thelerner

Good question. One thats tackled every few years here. Probably better to ask it in a new thread. I find the Taoist section to have fewer but more serious posters. Cause this section, and this thread is poison. I wouldn't expect good answers here. I'll repost it in the Taoist section and give my reply.

For sitting its good to have your butt raised a few inches up on a stiff pillow, or two rolled up towels. In the beginning its fine to have the your back against a wall for support. Lastly, a little discomfort is alright, sit through it, it gets easier. On the internet there are many guided meditations of all types. Trippy, Taoist, shamanic, sexual, productive.. They are good to try while lying down. Google guided meditation or put it into youtube. See if any strike your fancy. They can be a great source of peace. For example here's one-

No more internet, thats, that's impossible. where would i get my stuff. I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. Albert Einstein Circa 1948 Sticks & Stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. Me circa 1972

my 2 bits. I think WWIII is, thankfully an exaggeration. If nothing else the US & Iran are probably somewhat short on friends, especially in a self inflicted conflict. That's not to say war isn't in the cards. The US is sadly bomb, drone and missile happy but very reluctant to send in physical troops. Iran has a tendency to fight through proxy, having zealots and encouraging third parties to attack targets of opportunities. Many wildcards, modern weapons are too powerful to be used for bluster and bluff. Hmnn don't need a world war to be greatly destructive, kill 10,000s, maim 100,000s and torch billions in property.

Power of Will-any practice will be better than this quarrel that you made here. @MegaMind is right and he truly what to find a way to this technology. That’s great. Anyone can say BS I just don’t understand why you spend so much time to kick @MegaMind from this forum. You don’t have nothing to do? Or what? Go and try something and let us know. Don’t waste your time because it’s never enough. I have a practice I discuss it here. Thats the purpose of this forum, actually, for most people. I have a blog here if you're interested in what I do. Which was inspired by another member who wrote about their experiences. also I'm not trying to kick him out of this forum. Matter of fact I hope one day he actually joins it as a member and is able to discuss things here like everyone else. Instead he has one purpose, keep Mo Pai arguments going. Which is as you say, a waste of time. I have maybe 7 posts in this thread, he has dozens, pages worth, posting every day multiple times. You may want to talk to him about how intelligent his time spent here is.

but you can't say what those are. Its forbidden, ammo for those who read it. which I'm sorry for but you do seem a little bit of a glutton for punishment. In that weeks ago, you could have made your case and left, instead you keep this thread going and going and going. Writing the same things, over and over, knowing almost exactly what you'll get back. This is a pretty typical MP thread. Crazily, shorter then many, where a singular WMP person keeps a circular thread going for months. I don't know. I think writing honestly about your experiences is a tact you should try. In that its what every one on the board does. It's kinda the boards whole purpose. I am guilty of throwing back at More Pie Bear that he wasn't practicing Mo Pai but was seemingly spending hours writing on forum boards. I thought that was bad. I 'used' his confession him, but there was the hope he'd write less and practice his art more. A piece of advice many of us need. I'd ask how much you practiced, how long a typical session was but again- it'd only be used as ammo against you. Your forbidden to write about personal experiences. addon> You don't need to provide no stinkin proof. You've got old John Chang videos. yeah yeah.

cool, so what miles markers along the way are there? Any that you've experienced? ie What real things, not placebos, do you get out of it? <calculates bot answer> we're not allowed to tell you.

wasn't thinking in terms of trickery. I was thinking of terms of what it means to you. John could do it, so maybe one day you could do it? Is that why its the video is important to you? To be like John Chang? Like, how much celibacy would you be willing to do, to be able to light up a small led bulb?

I was listening to a Tara Brach podcast. She had 2 funny jokes on it. Lets see if I remember them. A man walks into a bakery and starts screaming at the baker. 'We ordered a cake to celebrate our store's new bigger location and instead got a cake saying 'Rest in Peace'''. The baker thought about it and said 'I'm sorry but that's better then the cake we sent to the funeral parlor. It said 'Congratulation on your New Location'. rats can't remember the 1st one. got it. A father who wasn't too tech savvy noticed his son ended a text to him with LOL. He immediately thought it meant Lots of Love. He thought what a great sentiment and from then on ended all his texts with LOL. The man's sister was going through a divorce, he sent her a text, 'We support you in this difficult time, LOL'. He texted a sick friend, 'Hope you feel better, LOL'. He did this for a year, and wondered why people rarely texted him back. https://www.tarabrach.com/power-awake-awareness/

Yes, I realize that. What do you, individual, writing as MegaMind think the video proves? ie 'What is it evidence of? For example what level/how many years to lift.. um.. 6 ounces or light things on fire? Do you know? Is there anyone you can ask? ' Are you going to come back and tell me it was 'shot in color', to avoid answering the questions?

What is it evidence of? For example what level/how many years to lift.. um.. 6 ounces or light things on fire? Do you know? Is there anyone you can ask?

