I’m sorry.

It’s true. You’re really not.

You’re selfish, your vain, you’re self absorbed. Every last bit of altruism coursing through your blood is nothing more than self-interest wearing angel wings. Your kindness and consideration are rooted in greed and avarice. You might not be aware of this greediness, of this covetousness that has given birth to most of your actions, but it’s there, nestled deep inside your brain.

Man is driven by his genes. The desire to propagate underlies nearly everything he does. At heart, people want their genes to thrive and survive, to propagate and to perpetuate themselves. Your actions, almost all of them, serve an unquenchable, genetic thirst.

All men, with few exceptions, are genetic supremacists. Most people on this planet want their genetic code to carry on into the future,even at the expense of others. Hell, especially at the expense of others. This desire for a genetic legacy informs every single action a person does, even if they’re not aware of it. Yep, this fundamental genetic greed forms the basis of most human behavior.

People aren’t nice, unless you consider genetic supremacism to be all giggles and hugs.

You might refuse to believe that your actions, decisions, beliefs, even your temperament and disposition could be bound to something as petty as the impulse to breed. Keep your delusions if you must, but the truth is there for anyone who cares to investigate.

Deep down, you only care about your genes.

世界は美しくなんかない。そしてそれ故に美しい。

“The world is ugly, and that’s why it’s beautiful.”

Ugliness and beauty are two sides of the same coin. They depend on each other to exist. You can’t have beauty without it’s nasty looking cousin. The one defines the other. Beauty and ugliness limit each other, give each other form, shape, and value.

A world without ugliness is a world without beauty. They depend on each other, like Siamese twins. That’s why we have to appreciate filth, despair, horror, and all those dark dirty things that make life seem so unbearable. The bad makes the good possible. What’s Batman without the Joker, Superman without Lex Luthor, or the X-Men without Magneto? Heroes are only possible in a world full of villains, and beauty is only possible in a world full of ugliness.

Happiness is impossible without misery. We can’t experience either one of them in isolation. We can only experience them in relation to each other. The deeper we fall, the higher the emotional heights we’re capable of reaching.

We have an emotional baseline. That baseline is the ground we stand on, the place where spend most of our time. Misery is a pit that we dig into the earth, and happiness is a tower that we build on top of it. The foundation of that tower depends entirely on how deep a pit we dig. The more sadness we’ve encountered in our lives, the more capable we become of appreciating the world.

The greater our tribulations, the greater our rewards — so long as we manage to climb out of our sad little holes and climb up our big happy towers.

Ugliness is beautiful, because the more of it we experience, the more capable we are of appreciating beauty when we come across it. However, that’s only possible if we don’t feel sorry for ourselves. We have to allow ourselves the freedom to appreciate beauty, the freedom to take our minds off the misery and sadness of the world, the freedom to forget the pain and suffering that surrounds us.

We are tiny flecks of dust in a vast and lonely universe. We are insignificant in the face of the world we inhabit, and we simply can’t spend our lives living in the shadow of suffering, because the suffering that exists is great, while we are not.

A willingness to be small is a necessary component of happiness. Only when we relinquish our dominance over the world, only when we submit ourselves to the universe, only when we free ourselves of obligations we have no hope of ever being able to fulfill, of suffering and pain we can never expect to ease, will we have the space necessary to appreciate the beauty that does exist in this world.

Once we learn to ease our eyes away from the horrible, we can begin to truly appreciate the wonderful.

You have to start complaining about where you are. You have to start complaining about what you’ve got. You have to start complaining about the raw deal the world has given you and the meak and impotent response you’ve given to that deal. You are capable of more than this. You deserve more than this. You need more than this. Don’t live your life on the sidelines. Don’t waste your life on the backbenches. Don’t sit down in a cubicle and fill out paperwork all day. Get out there and take what you want, do what you want, and feel what you want.

Don’t apologize, either. You don’t need anyone’s permission to want the things you want or to feel the things you feel. You’re better off living on your own terms and being kicked out of polite society, than living in that society by sacrificing your happiness at the altar of social conformity. Don’t conform to a deformed world. Our society is defective, it’s got two heads and seven eyes and a club foot and a mullet. It’s an ugly beast, and you’ll make yourself ugly by trying to win its favor.

