October 28, 2009

No Action Is An Island

By wise sloth

 

Have you ever known anyone who dated an asshole and was miserable because of it? Did it ever annoy you how they’d constantly make excuses for why their significant other was an asshole and why they were going to put up with it? The whole time they were making excuses you were probably thinking, “That person was an asshole yesterday. That person is an asshole today. That person is going to be an asshole tomorrow. Why don’t you understand that?” Well, your friend was oblivious yesterday. They’re oblivious today, and they’re going to be oblivious tomorrow. Why don’t you understand that?

How you act in a given situation is how you can be expected to act in any other similar situation. Everything you do or think is a piece of a pattern of thoughts and behavior that has existed in your past and will exist in your future.

No action is an isolated incident. Everything is part of a pattern. This is why psychologists and fake psychics understand you so well even if they only know a little bit about you. They understand that every little detail they know about you is indicative of a larger whole.

This is why bad drivers and people who stand in the middle of the aisle at the grocery store blocking 15 shoppers while they stare mindlessly at a jar of pickles should piss you off. If they’re dumb enough to do that one seemingly idiotic thing, then how far does that pattern stretch throughout the rest of their lives?

So you have to ask yourself, what are your tendencies? Are there any tendencies you have that you try to minimalize or make excuses for? The next time you do some small irrational thing, stop and try to find how that irrational action fits into a pattern in your life because I guarantee it does.

Next time someone is mean to you and comes up with a seemingly valid excuse for why their meanness was an accident, don’t believe them. The only accident was that they let you see the real pattern beneath the mask they’re wearing.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Growing up and Becoming You

October 28, 2009

Piancavollos’ Traveling Snail

By wise sloth

Sign of the "Piancovollo" city limit sign in the Dolomite mountains of North East Italy.

From 2000-2001, I was stationed at Aviano Air Base in North-Eastern Italy, at the base of the Dolomite Mountains. One day I hiked to the top of a nearby mountain named Piancavollo. From the top, you can see miles and miles of farmland, small towns, and the long runway of Aviano Air Base. They say on a good day you can see Venice, an hour’s drive away. From Piancavollo all of civilization is spread out before you in a panorama. It makes you wonder how many people are milling around down there going on about their lives? How many dramas, how many love affairs, how many tragedies, how many criminals? But then again, you know all about what’s going on down there. You live there, somewhere, and you’ll be back before you know it. But from up here it seems so far away as to be surreal, just like how the top of the mountain does from down there.

Arial photo of the city of Piancavollo, looking down from the mountain of the same name

When I first arrived in Italy and saw that mountaintop commanding the horizon I told myself that I had to climb it to be able to say I did it and chalk up one more experience in the story of my life. When I finally got to the top and started looking down at so many places that I hadn’t been yet I started thinking about all the other places around the world that was craving to visit before I die. I didn’t want to look back on my life and say that I didn’t live a vibrant life because I never went to Hawaii, or Moscow, or London, or Key West, or Alaska.

I’m terrified of living a mundane life. Never mind the fact that in the short 22 years of my life I’ve been to Athens, Jerusalem, Cairo, Paris, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Vienna, New York, LA, and Cancun to name a few. But that’s not good enough. I’ve gotta keep moving,

Anyway. So I was standing on this mountain, eye level with the clouds, adding up all the places I needed to visit when my concentration was broken by the thought that I really had to pee. So I scurried over behind some tall rocks and whip it out to do my business when I realized that there was a large snail lying right where I was aiming. So I took a step to the side, and while I was standing there waiting to finish relieving myself occupied my attention by staring at that black and yellow snail.

Look at this little snail. Its life was a total contradiction to my quest for variety. In its entire life, it would never travel more than 20 feet (or something like that). It may never even see another human. It might not even see me right now. It certainly will never notice the vast panorama that’s embracing a hundred miles of varied landscape behind it or understand what’s going on in any of those towns. But do I have the right to say the snail’s life is a tragedy because it won’t see the Eiffel Tower or touch the Wailing Wall?

