate you into parting with your real life actual spendable money.

So I am semi-meh about the whole thing. I will keep playing, partly because part of the game are genuinely interesting, and partly because I want to be able to talk about it intelligently with Maelkoth.

But I can’t say I am in love with it or anything.

Well, that’s my words. I started off to do stream of consciousness then realize that it was actually easier just to write about my day.

Turns out my stream of consciousness is quite organized and competent.

I choose to look at that as a good thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.