Win your own favor instead.

Complain, and yell, and piss, and moan until you get so fed up of living the life you’re living that you go wild and start living the life you’ve always wanted to live but were too cowardly to pursue.

People are constitutionally incapable of appreciating the kindness and consideration of others. This is a fact. Whenever someone shows appreciation for something, you need to realize that this is an act. Peel open their skulls and look into the workings of their brain, and you’ll notice that they’re just putting on a show. Deep down, in the bottom of their cold, crippled hearts, people don’t care one iota about the things you do for them.

You are meat. You are a means to an end. A tool for them to use as they see fit. Don’t expect an ounce of genuine warmth, or you will end up freezing your little tush off in the cold barren desert that is society. This desert covers the four corners of your social word. Here and there, you may stumble on to an Oasis of authenticity, where
genuine relationships happen, but that is a rare occurrence, and chances are, most of your relationships belong in the desert, not in the oasis.

A sea of misery surrounds this dry and arid desert. Society is disingenuous, inauthentic, and full of sociopaths because mother nature is a cruel and heartless bitch. We are sentient beings who have managed to eke out a living in an inhospitable, violent, ad volatile cosmos. We are self-aware creatures stuck in a Universe that seems to have been designed to destroy life, not nurture it. The fact that we even exist is something that baffles most scientists. The world is constantly trying to kill us — through viruses, diseases, sicknesses, natural disasters, famine, and several thousand other threats. We are a fragile species stuck on a blisteringly dangerous planet. Worst of all, our planet looks like a sweet and innocent puppy when you compare it to the rest of the Universe.

Nature wants us dead, so it stands to reason that we’d be a little neurotic. Most other animals don’t have the pleasure of contemplating just how inhospitable the world is. They screw, they eat, they kill, they die. They don’t think about things, they just do them. We think. We ponder. We rationalize. We recognize how brutal the world is, and we do anything and everything to get by. This is the reason for the lack of authenticity in the world. Honesty isn’t a good policy when everything’s trying to kill you.

The Universe has given us plenty of reasons to be pricks, and very few reasons to be sweethearts. The very fact that sweethearts exist is almost a sick joke. When you’re sweet in a sea of bitterness, it’s deadly difficult to adapt. Decent people get burnt because there are so few of them. When you’re outnumbered by savages, you’re going to have trouble.

I am assuming that you are a good person. I am probably wrong, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt. You are a good person trapped in a terrible world. Don’t give in to its temptations. Don’t let it seduce you. Don’t believe what it tells you. Keep a stiff upper lip and hold people at a distance. Cultivate some self-reliance. Don’t get in the habit of depending on other people. Don’t let yourself need them. And never try to win them over by making them appreciate you. Just do your own thing. Live on your terms, by your rules, for your own reasons, in accordance with your own values.

Stand tall. Cast a shadow on the desert that surrounds you.

Hello, Mr. Mencken

H.L Mencken was a hell of a guy. They don’t make men like him anymore. They try to, they really do,
but the parts come out all wrong.

Mencken was a master of his art, and that art was taking society down a peg. It’s no
surprise that Mark Twain was a huge influence on Mencken, seeing as how Twain had no delusions about human nature.

Mankind is a Farce

Humanity is a joke, and Mencken was one of those rare individuals who actually got it. He saw the world for the farce that it was, and always took the time to have a good belly laugh at its expense.

We like to primp and preen and pretend that we are something, anything, other than absurd and ridiculous. Mankind is the butt of a cosmic joke, a speck of fecal matter propelled by the asses of who knows which god, that has travelled trillions of miles just to land on a tiny rock at the far ends of a minor galaxy located in the boonies of the Universe.

The Reason Aliens Haven’t Visited Earth Yet

People often wonder why, if aliens exist, we haven’t met any yet. Earth is Bumpkiss, Illinois, a single road town in the middle of nowhere. We’re not getting any space tourists, because the aliens are too busy visiting real worlds with real cultures full of living beings who are actually capable of real, sentient thought, instead of the knee jerk reactionary tripe that passes for human thought in most corners of this backward planet.