Oh, just fuck off. <kidding> but if you felt something maybe its a step in the right direction. There's a whole practice of Metta meditations that work on the heart area. Google it. Here's a link to one of my favorite meditation teachers doing one- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Jb72-QgXOc Many teachers start big, loving everyone and everything. Brahm starts small, opening your heart to anything you already have a connection to. Like- https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/ajahn-brahm-metta-kitten/ Since emotions are 'in the mind' here's a fun talk he had, very humorous, and humor is one of most useful and pleasant forms of emotion. http://podcast.bswa.org/e/smart-thinking-boy-wonder-ajahn-brahmavamso/ His dharma talk, Smart Thinking, Boy Wonder. For some reason, Batman been on my mind alot. An ultimate archetype for a man pulling himself up.

double post . mostly For the very spiritual, money beyond needs, is a distraction, as are material goods. At some point we can become it's possession. unless your Batman. confession, i just bought a titanium Wayne tech watch. https://www.undone.com/en/watch-detail/undone-batman-knight Thus my values are suspect.

Ode to money; the lubricant of barter, the measuring stick of perceived value. We create it, name it & play with it. A useful idea, worthy servant and poor master. It Is because we think it Is. And if you don't, I have a nice P.O Box in Brooklyn for you to send it to. Even Einstein had problems with money. In 1904 working as a patent clerk he met my great great uncle, Manny the accountant who explained it to him. Using language Einstein would understand Manny wrote this: M = E C^2. Which translates into Money equals Energy times Consumption Now and Future. You see how energy is at the heart of money? And what is energy? The potential for work. In humans terms Energy makes our lives better and more enjoyable. Flip the equation and we see E= M/C^2. Present and future consumption divides our M and cuts our Energy. Equations must be balanced and choices made. Still one can break out of the zero sum game through leverage. Creativity, creating new resources or combining old ones in new ways allow more work done with the same effort. This is how the wise tap the source of money.

Too bad, I'd love to hear about someone who's done his seminars lately. See what its like, what might have changed over 20 years. to the OP. Kunlun mountains are legendary for the different cultivation schools that sprung up around there. I forget if it was Kunlun that was won by a Taoist in a contest (card game?) against the emperor.

Glad you've joined. , You'll find we have high expectations and low standards. Look forward to your contributions.

It's easy to know what I want. Not hard to develop a plan that gets me there. But to act on it, is to fight against the gravity of my personality. To gain an escape velocity that keeps me from being pulled back by laziness and desires. The pull of pleasure.

Its my impression that transmuting and transforming sexual energy is pretty high level skill on a long term traditional practice. Many pre-requisites and no simple solutions. Instead of chi gung and the like, you may want to look at modern cognitive behavioral therapies. I'm reading The Liberated Mind, and its all about decreasing the power of thought patterns. Not fighting them, but being able to have the thought and notice it then ignore it. Course sex is more then a thought, its a deep biological urge. Still you've tied the thought to a specific act. Cognitive Behavioral theory would have you, not fight or flee, but see it and keep going, do something else.

Life is alot like a vacuum cleaner. When it seems to suck the most, it may be doing the most cleaning. The attachments are there for a reason. Use them properly and don't be to quick to let them go.

If it wasn't brutal, everyone would do it also you're in the right place to get in epractice. which is much easier then real life, cause (e)here we have to do is (e)ignore or (e)move on.