I won’t ever get to see what a blade of grass four times my height looks like. Surely that snail is getting to see some pretty amazing things down there. But there’s something more important implied by this snail than appreciating the view from a quarter inch above the ground. How many amazing places do you have to go and how many amazing situations do you have to get yourself into before you can say that you lived an amazing life. What if there were more than 7 wonders of the ancient world ever built? What if there was a structure built in every single city on Earth that was worthy of being called a “wonder of the world”? You couldn’t see all of them in one lifetime. So how many do you have to see before you officially lived a vibrant life? How few can you get away with seeing and still say you didn’t live a mundane life?

Taking this idea one step further let’s ask if you really need to see any of these “wonders” at all. Maybe I’m wasting my time and money traveling, and all these adventures that I’m so proud of having have really been distracting me from focusing on something more important. Maybe visiting amazing places is less important than having an amazing personality. Maybe the quality of your environment is determined by the extent that you appreciate it regardless of what or where it is. Maybe it doesn’t matter how many mountains, rivers, or antique buildings you get to see, especially when there’s an entire universe of complex uniqueness in the mind of everyone you pass on your way to see these inanimate buildings and rocks.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Whatever the answers I at least figured I could lighten up a little about not getting to visit more famous places. By the time I finished thinking about all this, I had been done peeing for about a minute now and had just been standing there on that mountain exposing myself to a snail and staring into oblivion. So I collected myself mentally (and physically) and started off down the mountain back to my busy, little town where I had plans to do nothing for the rest of the day.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

My Goals
My Life Stories (in chronological order)
My Art

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in My life stories

October 28, 2009

An American Beauty-esque Rant About Life In America

By wise sloth

You ever feel like Kevin Spacey’s character in “American Beauty?”

 

 

You have an indoor job that doesn’t require a lot hard physical labor. So theoretically you have an easy job, but you come home from work every day tired. You’d think you would have lots of energy because there’s so little sensory stimulation in suburbia, but your job is stressful and pointless. You have no job satisfaction. The only places you ever go are to work, a gas station, home, a grocery store, and occasionally a restaurant or mall. Wash, rinse, repeat over and over again. Your life is a skipping CD. It has become so routine that you can do it without thinking, and sometimes you do. Months fly by and you don’t even realize it because you’ve been asleep at the wheel the whole time.

Then one day you take a vacation to someplace you’ve always dreamed of, and your vacation probably goes something like this: You spend the whole vacation running from attraction to attraction in a wild frenzy trying to fit everything into your short trip, which makes you more exhausted than when your vacation started so that you’re relieved when you get home. When you get home you realize you spent way more money than you budgeted, because you got overcharged for everything, and now you’re going to stress out over making your money back. Despite all the problems with your vacation it still got you thinking about how jealous you are of the people who live in the picturesque place you visited, and now you’re depressed because you had a taste of a better life (that you know someone else is living), and now you have a frame of reference with which to measure how dismal your bland, stressful, circular life is.

So you get back to your bland, stressful, circular routine and the memory of your vacation quickly rides the conveyor belt of time to the back of your mind. You don’t realize it, but if you had have enough money or vacation time left you’d take another vacation as a roundabout way to buy happiness, but since you can’t do that you’re forced to endure the unfulfilling lifestyle you’re trapped in. So you try to find little ways to bring some happiness in your life (or at least ways to feel alive): buying a new hat, masturbating, watching a movie, going bowling, getting drunk, eating at a new restaurant, etc.

So basically you have a tiny life, and it starts to feel claustrophobic. That compounded with your stress and lack of respite you start feeling depressed and develop panic attacks. You start to suspect that there’s something wrong with you, and all the self-help books you read agree you’re an ungrateful emotional cripple for not being maniacally happy every moment of every day. Since the self-help books didn’t solve your problems (and actually made you feel more guilty) you suspect there is something wrong with you biologically. So you go to see a therapist who puts you on antidepressants, which make your stifling lifestyle more bearable by forcing you to be happy chemically.