Now, it’s just speculation on my part, but I suspect Aliens have taste, and so long as humans don’t, we’re not going to be seeing them any time soon.

Quotes from Mencken

I’ve gone off on a tangent, so let’s get back to Mencken. He had the same expectations of the human race that I do. None.

He was a brilliant mind, and I thought I’d share some of his quotes with you. Now, you’ll find several around the web, and I’ve collected a couple of them like these little gems

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn’t care to drink with, even if he drank.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

Mankind Hates the Weak

Now, those are all fine and dandy quotes, but they’re a dime a dozen. Instead, here’s an excerpt from one of his books, “Damn, A Book of Calumny”

For humility and poverty, in themselves, the world has little liking and less respect. In the folk-lore of all races, despite the sentimentalization of abasement for dramatic effect, it is always power and grandeur that count in the end. The whole point of the story of Cinderella, the most widely and constantly charming of all stories, is that the Fairy Prince lifts Cinderella above her cruel sisters and stepmother, and so enables her to lord it over them. The same idea underlies practically all other folk-stories: the essence of each of them is to be found in the ultimate triumph and exaltation of its protagonist. And of the real men and women of history, the most venerated and envied are those whose early humiliations were but preludes to terminal glories; for example, Lincoln, Whittington, Franklin, Columbus, Demosthenes, Frederick the Great, Catherine, Mary of Magdala, Moses. Even the Man of Sorrows, cradled in a manger and done to death between two thieves, is seen, as we part from Him at last, in a situation of stupendous magnificence, with infinite power in His hands. Even the Beatitudes, in the midst of their eloquent counselling of renunciation, give it unimaginable splendor as its reward. The meek shall inherit—what? The whole earth! And the poor in spirit? They shall sit upon the right hand of God!…

This little slice of wisdom is something most of us should do well to remember. The human race, by and large, hate the weak, the humble, and the poor. We , as a species, despise them, we loath them, and we empower the top dogs of our society to feast on them at their leisure. The moment the weak try to defend themselves, we rally around their oppressors and aggressors, and we tell them to learn their place. And if a weakling were to gain the strength to defend himself against those belligerent forces arrayed against him, only then would we lavish him with our respect and fealty.

We save our kindness for those who don’t deserve it, and have none to give to those who do.

Mankind only responds to power and prestige, and can’t conceive of anything of value that isn’t wrapped in gold, and guarded by soldiers.

A principal from a random American backwater is in tepid water after using one of his students as bait to catch a rapist. He failed to catch the rapist, though he did succeed in getting his student raped.

The water is only tepid, because let’s face it, you know he’s not going to get more than a slap on the wrist. He probably won’t even get fired. The way our world works, I wouldn’t be surprised if state officials decide to give the man a medal or maybe a parade. Probably both. He showed gumption and initiative.

A cause for celebration

Right now, the bureaucrats at the principal’s school district are probably baking him a very large cake.

Parents, meanwhile, are likely lining up around the school with words of support for the principal, and pitchforks and Molotov cocktails for the girl who was raped.

We’ve seen this kind of behavior before, most notably during the pedophilia scandals of the Catholic Church, when churchgoers often shielded priests accused of child-rape while throwing venom and invective at those folks who had been abused by the priests.

People often despise victims while adoring the belligerent and the violent. That’s probably why people like Stalin and Hitler have such an easy time coming into power. We, as a society, reward assholes, and piss on everyone else.

The Story

This is my interpretation of what happened: The girl was assaulted by a fellow student, and went to a teacher for help. This teacher wanted to escort the girl home, and went to the principal to tell her what happened. The principal, who I assume is some kind of super villain who once did battle with the likes of Spider-Man before escaping into our own universe, laughed maniacally and said no. He had a better idea! Instead of calling the police or getting the girl to a hospital, he’d make use of her in a dastardly plot, a plot straight out of a pulp novel circa 1963.

