It’s been a good old day today. I have eaten pleasing foods, watched harsh but stimulating and enriching television programming, and I did another of my talking to the camera things.

Yup. There it is. Just me talking to the camera about what’s on my mind. I imagine things will get a little more ambitious as time goes on. This is, after all, only episode 2 of 60. And like I say in the video, breaking in a new habit is always hardest at the beginning.

So like I said, I did not feel like doing it. But I did it anyway, because I’m a grownup.

So there. Nyeah.

The harsh television programming I mentioned above is a BBC series called “Nazi Hunters”, and watching it can be quite rough because in order to show you Nazis being hunted, they first have to tell you all about what these particular Nazis did in order to deserve being hunted down and brought to justice.

So I have seen a hell of a lot of incredibly depressing footage of mass graves, concentration camp liberations, and so forth lately. So that is sad as hell.

And yet, it ends with the Nazi being brought to justice (usually), and it also has lots of stuff about the last days of the Third Reich and that frankly never gets old. What a time to be alive! You get to watch as the greatest monster of the 20th century die at the hands of the forces of good.

One of the strange truths about people like Hitler’s Nazis is that they make the moral situation very clear, at least on the front lines. Perhaps some pampered wealthy Berliner might have been able to convince themselves that the Nazis were the good guys, protecting the Homeland and all that, but even before the fall of the Third Reich and the liberation of the concentration camps (and the death camps… some of these places did nothing but kill people), the Allied soldiers had seen enough of how the Germans treated people in their occupied territories to make it very clear who was on the side of the angels.

Still, I wonder. I asked the question to my Facebook friends the other night : what would we think of the Nazis now if everything else had been the same but there had been no Final Solution? No mass killings, no murder factories throughout Poland, just the concentration camps?

They would still be viewed as villains, of course. Rhetoric alone would have put them in the same fascist camp as Mussolini and Franco. not to mention the way they ran their own country and those they occupied. The concentration camps alone were brutal nightmares. Romans treated conquered people better because they viewed them as potential slaves, not as filthy vermin.

And slaves have to eat.

But would we view them as the greatest villains in (white) history? Or just as some nasty bastards we’re glad we got rid of, but not a whole lot worse than any other historical group of bad guys?

Would the names Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco be more or less interchangeable?

What else…. well, I think getting the little video I did today was difficult ironically because I was in a fairly good mood. When I am in a good mood, especially in the summer, my self-discipline goes right out the window. I feel all happy and contented and that makes me feel extremely self-indulgent and hedonistic, and resistant to doing anything that isn’t fun.

But I want to make my actions reflect my ambitions and that means working hard even when I am feeling fine. I think a certain Ms. Poppins has the right attitude towards that.

After all, as I said in my video, life will inevitably involve doing a lot of stuff that you do not want to do. When we are children we can take the attitude that we do things which are not fun only under strong protest because we have our parents to take care of all of life’s little chores and therefore our laziness is unlikely to cause anything bad to happen to us, punishments aside.

But when you’re an adult, you are on your own. If you want clean dishes, you have to wash them. If you want clean clothes, you have to do the laundry. If you want to eat, you have to buy groceries. And if you want money, you have to work.

And once you grow up enough to accept that these things need to be done and you are the only one who will do them, it’s futile to keep fighting it.

After all, who are you protesting against? No matter how reluctantly or poorly you do the job, your parents are not going to show up and do it for you.

It just won’t get done, and you will suffer the consequences of your actions. You are only hurting yourself when you try to live like you are still a child as an adult.

Make peace with the fact that life is work, and then you can find a way to enjoy all those little tasks that before were getting you down. Whether it’s your job or your finances or your lack of a love life that has you feeling blue, there is no reason that you can’t invest the effort into making the most of your situation and finding all the joy in life that you can.

And that doesn’t mean that someone has “won”. Your parents are not going to show up and say “Ha ha, told you chores weren’t so bad! All that whining for nothing!”

The winner is you, and the prize is a much more fun and interesting life. Once you lose your middle class terror of “settling for less” and the connected feeling that it is somehow wrong to be happier than you are rich, you can be happy doing damned near anything.

And happiness is what it’s all about, right?

Ask yourself…. have I been turning down happiness because it wasn’t on the right terms?

How silly is that?