Let’s go a few more rounds with this topic.

Ready? Let’s begin.

I have been in a podcast-listening mood lately and the Cracked podcast only comes out once a week or so and so I have been in the market for something similarly stimulating to listen to while I kill stuff in Elder Scrolls Online, also known as ESO.

Then I remembered that the CBC has all their radio shows available online as podcasts, so I decided to get caught up on one of my fave CBC shows, namely Ideas.

I mean, talk about the perfect show for me. I am all about ideas. I am a highly ideological person and there have been times when ideas seem more real to me than reality. I am a creature of idea-space and ideas are what really get my attention.

So it’s like the show was made for me. More or less. I love the show so much that I don’t even find its occasional lapse of preposteriously ponderoud pretentiousness and stuffed shirt earnestness to be particularly offensive.

In fact,. I think of them more as endearing flaws.

But sometimes has become clear to me as I have been listening to these shows and it’s something I have always known but never quite consciously articulated before now :

There are areas in which I am one cranky, angry, curmudeonly motherfucker.

I mean, at least half the episodes I have listened to lately have made me super angry. The exact reasons vary, but it can all be boiled down to my frustrations with what I think of as sloppy, myopic, hopelessly limited and illogical thinking on the part of people claiming to be some kind of expert on something.

Well you’re not an expert, you’re a fucking dingbat, I cry out.

This is the sort of thing that used to get me in trouble in philosophy courses because we would be reading the thoughts of some Very Famous Philosopher and I would see the obvious flaws in their argument and their thinking and in what we will call my “passion” I would get upset and express my opinion in my usual, um, “unfiltered” way,

Now imagine being my poor philosophy professor. You are trying to teach the material and get the students engaged in the material. Usually, this is not a problem. But now you have this big dude with zero respect for authority and tradition getting agitated and tearing apart the very arguments you are trying to teach as well as expressing disdain for the philosophers associated with said arguments.

And the thing is, they can’t do anything about it, because philosophy class is all about open inquiry and challenging existing paradigms and all of that good stuff and so you can’t very well tell me, “stop thinking about those things!”.

Luckily, I did figure this out eventually and did my best to compromise between my white hot burning need to express myself and the nerves of my professors.

But listening to a podcast by myself means I have no such need for restaint. And so I get quite sore over petty stupid limited thinking that, to my mind, obviously makes no sense whatsoever and is absurd on the face of it.

Like this episode I listened to about AI and the future of world. It sounded pretty interesting from the description. But in retrospect, I could have spared myself the rage if I had realized that could mean they were going to talk about automation, and people are saying some incredibly dumb shit about automation these days.

And sure enough, one of the experts had written a book about the (get this) “jobless future”. Oh right, because of automation, nobody in the future will have a job because machines do all the work – for free, apparently, seeing as with universal unemployment, nobody will be able to to afford to buy anything and there will be no money to pay for the care and upkeep on all the automated factories as well as nobody to run them and nobody even deciding what they make and….

It’s a stupid fucking idea and I am ashamed that the CBC gives it credibility by having not one but two experts balther on about it for most of an hour. The only thing necessary to insure that jobs will exist in the future is for it to continue to make money by hiring people to do things.

And I don’t see that changing any time soon, do you?

If a businessman buys a machine hat can do the work of ten men, he doesn’t fire nine people. He keeps the same number of employees and does ten times as much.

And so forth and so on. I have talked about this stuff here before. My point is that when I listen to crap like that, I get really mad and worked up over it.

It’s not hard to see why. I have a lot of latent anger to start with, and like I said before I am very much a man of ideas, and a radio show can’t argue back or be hurt by what I say, so it’s like a perfect triifecta of rage release when I listen to a show like Ideas.

I mean, people are just so fucking stupid!

I focus on this aspect of my persobnality tonight because it illustrates how I am not quite the super friendly mellow happy dude I think I am. And I want to face that, and give myself permission to be a cranky, angry dude some of the time,.

Specifically, when that is how I am actually feeling. It’s not healthy the way I smother all but the most acceptable emotions in myself. It’s okay for me to be in a bad mood. Other people, more healthy people, get cranky sometimes and it’s not the end of the world for them. Why should I be any different?

So maybe I need to loosen my iron grip on myself a little bit. Maybe I would be a lot healthier if I let my inner hothead out for exercise now and then. maybe there are worse things in the world than being short with people now and then.

All I know is that my contents are under too much pressure and something, somewhere has to give before I explode.

Now is the time to make sure what gives is not my sanity.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.