He didn’t believe the girl had been raped, and he didn’t care if she said otherwise. It was consensual sex! It had to be. He knew it in his gut. Consensual sex on school grounds. He wasn’t going to stand for that. He was going to catch the rascals who were bumping uglies at his school, consensually of course, come hell or high water.

He no longer had access to death rays and foot soldiers, but that didn’t matter. Our fearless principal took the initiative, and courageously sent the girl out to hunt down her “consensual sex partner” . The girl would then confront  the boy who had just had “consensual sex” with her,  and the principal would use his latent psychic abilities to swoop in and reprimand him. He’d give him a good, stern warning and possibly detention. It was foolproof! No one, not even James Bond, not even Doctor Doom, not even the infernal forces of Mephistopheles could foil his scheme.

Well, we know how that turned out.

These people run our schools

These are the kind of people running our schools. Idiots who don’t see anything wrong with using their students as rape-bait. Morons who think they belong in an action adventure movie. You’re not Bruce Willis and this isn’t Die Hard. You’re a school principal, and one of your students just said she was raped. You are not qualified to tell her otherwise. Call the police, sit back, and try to be a human being for just a few minutes. Is that too much to ask for?

This story might be an extreme example of educational malpractice, but this incident is symptomatic of a schooling system that dehumanizes the people who are forced through it. In the eyes of her principal, this girl wasn’t a living, breathing, human being — she was a two dimensional cartoon character. He saw her as nothing more than a plot device in a drama of his own creation, and that drama has had some devastating, real world consequences.

There will be no accountability

What I find infuriating about this story is that I know this man is never going to be held accountable for his actions. Schools are such giant, inhuman monstrosities, that it is simply impossible for them to ever do the right thing. It won’t happen. It can’t happen. You’re more likely to draw a quart of blood from a rock than you are a single drop of decency from the entirety of our educational system.

It is a massive broken mess and the sooner we toss it the better off our society will be.

You might think that’s an extreme position, but it is the only sane one to take under the circumstances. We have absolutely no control over our schools. These institutions and the bureaucracies which prop them up do not care about us.

They don’t care about our children, they don’t care about our communities, they don’t care about justice or compassion or consideration, or anything remotely life-enhancing. The only thing that matters to the educational system and those who exist within its corrosive corridors, is that it continue to exist no matter what.

It is a malignant cancer. There’s a reason the best teachers in our schools either end up quitting or burning out. Schools are toxic — for the teachers, for the students, even for the bureaucrats like our good principal.

Speaking of him, he’s not the only one who needs to be held accountable. The entire social edifice he belongs to share part of the responsibility for what happened. Everyone managing our schools, from the governor down, owns a part of this tragedy. They are all culprits, every last one of them.

But what do I know. I’m just a cranky misanthropist.

A few final words

I hope the victim of this twisted affair manages to find a good quality hammer to smack down the bag of nails our society has just given to her. Hopefully she’ll find more compassion and love in her surroundings and escape the brutality, the heartlessness, and the stupidity of the adults who were supposed to be looking after her.

As for us, we allowed this to happen to that girl. We are responsible for her suffering because we refuse to resist a society where these sorts of things are allowed to happen. We consent to our society, and this consent is what made this situation possible. Without it, none of this would have happened.

We placed a burden on this girl’s shoulders by tolerating the intolerable, and by failing to strike out at those things that deserve to be struck at.

We failed to protect her, we failed to create an educational environment that would make her assault an impossibility, and we failed to provide a legal system that would guarantee her well-being while assuring that those responsible for her suffering not only paid a real and substantial price for their actions, but that society would change in such a way were their actions could never be repeated.

I find it ridiculous that our manufacturing plants have quality control systems in place, but our governments and our schools do not.

We need six sigma for politicians and bureaucrats.

I myself, am a failure. I lack the strength to do anything but sit down and complain about the world. I suppose, perhaps, someday I might manage to muster enough influence to enact some kind of change, or accumulate enough money to help out in a serious and sustained manner. Instead, I’m just a miserable fool, complaining on the internet.

