In our second year of life, we select and consolidate our worldview. . . This happens before we acquire the necessary life experience and maturity to understand the nature of the obligations we assume in this way. . . For most of our lives, we strengthen this worldview and protect it from any threat. We avoid all situations that threaten this worldview.

-Eric Berne.

If for years you seem to be stuck in the same intolerable situation – constantly running out of money two days before the paycheck, always ending up with uncaring and cold partners, remaining stuck for decades in a job you hate, feeling permanently frustrated in everything you undertake, hating your living situation for years on end –  the only way out of it is to ask yourself these questions:

1. If I didn’t have to be constantly miserable about and struggling with this situation, what would I be doing instead?
2. What specifically is so scary to me about this thing that I’d be doing instead?

Accepting that one remains in the intolerable situation because its familiarity is comforting is hard because a feeling of guilt immediately follows. “If I choose to live this way, then I must be to blame,” people think. But this way of thinking is precisely one of the defenses that Berne is talking about in the quote I gave above. There is no need to feel bad. This is an adaptive mechanism that everybody uses. All it means is that you are human, and that’s definitely not your fault. 

An example of how this worked for me is under the fold.

Continue reading “Escaping Permanent Misery” →

Carnival has existed for centuries as a space where people could shed their inhibitions, forget social conventions, laugh, stop trying to look serious and respectable all the time, and instead be irreverent and disrespectful for a change.

We don’t have carnavalesque spaces any more. Whenever anybody tries to make a joke, an army of sour puss prudes emerges to lecture on some entirely idiotic distinction between “punching up and punching down.” And then some idiot begins to share tales of horrible trauma caused by the joke, and all fun dies under the angry glares of the self-righteous.

The congenitally humorless publish endless exhortations denouncing people for not taking every one of their neuroses into account when trying to express themselves.

In the absence of regular, socially acceptable ways to vent, playful, irreverent impulses curdle, rot, and begin to emit noxious fumes. When they finally escape – and the repressed always returns, no matter how much you try to stuff it under a mountain of prohibitions – they look like Trump’s mocking of the disabled and inspire a burning desire to rebel by inflicting a Cruz or a Trump on the world.

There is a crowd of people bearing responsibility for the bastardization of the political space that we are witnessing, and the prudes who trawl social networks and blogs looking for a sentence, a word or a pronoun to feel mortally offended by are among them.

There is a company that, as a reward to workers who have stayed on for 5 years, buys the employees a two-way ticket absolutely anywhere in the world they want to visit. The rewards for staying on 1, 2 and 3 years are also great.

What people don’t tell one about Uber is that it’s only partly a rideshare app. It’s also a sociability app. Drivers expect to socialize during the rides and react with incomprehension and resentment if one tries to read or text while being driven.

As a result, one gets to meet quite a lot of strangers one would never meet otherwise and discover how complex people are if one takes Uber often. 

Today, for instance, my driver was a 47-year-old fellow who started out with an anti-Michael Brown rant. That immediately made me wonder how I would stick out the rest of the 1-hour-long ride. From Michael Brown and exuberant praise for brave police officers, the talkative driver with a Bible prominently displayed on the dashboard (I’m not being critical or anything since my Bible is bigger than his Bible) segued to the subject of Muslims.

“God have mercy on us,” I thought.

But it turned out I was too quick to place the fellow into an identity box. He offered a very nuanced and insightful discussion of the Koran. And then moved on to praise Canada’s state healthcare system and conclude that, “Say what you will about him, but there are things this Bernie Sanders guy is right about.”

After that, he shared his profound dislike of Bosnian refugees (who are a large local community) and informed me that there are women who actually like working even though they are married.

Don’t think I was just sitting there quietly, though. I used the opportunity to convert the driver from a very pro-Russian stance to a more Ukrainian-friendly one.

Understanding oneself is a great luxury. And not just in existential but also in dumbly economic terms. 

