Standard disclaimer : these ideas are new and hence noit well thought out yet.

So bear with me.

It just occurred to me that there has to be a limit to how much one’s ego and self-worth is open to the vagaries of fate.

Put another way, there has to be a point past which one’s self-worth is no longer taking input. A zone where it doesn’t matter what happens and it doesn’t matter what anything thinks or says, the score will go no lower, period.

And I know what you’re thinking (spooky, isn’t it?) : That sounds an awful lot like narcissism, doesn’t it?

And you’re right, it does. But it is not narcissism. A narcissist is someone who puts all or nearly all of reality in that zone. They take a good thing – having this buffer zone – and turn it into insanity by taking it way too far.

My point is, everyone needs a No Apologies Zone. If they lack one. then they are missing the fundamental foundation needed for a stable self worth.

It is neither safe nor healthy to have your entire self worth on the line all the time. Like a gambler who bets it all every single time, it is a recipe for failure. Nobody’s self worth can survive that no matter how many reasons to think highly of themselves they have.

Like, to pick a random example, being hyper-intelligent, creatively gifted, and one heck of a nice guy to boot.

The problem for people of my own foolish mindset is that the act of sealing off part of your self-worth from all inputs is fundamentally irrational. In the false reality of reason, nothing should ever be immune to change based on new evidence. In theory, one’s entire mind, from brain stem to cerebral cortex, is constantly open to a radical realignment at any moment.

In practice, of course, that would make a person completely mentally unstable. People have to keep a lot of the fundamentals of reality constant in their minds or they would go insane. There is only so rational we can afford to be.

And yeah, I am talking to myself there.

And the thing is, most people do not, in fact, need to be told this or taught this because most people respond to and act upon their emotions without the interference of the reasoning mind as least some of the time.

So they don’t have to think about it, they just react. Someone hurts their pride and they strike back verbally at the source of their pain. Something agrees with their self-image and they accept it without question. Something makes them feel uncomfortable so they reject it as untrue.

You know, all the things that us smart logical types are not supposed to do. Irrational things. We’re supposed to be better than that.

Yeah right. Not if we know what’s good for us, which is an open question.

One can frame it as a sort of self-interest equation. Why should I, a naked beach ape who just wants to be happy, accept a truth into my mind that will only make me upset and unhappy when I can simply reject it and stay happy?

The counterargument would be that you are always better off knowing the bitter truth than living in a puffed up fantasy land, but I no longer think that is true. I think it is, in fact, an article of faith, and that faith can demand sacrifices far in excess of its utility.

And people of average intelligence get that, albeit unconsciously. It’s only us over-brained fools who go around shouting “VERITAS UBER ALLES” and making grand statements about The Truth and strutting our intellectually rugged stuff.

I have talked before (I think) about how a certain kind of intellectual openness is akin to simply eating everything you see and trusting your digestive system to work things out from there, with nor regard to the damage it may do to you or how it might make you feel later on.

A sensible organism knows to give things a sniff test and maybe a bit of a lick before deciding whether or not to eat something. Our minds should be at least that intelligent, and for most people, they are.

Again, it’s just us misguided lunatics with more brains than sense who act like we can take anything and try to make a virtue out of our lack of discernment.

There is nothing wrong with asking, “what will this do to me?” before integrating new information into your mind. That doesn’t mean making that the only concern – that way lies narcissism, even solipsism – it just makes it a legitimate question.

So when a Fox News type rejects the truth about oh, so very many things, understand that they are acting in their own best interests regardless of what us lofty intellectuals think they “should” do.

So let’s join them in a radical existential statement : I would rather be wrong and happy than right and miserable.

I have been asking “Would you rather be right, or happy?” for years in reference to people hanging on to emotional and/or philosophical positions that are bad for them simply because if they let go that means someone else was “right” all along and they would rather DIE than admit it.

But it turns out to be far bigger than that. There are things far more important than having the “right” answer or knowing that you are more “right” about things than others.

That is a very hard thing for a former precocious child’s mind to wrap itself around. We tend to have far, far too much of our self-worth wrapped up in being “right”. As if at any second there might be a quiz and we will need all the “right” answers to pass.

But the real logical truth is that what matters most to any of us crazed sex monkeys is whether or not we are happy, not whether or not we are right.