Powerless and impotent while the world burns, slaughters, rapes, kills, hates, beats, steals, and destroys itself. Why is it that anger and rage are so easy to find, but love and compassion are not?

And still, people have the gall to claim that our society isn’t pathogenic! All it does is spread disease. When love is more common than hate, when peace is easier than war, and when trust triumphs over fear and apathy, then I’ll change my mind.

This site hasn’t seen an update since January 2009, nearly
eighteen months ago.

I didn’t know quite what to do with the place. My heart wasn’t really
in it. Yes, I started blogging about depression because I think there’s
plenty to be depressed about in this rotten world of ours. Wherever
you look, you’ll find something to cry about. Pain, sorrow, and
suffering are never more than a stone throw away.

Earth is a cesspool, and man is a malignant cancer. Life is miserable
for anyone who isn’t delusional, and that’s why I was struggling with
the site.

You see, I kept covering depression as if it was something you had to
treat, to fix, to cure. Well phooey to that idea!

You’re not sick, society is

The idea of treating depression is a foul one, because it assumes that the patient is the problem.

His biology, his history, his psychology, and his brain chemistry are all suspect. Conventional methods of treating depression assume that the patient is at fault, and he must be fixed and cured.

There’s something terribly wrong with him, and only the marvels of modern medicine can fix what ails him.

Maybe it’ll be drugs that cure him, or maybe it’ll be a form of psychological therapy like CBT, but one way or another, the man will be “fixed”. His doctor will “cure” him of his disease, and his body and mind will be purified.

Nonsense and balderdash!

The job of the modern psychologist and his more erudite cousin, the psychiatrist, is to render normal that which is unhealthy and disgusting: our rotten, pathogenic society.

Ours is a diseased community that feeds on hatred, alienation, disgust, apathy, rage, and a thousand other equally nefarious states of being.

The psychologist and the psychiatrist are tasked with the duty of adjusting people to a maladjusted world. The natural state for any healthy human in a sick society like ours is to be absolutely, irrevocably depressed. Only by deluding ourselves, by closing our hearts, by turning our eyes away, by ignoring the suffering and pain and anger that surrounds us can we adapt to our society.

Normalizing the abnormal

Psychologists and other mind doctors have one overarching goal. It is implicit in the structure of their professions, and in the method by which they obtain social authority. Their goal is simple: to make society appear normal, no matter how abnormal it might be.

Earlier last month, I began investigating the work of the famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan isn’t a very easy thinker to approach, and it may very well be years before I have a decent understanding of his thoughts, but my initial impressions of him are fairly positive.

The reason for my approval is that Lacan is one of the few thinkers in the field of psychology who recognizes that we are born into culture, and our life is given narrative shape by the words and values and meanings of that culture. He understands that there are narrative forces which shape us. This recognition of the role narrative has over our lives is something that very few psychologists seem to appreciate.

Psychologists operate under the assumption that their ideas are natural, that their values are natural, that the world they operate in is natural, and that society as it currently exists is natural. They are utterly and completely ignorant of the presuppositions that prop up their world view.

This lack of self-awareness is a violent disease that makes psychologists active participants in perpetuating the unhealthy social structures that form the foundation of our society.

Most modern psychologists suffer from the delusion that mental health is measured by how well adjusted a person is to society, a view that assumes that our society is something that is worth adjusting to. The psychologist implicitly believes that our society is natural, but he never bothers to offer any arguments in favor of his position.

Worst of all, in order for the psychologist to function in our society, he must be validated by it. He must climb through the ranks of the amoral and dehumanizing educational system for over a decade, and he must engage in our brutally inequitable economic system. In order to practice psychology in our society, one must first submit to a series of psychologically devastating social practices.

The only healthy psychology is a post-academic psychology that recognizes the myriad ways our society fails us.

The Future of Mental Health

Our society is a historical aberration. For millennia, our ancestors lived in tight knit communities. They knew each other, cared for each other, looked after each other. It wasn’t a perfect life, but it was how humans lived for thousands upon thousands of years.

