A thoughtful young man

This video really made me feel good, and filled me with hope for the future.

And you have to love his curly hair. Reminds me of my brother back in the 70’s.

He does kind of ramble and repeat himself, and hey, I can relate. That is the downside of doing videos without a script, from the heart.

You can lose track of what you’re saying very easily.

For me, that’s a risk worth taking in order to get how I really feel into the video. I could never rehearse a video beforehand or even write a script.

To me, that would make the words dead, and therefore worse than pointless to say.

I won’t claim that all of the 400+ videos on my YouTube channel were done in one single continuous take. There are times when I re-did parts of them because I didn’t like how they came out the first time, and of course, they’ve all been edited for brevity and to take out the ums and uhs whenever possible.

But for me, sincerity is paramount. I don’t say what I don’t mean. Ever.

Anyhow, back to our floppy haired friend’s message. Like I said in the comments, listen up, kids, because I am 51 years old and have “stayed home” for my entire adult life.

This could be you, kids. Take it from a guy who lives in a van down by the river.

So to speak.

I desperately want to make sure young people don’t follow in my footsteps. It’s bad enough that I am in this deeply humiliating and self-destructive pattern, but it would be far worse to see someone HIS age going the same way.

I can’t go back in time and give my younger self a swift kick in the nuts and tell him to get busy striving and living and being an adult NOW, so warning the young people about the tragic fate that can befall them well have to do.

Because the thing is, kids, nobody is going to force you to get your shit together. [1] You are perfectly free to find a dark corner somewhere to live in, get on welfare, and do nothing but play video games for the rest of your life.

And that might sound good when you’re in your 20’s and just graduated from university and are terrified of the big bad brutal adult world you think will crush you utterly.

But is that really where you want to be when you’re 30? Go on, say it to yourself : “I am fine with reaching my 30th birthday without having done a single thing with my life. ”

Now try it again for 40. And 50. Still feeling good? Go for 60. How about now?

Imagine what you will say when someone asks you what you do for a living.

Imagine how cringe that will be for you.

Yeah, welcome to my life. It freaking sucks. I’m a massive loser and I am dying and only now have I finally got it together enough to at least think of beginning to try to dig myself out of this massive hole I am in before it becomes my grave.

And you are the only one who can save you from my fate. I say that not to be mean or harsh or show you “tough love” but because it is literally, actually, completely true./

No matter how you get to a better life, it is going to be you who gets you there. Even if you were to win the lottery, it would still be you who had to cash in the ticket, sign the giant novelty cheque, go to the bank, and so forth and so on.

Or at least choose who you can trust enough to do it for you.

You’re the only person at the center of your universe. Nothing can happen without you making it happen. So start making it happen already!

And that goes for me, too.

More after the break.


Another on-topic vid

This time, it’s about what’s wrong with us “gifted” kids.

Makes sense to me.

Yeah, I could have told them that.

But nobody ever asks!

Seriously though, that video also feels like it’s about me. Like I said in the comments, my problem was that I was so outrageously “gifted” that school never challenged me. Not even in university. Usually, I was lucky if it could even hold my attention.

Hence my looking like I was not paying attention in class. No teach, I heard and processed every word you said. It just doesn’t take that much of my brain to do so.

Yeah, I know that’s dickish as hell. All I can do is plead that I was trying to make sense of a world that had no role models for me.

So I made a lot of mistakes.

Anyhow, back to being “gifted”.

Until I watched that vid, it had not occurred to me just how corrosive the idea that intelligence (or any other ability) is a fixed, immutable thing could be.

I suppose that’s IQ privileged of me. I have never once in my life tried to become smarter. I always had way more smarts than I knew what to do with.

Granted, there have been many times when I wish I had a different KIND of intelligence. Like, say, technical. Or the sort of abstract logical thinking good for programming.

I tried to learn programming. But it gave me a splitting headache to try to think that way. It felt like I was trying to squeeze my very big brain into a tiny, narrow space.

Same with chess, really. Not good at that, either.

But yeah, no surprise that telling kids they are naturally smart leads to poorer performance because it leads to not trying as hard. Duh.

One last thing, though : If I did a test and the instructor praised me for how hard I tried or the really good effort I put in, I would be insulted beyond repair. Because to me, that sounds like what you tell the dumb kid in order to have something nice to say to him.

Like seriously. Imagine it’s the Olympics. You cross the finish line, and your coach says, “Wow, great effort! you really applied yourself out there!”.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it?

I mean, what’s next? A trophy for “most improved’?

Oh wait, there’s one more thing : my immediate thought about that was “this assumes that the amount of effort you put into something is under your control. ”

But it is. And to think otherwise is exactly the kind of blinkered fixed ability thinking that traps people like me in the first place.

I have so much to learn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.



Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)
  1. And if they did, you’d probably fight them like a cornered badger.

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