The problem isn’t that you don’t understand the self-help secret of life, and the problem isn’t biological for most people. The problem is that our economy is designed to force you into a repetitive, stressful, lackluster lifestyle that is too expensive for most people to escape. Nobody intentionally designed it like that. It’s just the way it happened. If beer or antidepressants help you get through it then you may as well try them, because you’re probably going to be stuck in the cycle for a long time. Here are some other helpful hints for coping with modern life: Go insane. Get a hobby. Convince your boss to let you wear pajamas to work. Exercise. Work in the porn industry. Quit your job and move to a third world country.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

 

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Poverty

October 28, 2009

The Rising Tide of Vagrant Intellectuals

By wise sloth

Photo of Charles Bukowski sitting at a desk covered in papers, speaking into a microphone, holding a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of alcohol in the other.

 

Throughout most of human history, the only people who could read were the upper class. Until the invention of the printing press, the upper class was also the only people who could afford books, which all had to be hand-written. Even if a peasant could read, lived in a city with a library, and were allowed in the library he still wouldn’t be able to learn enough to be considered educated, because he wouldn’t have time to learn, because he would have had to work the fields or the factories from morning to night.

The printing press helped make education more affordable and accessible to the poor. Unions gave us the weekend and the 40 hour work week, which gave the poor time to learn. The invention of free public education allowed the poor to learn to read and get a taste for intelligence. Very recently children of blue collar workers have been able to access higher education through grants, scholarships, and loans. Now that the internet exists anyone can research any topic they want through free websites. Anyone can purchase almost any book that exists on Amazon.com, even upper-level college textbooks that used to be only sold at university bookstores.

Towards the beginning of human history, the only people who could ever hope to be intelligent were the wealthiest people on the earth. As a result of social progress and technological advancements access to knowledge has slowly trickled down to the middle class, and now the lower class finally has the same privilege (at least in first world countries).

With the lowest class of society finally having practically unrestricted access to knowledge I see a new class of philosophers and thinkers forming. I call them the vagrant intellectuals, and I have high hopes for them.

Think about this. What is an upper-class socialite going to be inspired to write? A pampered socialite from old money doesn’t have to face the harsh realities of life and isn’t going to be able to relate to the real human condition, and that’s going to be reflected in what they publish: over-worded pseudo-intellectual crap.

But the poor, the dejected, the abused, the chemically dependent dregs of the earth have been bitch slapped by reality, and now they have the educational resources to understand and articulate that experience. Plus they have the technical resources to disseminate their hard-earned knowledge upwards to the rest of society. Plus, they can help the rest of the dregs make sense of their lot in life and articulate their experiences.

The rich are losing their monopoly on literature and intellectual culture. More and more you can expect the poor to shape national dialogue. The more the poor air their experiences and grievances the more well-rounded our understanding of our society will become and the more the world will be forced to acknowledge and rectify the unfair conditions the poor live in.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

The Importance of Public Education
Flaws in the Public Education System
Improving Public Education

 

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in The Value of Public Education

October 28, 2009

Don’t Argue With People Who Point Out Your Flaws

By wise sloth

What would you do if one of your friends had a big piece of broccoli in their teeth that they were oblivious about, and the two of you were about to go out in public? If they’re your friend, you’d say, “Hey, you’ve got some broccoli in your teeth. You should pick it out so you don’t embarrass yourself, friend.”

Broccoli in your teeth is a metaphor for everything you do wrong. For example, growing up I went through a series of bad haircuts. In fact, it was pretty late in life before I ever had a good haircut. I had a lot of friends through the course of those haircuts who should have told me I looked like a waterlogged circus clown. My friends would have told me if I broccoli in my teeth. So why didn’t they tell me my haircut sucked?