For the less fortunate, there is a cheap alternative: joining an identity group! The more active people are in constructing their identity category, the more wounded they are.

Here is an interesting article on the subject. Of course, compared to its author, I’m even more privileged because I undergo a much more complex, slow, in-depth and expensive form of therapy.

Trump won. Which is good because we want him to get the nomination.

Cruz had prepared some good material and delivered it almost convincingly but Trump responded to everything with great ease. Good improv always triumphs over the capacity to recite the lines somebody else wrote for you.

Gosh, and here we all thought it was going to be a boring election. I’m awed and amazed to see an actual democratic system at work. This is very beautiful, people.

“Dad, what is this that you are wearing on your head?”

“It’s a keffiyeh, son. In the desert, it protects us from the scorching sun.”

“And what’s this you are wearing over your clothes?”

“It’s a djellaba, son. In the desert, it protects us from the burning heat.”

“But why are you wearing all this in winter in Cologne, Dad?”

“Straighten your hijab, son, and shut up, or they’ll send us back to Donetsk.”

Are there people out there who are as tenacious as I am in watching these debates?

Join me in this addiction to the American political process!

8:04 – Christie has overtaken Bush in the polls? I totally missed that.

8:05 – Cruz is such a freakazoid. Everything about him is just off. Why don’t people see that? And also, “Obama Clinton economy”? WTF is that? Stupid dick.

8:10 – everybody is criticizing Obama for not being an apocalyptic drama queen in his State of the Union speech on Monday. Losers.

8:22 – I didn’t know Cruz was a crook. It’s good to find out. Not only is he not qualified to run because of his citizenship, he’s also in some financial mess.

8:26 – am I imagining it, or is there a lot more commercials than usual? And are they a lot creepier than normal?

8:28 – Cruz is making a limp-wristed attack on Trump. What a weakling.

8:31 – the audience is booing Trump. He deserves booing but not over stupid Cruz. Trump held his own admirably in the face of the booing.

8:35 – Trump and Cruz are doing some weird catty thing about who’ll be whose Veep. In the midst of all the bickering, Rubio squeaks, pointing at Christie, “He supports the Common Core!”

8:46 – seriously? Bill Clinton’s sex life of 20-30 years ago? What a bunch of sore losers.

8:57 – Rubio is attacking what Obama said in his campaign 8 years ago? Because that’s very relevant to this election? Where Obama is not running? Is Rubio high?

9:04 – Cruz really stepped into it when he handed Trump a chance to bring up the World Trade Center.

9:15 – Carson is done. It’s time for the poor fellow to quit. He started shrieking about how much he wants to bomb people and looked very unstable.

9:20 – Trump’s television career is putting him far ahead of the pack. He knows how to squeeze his camera time for every ounce of potential.

9:21 – Bush is channeling Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy position verbatim.

9:25 – just a few phrases, and the erstwhile hecklers are eating out of Trump’s hand. He’s good.

9:33 – now China is Trump’s sworn enemy. It’s like he detests everybody but Putin.

9:42 – all this talk about China is soporific.

9:55 – Rubio’s right: Cruz’s tax plan is nuts. The last thing we need is a sales tax.

9:56 – Christie is attacking the Republican congress and defending social security? What is happening?

This weather is so messed up. I went outside and thought I was sick or something because it’s abnormal to feel so hot in January. I seriously considered contacting my doctor until I looked at the outside temperature and discovered it was +19°C in the shade.

Yesterday evening, by the way, it was so cold that I almost had frostbite.

This must all be very hard on elderly people.

A church in Taiwan has been built in the shape of a high-heeled shoe to attract female worshipers. The church will feature 100 “female-oriented” gimmicks in the church, like maple leaves, biscuits, cakes, and “chairs for lovers”.

One thing that the many journalists writing about the church aren’t managing (and even trying) to establish is what religion the church is affiliated with. That’s what the consumerist version of religious practice is like.