Well, I want to, anyhow.

That’s what this whole toughening up thing boils down to : developing one’s ability to deliberately do things that are going to hurt or scare you or freak you out because that is the price for getting what you want.

Life is way too short to limit yourself to only the easy and fun things in life while never getting anything that requires effort or focus or seems like work.

That’s something you have to figure out for yourself, though, because you are the only one that can silence or ignore that evil grinning voice in your head that tells you that you can avoid the hard parts of life forever without consequence or cost.

That voice is like the asshole in the suit here :

It might seem like your friend but it will doom you.

Anyhow, like I have said many times before, being able to make yourself do things you don’t “have” to do (i.e. there are no external entities enforcing immediate consequences) and don’t want to do but you want the result is one of the basic building blocks of becoming an adult.

And I have wasted my entire adult life waiting around for that easy road to magically appear and for life to lower its difficulty setting just for little old me so that I wouldn’t have to grow or adapt or change or anything!

I mean, how lazy can you get? Not to mention unambitious.

Gifted child syndrome is definitely a big part of it. People like me who have been gifted their whole life (I learned to read when I was three, for crying out loud) are very used to everything coming to them naturally and easily due to our gifts.

But that only works in school. The rest of life is work.

Us grown up gifted kids often don’t get that, though, or worse. we understand it but we use it as Exhibit A in our case that life is horribly cruel and unfair to us.

But it isn’t. You are being charged the same price as everyone else. Everyone in the world has to work to get what they want and do things they don’t want to do.

Even the idle rich have their challenges when it comes to all the things money just can’t buy. Even they have to sit through elementary school choir concerts.

But we high IQ types are often a lot like the spoiled rich. We seem to think that life owes us an endless amount of bending over backwards to make things just as easy as school has always been for us.

But it doesn’t. Nobody gets that. Everyone has to grow up before they find happiness. Everybody has to make peace with doing things they don’t like and don’t want to do and that hurts or is scary or gross or whatever in order to get what they want.

And no matter how long you wait or how pathetic your life gets, nobody is going to come along to make everything easy for you again.

So it’s a stark but simple choice : grow up, or decide it’s not worth it and suffer.

Either way, you have chosen your destiny. You are not a helpless victim of circumstance. You have made your choice.

But remember, in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on.

More after the break.

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Don’t worry if it’s not good enough

Hey fellow old people! Remember this old feel good hit from the Seventies?

How good a feel good up with people vibe does this song have?

I first heard it on Sesame Street. That’s how good it is. In fact, it was years later that I even learned it was by the Carpenters and not Children’s Television Workshop themselves because it fit the vibe of the show so well.

And there were a lot of attempts at that kind of song in the Seventies. It was a very depressed decade. The big technicolor LSD dream of the Sixties had crashed into the drug addicted, crime riddled (related),. dead rock icons Seventies and the feeling that anything is possible turned into “this world has a lot of problems”.

It was a total bummer, man. A bad trip for everyone.

And that’s the time when the feel good inspirational song rises. It happened during the Great Depression and it happened during the Seventies too.

And into that era came Sing by the Carpenters, and for my money. it effortlessly rises above most of the other contenders in a very crowded field.

It’s certainly one of my all time faves. And it succeeds precisely because it isn’t reaching for some massive universal theme, it’s just about singing.

Singing not because you’re performing or trying to be perfect or you have something to prove, but just for the sheer joy of singing. Singing because there’s a song in your heart that is clamoring to get out. Singing because it lets you express emotions you can’t express or are afraid to express in words.

Singing because when you sing, you feel truly and fully alive.

As someone who loves to sing, that really means a lot to me. i had the voice of an angel when I was little but then puberty came along and took that away from me.

Looking back, I took that way too hard. My voice wasn’t freaking gone,. it had just changed, and I could have learned to use the new voice just as well if not better if I wasn’t so damned melodramatic.

My voice cracked when I sang? Well that’s it, my singing voice is RUINED FOREVER and I will NEVER SING AGAIN!

Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with me?

Here’s another all time feel good classic :

Came out in 1973, as did I. And I absolutely love it. It fills me with hope and courage every time I listen to it.

It speaks to me so deeply that I have to wonder if the fact that it came from the year of my birth is somehow related. Like it perfectly encapsulates the feeling of that exact moment in time and thus speaks to me even though I was an infant at the time.

I know there are logic issues with that idea. And I don’t care.

One last song, this one with a somewhat different vibe :

Je me fou de passe indeed!

Alexa, where’s the nearest bastille?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.