We all know acquaintances, family, and friends who are doing something wrong in life, but we don’t say anything because it would be rude. In 2004, I worked with a guy who acted ridiculous, and everyone complained about him behind his back. I always felt guilty every time he made a fool out of himself because he didn’t realize it. Everybody else did though, and they were just going to let him keep on being a moron and keep ruining his life. Well, I couldn’t live with that on my conscience. So one day I had a long conversation with him about how he was making his life harder, and he needed to put more thought into the decisions he made.

He lashed back, demanding me to explain what made me think I was so great. From then on he was quick to criticize me. I’d made an enemy by trying to help him. And all the people he thought were his friends just kept laughing at him behind his back and letting him be an idiot. But I didn’t give up. There were a few times after that when he did something stupid again, and I said, “This is what we talked about. That was a bad idea, and you’re going to regret it, and when that happens, you need to analyze the situation and learn a lesson from it.” His stupidity always came back to haunt him, and he never learned a lesson…but he did resent me more.

It was ironic that he thought I was a prick, because I was the most honest, concerned, and helpful friend he had in that circle. It absolutely blows my mind the unwavering resolve people have when it comes to not listening to (or more precisely, thinking about) advice and staying stupid. I’ve seen this time and time again, even when people ask you for advice. You give it to them, they argue with you, do the opposite, regret it, and then do the same thing over again and wonder why their life sucks.

So do you think I was being a prick by calling out my friend’s mistakes? Don’t answer. It’s a trick question. It doesn’t matter if I was. He needed someone to point of the proverbial broccoli in his teeth by any means necessary for his own good.

Do your self and the world a favor. Embrace criticism. It’s better to lose face and look dumb for a minute than to be dumb for the rest of your life.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Self-Esteem

October 28, 2009

What is sin?

By wise sloth

When I was a Christian, I was confused by the subject of sin. I couldn’t figure out what exactly constituted sin. I reasoned that if civil laws have themes running through them, then Biblical rules must have an even more profound common denominator than The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So I took a year-long course on The Old Testament and read the Bible from cover to cover. To my astonishment, the only common denominator I found that tied all the commandments of the Bible together logically and coherently is this: Everything the Bible says is a sin was a cultural taboo in ancient Middle Eastern Jewish culture. You only have to scratch the surface of The Torah to find this, and the deeper you dig, the more you’ll find.

Consider some of the sins listed in the Old Testament and try to find the common denominator they all share:

  • You can’t cut your sideburns.
  • You have to be circumcised.
  • You can’t work on Sunday
  • You can’t eat animals with cloven hoofs.
  • You can beat your slaves, kill your children and sell your daughters.
  • If you have a wet dream you have to leave the camp for several days until you’re spiritually clean again.

"If two men are fighting, and the wife of one man tries to rescue her husband by grabbing the other man's private parts, you must cut off her hand. Don't have mercy." Deuteronomy 25: 11-12

"The children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall you buy. And they shall be your possession. And you shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession. they shall be your bondmen forever." Leviticus 25:45-46

Finding any other pattern between the sins listed in the Bible becomes harder when you include The New Testament. Try to find a common theme in these New Testament rules:

  • Homosexuality is still a sin.
  • Adultery is still a sin, but you should no longer stone adulterers as God commanded.
  • Slavery is still approved of, and slaves are told to obey they masters at least 4 times.
  • Working on Sunday is now okay.
  • Not believing the story of Jesus is a now a worse sin than murder.
  • Divorce isn’t a sin if the wife fornicates.
  • Stealing is still bad.
  • Women shouldn’t wear pearls or gold, and they should either cover their heads during prayer or shave their heads.
  • Jesus turns water into wine for people to drink, but Paul says drinking is a sin.