The advent of property, of the division of labour, of agriculture, all of these are new additions to the human experience. Our society is not normal, and instead of forcing people to adapt to it, psychologists would be of far greater service if they could figure out how to adjust our modern world so that it doesn’t make us sick.

Unfortunately, it would be far too much to expect psychologists who graduate from our Universities to be capable of such a task, and until a post-academic movement arises, we will be forced to endure a society that breeds mental illness, and a professional class that shifts blame away from society and on to its victims.

The Post-Academic Psychologist

Post-academic psychology is based on the idea that the academy, that is to say our Universities and the educational system which props them up, are psychologically destructive environments. They are so fundamentally unhealthy, that it impossible for a healthy mental health professional to graduate from them.

Think of it this way, imagine if our medical schools all insisted on giving doctors cerebral palsy before they graduated — we wouldn’t have many surgeons, now would we?

Our Universities saddle our mental health professionals with a variety of mental hangups and illnesses. It is incredibly difficult to graduate from University with your dignity and self-worth intact. Most graduates suffer from a form of Stockholm syndrome, and refuse to recognize the damage that has been caused to them by the hierarchical, anti-social, non-dialogical, solipsistic, dehumanizing, status worshipping, heavy handed, domineering nature of the University experience.

I am not at all talking about the contents of individual classes, where learning is possible, but the structure of the learning experience. The structure of the educational experience teaches students hundreds of habits and beliefs, none of which are healthy.

Paulo Freire, the renowned Brazilian educational critic and author of the seminal work “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” pointed out, time and time again, that in our educational system, professional authority trumps the authority of knowledge.

The relationship between professors and their students is a fundamentally unhealthy one that normalizes one sided power dynamics in which authority isn’t conferred through group consensus, but assumed through the machinations of established and entrenched hierarchies that are socially alienating and disenfranchising for those who come in contact with them.

For Freire, there are no teachers, only students. Yes, some students will know more, but in the presence of a dialogical educational process, no student ever has any authority over another student. Knowledge has authority, but professional status does not.

People who have spent their entire lives dealing with teachers will consider the idea of an educational system that has none nearly incomprehensible. These individuals, and you’re likely one of them, simply assume that teachers are natural. They are not. They are unhealthy social constructs that teach helplessness.

A majority of University graduates don’t think they can learn on their own. This isn’t an accident. Our schools teach students to be helpless. They tell them what to read, when to read, how to read, what to focus on, what to ignore. They tell students when to pee, and when to wake up, they tell students what’s worth learning and what isn’t. They control the vast majority of their waking hours for the better part of their childhood, and teach them that the value and merit of their work, work they had no hand in choosing, can and should be decided by an external authority they had no hand in electing. The entire educational process revolves around stripping as much personal autonomy from students as possible, habituating them to a reactive and powerless life, an abusive process that is extremely severe during their formative years, and only partially alleviated once they reach University.

This learned helplessness, this complete dependence on external authority, this lack of personal agency, all lead to people who are fundamentally neotenous.

Mental health professionals who come from an academic background are often so thoroughly twisted by the experience, that they are simply incapable of conceiving of a world where people are independent, self-motivated actors in plays of their own choosing. For the average mental health professional, unquestioning obedience and a willingness to roll over whenever someone in authority asks you to is the hallmark of being a well adjusted adult.

Years ago, Stanley Milgram conducted a study that measured the blind obedience of participants. He had actors hooked up to a fake electric shock device, and then asked participants to administer shocks whenever the actor failed to answer some question correctly. In the study, not all participants went through with the shocks, but a lot of them did. All it took was a guy in a lab coat to convince strangers to torture each other. Mental health professionals basically want all the people in that study to administer the shocks demanded of them by authority.

That’s what this comes down to. Society is the man in the lab coat, the mentally depressed are the people who refuse to shock the actor, and the happy well adjusted people are those folks who have no problem torturing strangers. Psychologists and psychiatrists want everyone to adjust to our society, completely indifferent to the fact that misery exists because that’s what people feel when they’re getting a raw deal.

You can’t change the world if you’re happy with it. Depression and misery and anger and sadness and all that bad stuff? That’s your bodies way of saying things have to change, and unless your doctors are going to help you change the world as well as yourself, they suck.