It’s just taken me a long time to figure that out.

Well I said I was intelligent, I didn’t say I was smart.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Apparently I am back at the “oscillating between deep depression and smoldering rage” part of my mood cycle.

Pardon my cartwheels of effervescent joy.

Imagine that being said by The Brain from Pinky and the Brain.

For use as your exemplar :

That’s a very cute thing for those fun folks at Postmodern Jukebox to have done.Initially, I was just there for the Rob and Maurice content, but the smoldering torch song version of the theme is great too, especially when (SPOILER) she looks right into the camera and says “Narf. ” at the end.

I marked so hard for that. I really have a soft spot for women who can be silly.

God, I miss my sisters.

Anyhow,. so I am down in the dumps again. Last night’s mental malfunction was such a blow to my sense of reality that I don’t think I have fully recovered yet, and it happened around 22 hours ago.

That shit just shouldn’t happen, man. Thanks to my computer based lifestyle and dreamer nature, I already live in the world between my ears far too much and as a result, my sense of reality – the non-virtual kind – is already threadbare at best.

As a result of that, on a very real and very very deep level, I don’t have faith in reality. I don’t feel like I can count on things staying real and I have a deep dread of ending upo trapped in my own mind with no way out.

So something like last night’s journey into being even more mentally fucked up than usual really scares me right down to the core.

It makes me realize just how blurry the boundry between outer reality and mental reality can be for me. Not to the point of being schizophrenic. thank goodness, but to the point of a certain level of mental instability nevertheless.

I would likely be better off if I stepped away from the computer more often and spent time just sitting outside, drinking in the realness of it all and grounding myself in the real world before going back to the shadowbox of my mind.

That’s how my relationship with reality feels right now : like I spend all day in a world which I treat as real. but which is really only shadows and less than shadows projected into my mind via my various distractions.

Hell. even spending more time reading books would help ground me. Even they are more real than all this video game bullshit.

So yeah. I am back to hating and resenting video games again too.

And I tell myself that I can’t stop playing them, or that I don’t know how to stop, and so forth, but is that really true?

Or is the real truth that I know perfectly well how to stop and could stop any time I wanted if I was willing to sever the umbilicus that ties me to them and keeps me emotionally dependent on them?

That’s the nature of addiction. Even if you know the thing you are addicted to is killing you, you keep using because you are too scared of having to deal with reality without the addiction that you will ride that burning wagon right over the cliff.

Abnd up until the very end, you will be telling yourself that everything is fine. And if you happen to survive the crash. you will tell yourself that it was an unavoidable tragedy, woe is me, and then go right back to using.

Because the crash changed nothing. You are still emotionally dependent on your addiction and you are still too scared to face the world without it to change.

And that’s not the sort of person I want to be. I want to be the Taurus ideal of a square-jawed realist who can make the tough choices and do whatever is necessary regardless of fear or squeamishness. The sort of person you can always count on because you know that their fundamental values are rock solid and that they will live by them one hundred percent or die trying.

And I am that guy. For others.

For myself, not at all, really.

And it’s high time I stop pretending that this self-neglect is okay. It isn’t. I act contrary to my own self-interest all the time and to be honest, I deserve better.

I can hear my therapist saying I need to be my own parent right now, and I can feel the utter despair that filled me when he did because if that’s the only solution, I am fucked.

Because I am not sure I am capable of that. I can’t imagine where I would find the strength. My deep damage would make it so hard.

And that’s what this all boils down to : on a fundamental level, I am deeply damaged. and that damage cries out like a physical injury when I try to do things.

And lacking the ability to x-ray my psyche, I don’t know beforehand what will set it off. I now some things that will, but that list is never going to be comprehensive.

And because of that, I really have no good explanation for why I can or can’t do something. The closest I can come to a real, honest explanation would be, “because the injured part of my mind hurts me when I try to imagine doing it. ”

And it might be wrong. In fact, historically. its predictive record is spotty at best. There have been plenty of times when I thought I couldn’t but totally could once I made up my mind to do it.

But it’s still all I have got. I don’t have the capacity to think past it yet. When it tells me that a course of action will lead to nothing but pain, anxiety, and misery, it is very hard not to listen to it.

Even though it leads me wrong.

I feel so god damned alone nearly all the time.

And I don’t know how to fix that at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.