"Slave, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ." Ephesians 6:5

Put the rest of the Bible to the test if you don’t believe me. Read the whole thing, and every time there is a commandment stated or implied, write it down. Make a list, and then try to find some form of logical, purpose-driven standard that ties them altogether. I guarantee there is only one common denominator that elegantly and without exception ties all of the rules in the Bible together: Jewish values projected into their cultural manifesto.

If you liked this post, you may like these:

 

7 Comments | posted in The Bible is Mythology

October 28, 2009

My Philosophy On Being Calm

By wise sloth

As a child, my favorite characters on television were the old guys (usually Asian karate masters) who were always perfectly calm and had everything figured out. They’d sit there and smirk as the young fledgling hero fumbled through their quests like a clueless 11-year-old lost in a big city.

 

Black and white photo of Mr. Miyagi (from the movie, "The Karate Kid) holding chopsticks and looking calm and wise.

 

One day it dawned on me that I’d been fumbling through life crippled by my own ignorance just like the fledgling heroes on my favorite Saturday morning cartoons, and just like the young heroes on television, I was the only obstacle keeping me from becoming a calm, centered Zen master too. All I had to do was figure out the supreme truth they understood. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask my parents or any other old people in my real life to teach that secret to me, because they didn’t know it either.

If nobody would tell me the secret to supreme calmness then I’d just have to figure it out for myself, and I reasoned I could do it without having to go through a lifetime of meditation and martial arts training if I just worked backward and reverse engineered the process from the conclusion.

The conclusion was that all life’s problems aren’t worth stressing over. I just needed to know why.

The difference between the old, wise, tranquil guy and the man who jumps out of a skyscraper when the stock market dips, is perception of priorities. When you know what’s important then you don’t worry about the unimportant things. When you have a skewed perception of what’s important, then you overreact to unimportant events. So you have to ask yourself, what’s important and why?

Imagine all the worst possible things happening to you at once. Your loved ones die. You go bankrupt. You go to prison. You lose your legs. You lose your rank in your high school’s social hierarchy. Once you’ve lost in every way that you can possibly lose in life, what have you really lost? All you’ve lost is external luxury. But you still have your self, the only thing you ever truly owned. Nobody can take that away from you, and as long as you have yourself then you can still till a life for yourself.

The only time you’re taken from you is when you die. Even then, it’s not logical to fear the inevitable. And the big kicker about death is that when you die you lose everything in life anyway. So when you lose anything in life before death…shit…you were going to lose it anyway. So you can’t ever lose anything that you weren’t going to lose anyway.

This makes a lot of suicides ironic. The point of suicide is to escape your intolerable life. If people could choose between suicide and a better life they’d just choose the better life. So if you’re at the point that you’re willing to kill yourself then you’re free to do anything. If you’re willing to let go of all the ties that bind you to the earth then you’re free to fly to the ends of the earth.

Look, shit happens. So don’t be surprised when it does, and don’t freak out because you think it’s the end. It’s never the end until you’re dead, and in the meantime, shit happening doesn’t change the fact that you’re still you and you can still experience life.

So the old, wise guy realizes that nothing really matters. but the reason the young hero can’t achieve the same Fight Club-esque sense of freedom from worry is because he’s trying too hard. Don’t try to hold the philosophy that loss is unimportant tightly in your mind. Just let go. Say, “Fuck it.” All you have to lose is your anxiety.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Happiness and Peace

October 28, 2009

Professionalism Is A Straitjacket

By wise sloth

Goofy photoshopped image of Donald Trump wearing a straight jacket in a padded room.

 

Think about any behavior that constitutes professionalism: wearing business suits, ties, leather shoes, addressing people with formal speech, prostrating yourself before abusive customers, sitting upright in your chair, etc. None of these behaviors are necessarily things you’d choose to do on your free time. In your free time, you wear comfortable clothing, speak naturally and honestly, stand up for yourself, lounge around comfortably, etc.

Professionalism is an unnatural set of behaviors forced upon you by someone else to improve their company’s image at the expense of your freedom and comfort. Professionalism ties your hands behind your back and prevents you from living how you want to…just like a straitjacket. This is inhumane and defeats the purpose of working in the first place.