Post-academic psychologists know that if you want to treat mental health problems, you can’t ignore the pathological nature of society. Post-academics recognize that the social structures that we interact with are so broken and diseased, that no one crosses their path without getting some kind of neurotic infection.

Post-academic psychology is a mindset more than anything else. It’s transcending the limitations of the ego obsessed Academy. It involves stripping away all the presuppositions, all the mental habits, all the beliefs and values that our society inculcated into us without our consent or awareness. Once we’ve freed ourselves from the narrative death grip of society, we can become full authors of our own experiences. This cultural freedom provides us with the means of dealing with our social reality without necessarily becoming tainted by it.

Cultural Freedom

Ultimately, what I’m suggesting is that misery is the natural response to our society, so the only way to free ourselves from that misery is to free ourselves from our cultural attachment to society.

That means we can’t belong to society, we can’t identify with it, we can’t be defined by it. Whenever it tries to attach its tentacles around us, whenever it tries to define our experiences, to imbue meaning into them, we have to erect barriers around ourselves, and then give ourselves a good scrub down.

My position is that misery is the natural response of a body that has been defined by the world without ever being given a chance to define itself. Self-authorship is the proper antidote to misery, and that means erasing whatever narrative nonsense society has foisted on you that you disagree with.

You won’t be able to escape the unhealthy practices of the world around you, but you will be able to separate yourself from them. Instead of becoming a well adjusted participant in an alienating, dehumanizing spectacle, you’ll be a quasi independent observer who can leave the social theater when he wants to, or get on stage when he needs to.

You won’t be well adjusted, but you will be incredibly adaptable.

Embrace your misery, reject what causes it, turn your back on society.

Final Words

This website will no longer cover depression as a personal ailment. Instead, I plan on covering a variety of social poisons and maladies. I’ll tackle subjects from a miserable, cynical point of view.

I’ll be delightfully and gleefully antisocial. Crass and cranky are what you can expect. From here on out, you’ll get a dark and bitter brew of social commentary and utter nonsense.

Society is a disease, and I’m the mad doctor with a top hat and a polkadot bow tie.

Le monde est a mourire!

I hope to improve the quality of the posts as well. Right now, I’m still experimenting with this site (expect a new redesign in the near future), trying to find a good work flow.  I guess Steve Pavlina said it best in his essay on creating value: beginners always suck.

And this blog is just beginning, so it’s got far too many rough edges that will have to be smoothed out. However, looking back over some of the entries I’ve made, and a few of them show promise. The following are my favorite posts of 2008 — in no particular order.

1. Mimicry, social beloging, and automatic behavior

2. A Holistic Guide to Dealing With Emotional Vampires

When you considerhow we unconsciously ape the people we’re surrounded by, you begin to appreciate how important it is to avoid emotional vampires. The quality of the people in our lives determines the quality of our lives. We’re not immortals, so we shouldn’t waste what precious time we do have on people who are disrespectful and destructive.

3. Searching Your Way To Better Health: How I cured myself of panic attacks

Five years ago, I started having panic attacks. At the time, I didn’t know what they were, and I sought out medical advice. Unfortunately, the doctors I saw were complete idiots, and I returned home determined to do what they couldn’t — cure myself of whatever it was that I had. I turned to google, typed in my symptoms, and within minutes I had a name for what I was experiencing. Once I had a name, it was as if I had established some degree of control over my experiences, and within a short amount of time, my panic attacks went away. I can’t recommend that other people will share my luck, but in my case, Google was a better health care provider than any of the medical professionals I spoke with.

4. The Five Factors of Depression

In this essay, I break depression down into five different areas of concern: genetics, environments, relationships, physical health, and internal states. Deficiencies and problems in any one of these areas can contribute to depression, and usually several problems across all five areas exist. The interesting thing is that each area is like the leg of a table, and if you knock down a couple legs, the whole thing comes crashing down. Improving conditions in a couple of these areas will usually end up improving conditions in all of them. Change your environment and internal states, and you’ll often find your physical health and relationships improve, and so on.