Why does your job exist? What does your business provide society and why? Why does our economy exist in the first place? We work to survive and find happiness. The whole point of working or even having this gigantic, intricate, thriving economy, is to streamline the hunting/gathering/tool making process so that we don’t have to waste our lives fighting for survival.

In other words, our economy has grown out of the desire to be happier, but professionalism stifles us all day every day. So if your company enforces strict standards of professionalism and makes a lot of money, and even if it makes its customers happy, it defeats the purpose of its existence by making its workers less happy than they could be if they were allowed their basic human rights.

If you ever see a company that has very strict standards of professionalism you automatically know that that company’s C.E.Os don’t care about their workers’ rights, dignity or comfort. For a dollar, they’d gladly put their workers in a straitjacket and tell them to like it.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Oppression in the Workplace

October 28, 2009

My Theory On Aggregate Happiness and Immediate Karma

By wise sloth

Aggregate Happiness

There are millions of moments throughout your life where you’re faced with a decision that can cause you a tiny bit of happiness or a tiny bit of distress. The amount of happiness and stress is so small that it basically doesn’t matter: like waiting to use the restroom until later, satisfying a slight hunger, resting for five minutes, rubbing one out before work, etc. These choices might seem inconsequential, but when you think of the millions upon millions of these tiny choices we make in our lifetimes, if we always choose to take that extra piss, snack, nap, or whatever then those millions of choices will add up to a huge chunk of happiness, but if we always choose to tough it out we will have amassed a huge pile of misery over the course of our lives.

Text: "It all adds up."

Immediate Karma

We only have so much time in this life. Therefore we only have so much time to be happy. Whenever you’re angry, confrontational, jealous, convincing, condescending, etc. you feel angry, confrontational, jealous, etc. If you’re always acting that way then you’re always feeling that way. So at the end of your life all you’ll have to look back on, all you’ll have experienced will have been negativity.

The second you’re mean to someone, you’ve already created an experience for yourself that is not worth remembering and is wasted time that could have been spent experiencing happiness. So when someone is being a dick to you, understand they may or may not ruin your day, but they sure as hell are ruining their own. Even if they look like they’re enjoying harassing you, they’re not experiencing pure, honest joy, and they’ll never be able to get that moment back. It will have been wasted on sub-par joy for the rest of eternity.

On the other hand, no selfless act is ever unrewarded. Anytime you do something virtuous you get the reward of feeling happy. Even if you don’t get a tangible reward, ask yourself why you would have wanted a tangible reward anyway. You would have wanted a tangible reward because it would have made you happy. Well, if you take joy in doing good without getting a tangible reward then you just skip straight to the end goal: immediate happiness.

Example of cause and effect: A man jumps on a see-saw with a boulder on the other end, causing the boulder to fly in the air and crush him.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Happiness and Peace

October 28, 2009

How To Be Cool

By wise sloth

Black and white photo of James Dean leaning against a wall holding a cigarette looking cool

All through junior high school and the first part of high school, I was obsessed with being cool, because the only way you could feel safe in school (much less become accepted or popular) was to be cool. Of course, I didn’t articulate it like that at the time. I just knew I had to be cool, and I felt that everyone else had already figured out how, and I was scrambling to catch up, and in the meantime, I’d just have to pretend as best I could and hope nobody figured out that I was a fake.

It turns out that most people actually felt the same way I did in high school. If we all knew that at the time we’d all have been a lot happier, but of course nobody was going to admit their feelings of inadequacy to each other. That wouldn’t be cool. Or would it? What does it mean to be cool? If it were simple we all would have just gotten it and our teenage years would have been that much simpler. But it’s not simple.

Urbandictionary.com has a good definition of the word, “cool.”

“An adjective referring to something that is very good, stylish, or otherwise positive.”

“Cool” is about as diverse as the word, “fuck,” but we’re only going to focus on one usage of the word. What does is mean to be a cool person? The urbandictionary.com’s definition exposes why it’s so hard to say what a cool person is. It applies to two opposing lifestyles: good and stylish.

Let’s assume that the terms “stylish” and “cool” are interchangeable. “Style” is whatever is popular at the moment. Other than the fact that style changes daily this is an easy-to-follow formula that is very reliable. Just conform to the majority’s standards and the majority will accept you…in other words, sell out. If you want to be more than just accepted the trick is to pay close attention to what is going to be popular tomorrow and stay on top of the trends. The problem with this is that you live your life for other people who are probably as petty as you and their friendship is about as durable as a sun-dried toothpick. There are a lot of people out there willing to pay that price for safety and exaltation, and if you choose that path I can’t say I blame you, and I can’t say I haven’t done it before. But today I won’t have any respect for you.

I’ll introduce my next point with a quote from James Dean, the master of cool. He once said, “If you aren’t living for yourself then you aren’t really living.” The other version of cool is to be yourself regardless (and often in spite) of what the majority is doing. Having said that, it’s also important to point out that style and individuality are two extremes at opposite ends of a scale, and nobody is 100 stylish or individual, and you don’t have to be. It’s okay to be in the gray area. No, you will be in the gray area. You can’t help being shaped by your environment, and at any rate, no matter what you do, wear, or want, in a world with almost 7 billion people you’re inevitably going to be like someone else. And trying not to be like anyone else for the purpose of not being like anyone else is pointless. Disliking something just because it’s mainstream is ultimately the same as liking something because it’s mainstream. Either way, you’re basing your actions on other people’s actions. The point is that when figuring out where you are on the scale it’s not important to measure how much you look or act like everyone else but why you make the decisions you’ve made. Did you do it for yourself or for someone else?

Consider subcultures like goth, punk, gangsta, hippie, raver, etc. These “sub” cultures include millions of people worldwide, which have entire fashion, music, decoration, and entertainment industries built around them to provide you the material goods you think you need to set yourself “apart.” Dumbass. Conforming to a subculture is still conforming. And the rules of subcultures are enforced just as harshly as the rules of mainstream culture. Don’t kid yourself. If you identify with a subculture you’re not the outsider you think you are.

The point is that it’s more important to be true to yourself than popular. It’s more important to have a sense of personal identity than social identity. And if you want to live for yourself then, yes, you will probably have to sacrifice some social acceptance for it, but if you do you’ll be free, you’ll be able to grow, and you’ll have self-respect. But where does say a 14-year-old get the strength to sacrifice popularity for individuality? Commitment to any mental endeavor like this is rarely done through raw, mental strength. It’s achieved through knowledge, which gives you a clear perception of the course of action you should take. Anyone who has great resolve to accomplish anything or live a certain way will always have a clear philosophy about why they’re doing what they’re doing. So in order to be yourself, you have to see clearly the cost and benefits of popularity and individuality. I mentioned a few reasons why individuality is more important than popularity, but there’s another very important one that I haven’t mentioned. Think about the people you’re trying to be popular with. If their friendship is so flimsy that you’ll lose it if you don’t play the perfect little role they expect you to then they’re not really friends and not worth impressing. In fact, if you haven’t figured it out yet, most of the people in this world are complete douche bags. If somebody doesn’t like you then statistically you’re better off. In fact, you should hope people don’t like you and leave you alone.

ANYBODY who stands up for them self in spite of social pressure is cool. And in this generation, nobody is more victimized by social pressure, and thus, nobody has to stand up for themselves more than nerds and gays. Agree with them or not, befriend them or not, but respect them, because they’re stronger and cooler than all the jocks and valley girls in the world. Don’t put words in my mouth though. I’m not saying we should all be gay nerds. I’m just saying that nerds, gays, and other unstylish outcasts don’t get the respect they deserve.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

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