5. Beating Seasonal Affective Disorder

SAD is a condition that hits people in the winter months. Human beings need sunlight, and when the sun is in hiding, people often come down with the blues. This post lists a variety of ways of dealing with the energy zapping condition: light boxes, dawn simulation, vitamin supplements, and pharmaceutical interventions among the therapeutic possibilities. It’s a good overview of the condition and the possible treatments available to those who have it.

6. Why do depressed people wake up exhausted?

A short but sweet video post about a question that has always baffled me: why do the depressed wake up exhausted? According to the video in this post, depressed people have different sleeping patterns then healthy people. They spend more time in the more active REM phase of sleep, where dreaming frequently occurs. The depressed dream more than healthy people because they have more emotional issues that need to be resolved, and since this emotional debris isn’t being cleared out during their waking hour, the brain takes it upon itself do this while people sleep. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do that great a job. I’m not sure how much weight this theory holds, but it’s an intriguing line of thought and it’s definitely worth investigating. Having seen the video, I now try not to carry any emotional baggage to bed.

7. Ten Illusion Clips

This has to be my favorite round-up of the year. It’s a collection of ten optical illusion videos, and each illusion shows just how wonky the human mind can be. The importance of this list is that it emphasizes how unreal our interpretation of the world often is. Visual trickery isn’t the only kind of illusions we end up experiencing — there are emotional, psychological illusions galore in the gallery of our personal experiences. We all have to be wary of automatically assuming something to be real simply because it seems real. Appearances can deceive, so we need to approach life with the possibility that our knowledge about the world and ourselves is faulty. Certainty is a dangerous thing.

In my opinion, these are the seven most interesting posts I’ve made this year. That works out to roughly one good post every two or so weeks. That’s a number I plan on improving this year!

2008 was a hell of a year.  Wallstreet tanked, taxpayers gave billions of dollars out to the rich,  and people all over the world are now worried about the future.

Over at Mister Misery, things in 2008 were decidedly quiet. This is a tiny, itty bitty blog. I don’t spend nearly as much time on it as I should. The reason I run this site is to learn more about pain and suffering. I’m an abolitionist, a transhumanist. I believe that a world of pleasure is possible, and to make that world a reality, I spend my time studying how to turn misery into happiness.

Alas, dear readers, I haven’t done a very good job so far. I’ve taken this site too seriously, so In 2009, I resolve to be less serious on this blog. I want to share all the craziest, juiciest, most interesting studies with you. I want to show you that a better way of living is possible, that happiness is within your reach, and that misery is nobody’s destiny.  What I don’t want, is to be grim and serious. I don’t want to pander to academics, I don’t want this blog to be dull, and I don’t want to post anything that requires a thesaurus to read.

In the past, I had trouble writing for this site because I always felt the need to qualify whatever it was I was saying.  This made my posts dull, grating affairs. Yes, if I don’t qualify things in my posts, they’ll be considerably less accurate — but also infinitely more readable and entertaining. When you qualify an argument, you’re asking people to connect the dots themselves when they’d rather have other people do it for them. In 2009, I resolve to take more stands, even if that means ignoring some opposing points of view.

Finally, this site has been rather lazy when it comes to post frequency. Once a week simply isn’t enough.  Expect much more material in 2009. I’ll be traveling extensively throughout the year, and during my travels, I’ll be interviewing interesting people and posting about it on this site. I’ll also be producing a videos for this site about psychology, misery, depression, and the future of pleasure.  It should make for a much richer blogging experience, and hopefully this site will go from being pretty damn weak to being incredible awesome.

For that reason, I’ve decided to start posting videos that I find particularly inspiring, the kind that will bring a smile to most peoples faces — even hardened cynics. I want my readers to get in the habit of seeking out positive experiences. Think of it as a cultural diet of sorts. Whenever you catch yourself
feasting on negativity, make a conscious effort to consume some happiness. Seek out thoughts that make you smile.

Take this video of Matt, a man who has literally danced his way around the world. There’s a good chance it’ll make your face break into a grin.