haven't added to this in awhile. (https://www.cracked.com/blog/10-things-everyone-should-know-going-into-next-decade/) He's not always right but his questions and solutions are always thought provoking. 10 Things Everyone Should Know Going Into The Next Decade David Wong 12/19 Well that decade only got stupider as it went along. Maybe the next one will be better? Here are 10 things to keep in mind from now until 2030. If we all go in prepared, I'm confident this next batch of years will go off without a hitch. 1 The Technology That Will Utterly Dominate In 2030 Is Barely A Thing Right Now In early 2010, only the most obnoxious 20% of us had smartphones. Today, realizing that I've left the house without my phone induces the same panic as showing up at a party and suddenly realizing I've shown up at a party. What fringe nerd tech will totally control our lives 10 years from now? Cybernetic implants? Bitcoin? Don't bother trying to guess. Remember, it's not the tech itself that matters, but the horrible new uses we organically discover, as well as the way cultural norms respond and adapt. Looking at your phone in the middle of a real-life conversation used to be unthinkable. And if we stretch this idea out to 20 years, good god. In early 2000, the term "social media" didn't exist. Neither did "podcast" or "blog." Hell, only 43% of Americans had internet connections. So a time traveler from 2040 would at times sound like you trying to explain to a non-internet user in 2000 what the "Subscribe to PewDiePie" meme is or why a guy quoted it before committing a mass shooting that left 51 people dead. We're talking layers upon layers of change. Stupid, stupid change. 2 Go Right Ahead And Ignore Everyone's Predictions At this point a decade ago, headlines about Bill Cosby were all "Comedy legend delivers significant message" and "Comedian Bill Cosby leads parade." Donald Trump was preparing to shoot Season 10 of The Apprentice. "Disney buys Star Wars" would have sounded like the premise of a bad SNL sketch, and "Russians secretly interfere with U.S. election" would have sounded like the plot of a '70s Cold War potboiler starring Gene Hackman. The bestselling nonfiction book of 2010 was Why Prince Is An Immortal Being. Yeah, some stuff was easy to predict, like how China would continue its rise, mass shootings would still be a thing, or how Syria would blow up. But the biggest cultural shifts always come bursting out of the ground like in Tremors. Lots of what now exists only as rumbles and rumors (there were whispers about Bill Cosby's behavior going back decades) will seem glaringly obvious to everyone in 2030. Lots of what we assume to be true today will be referenced as crass jokes by our older, crankier selves. Related: 26 Hilariously Inaccurate Predictions About The Future 3 Trends Never Simply Continue On Their Present Course It's early 2010. "Obamacare" was just signed into law. Democrats are in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, and have a Supreme Court that will legalize gay marriage and let their new healthcare law stand. This is all after a wave of articles about the total collapse of the Republican Party, and how their only way back to relevance will be to purge the crazies and become reasonable adults. The thinking at the time was that they'd need their own Obama -- someone young, smart, optimistic, inspirational, focused on the future. After all, it's not like progress can go backward or something. Oh wait, it totally can. Yeah, the lines on the graph never keep going the same direction. The culture is a series of reactions and backlash that is impossible to project with any accuracy. Who out there guessed that young people would just ... stop having sex? Or that the biggest shows on TV would see much lower ratings than then-unknown video game streamers? Go back 10 more years, and things get confusing and darkly hilarious. The big worry in 1999 popular culture was that Clinton-era economic prosperity was robbing white male professionals of their innate need for meaning (Fight Club, American Beauty, The Matrix). "Sure, we all have good jobs, nice homes and plenty of money, but at what cost? Can't this much easy comfort be a bad thing?" No one could have known 9/11 was around the corner, of course. In the same way, you can't possibly guess the huge thing that's coming to fuck things up in a few years. Hell, even if someone came back and told us, we'd probably just be confused. (I'm imagining 2010 me trying and failing to wrap my head around "Gamergate" or "incels.") 4 The Future May Not Affect You As Much As You Think I spent the supposed economic boom of the late '90s working multiple minimum-wage jobs at once while living in an apartment with a cockroach problem. My biggest paydays, on the other hand, came a couple of years after the worldwide economy collapsed in late 2008. My career on the internet began right after the dot-com bubble burst and internet careers were declared impossible. It was only after reading endless headlines about how no one was buying books anymore that I got a book deal. That's how it works; your future and "the future" are two totally different things. No trend applies to everyone, or even most of the people, and that means every headline you read about where the world is headed might be nothing more than trivia to you. You'll fall in love while reading articles about how we're living in an age of loneliness, or lose your job in an industry everyone insists is thriving. Maybe you'll find a way to overcome your anxiety and depression a month after an asteroid has destroyed the East Coast. Who knows? In fact ... Related: 7 Insane Problems We'll Have To Deal With In The Future 5 None Of Your Current Plans Will Work Out How You Think How excited was 2010-era Nokia about owning 40% of the booming cellphone market? Or Blackberry, with their 20%? If gigantic corporations can get sucked out to sea by sudden shifting currents, so can you. But trust me, this can be a good thing. Sometimes the sharks are on the beach. The key is that it's not just that the world will thwart your plans. Sometimes it's the world showing you that your plan was horribly misguided from the start. Maybe the day-to-day of your dream career has nothing to do with what you loved about it (ask doctors how much time they spend actually healing sick people). Maybe you'll completely flip on what exactly you want out of life. Maybe ... 6 You Even Won't Be The Same Person 10 Years From Now You may think you know this on some level. You've been around old people; you know they weren't born grumbling about their lawn and eating at buffets and shambling around with a decorative cane that has a little sword hidden in it. But it's hard to look back at the child you were 10 years ago and really comprehend that you are the child to the 2030 edition of you. We kind of secretly think at all times that we've fully become the person we're going to be. But you are going to change in ways you wouldn't like if you knew about them ahead of time. There isn't much you can do to stop it. Maturing always feels less like change and more like learning about yourself, unearthing the person who was always there. You don't know how you'll react in a crisis until the crisis comes. You don't know what you'll do with power over another person until you have it. You don't know what kind of parent you'll be until you have kids. My friends, some of these answers will be startling. Related: 4 Signs Of Aging No One Warns You About 7 Some Of The Beliefs You Now Hold Dear Will Look Ridiculous This doesn't have to be a bad thing, and there's nothing sadder than someone who refuses to grow. But some of the truths you refuse to even question today will not only turn out to not be true, but will look horrifying in retrospect. You will find out some truths about your friends, parents, family, heroes, and enemies that will make you realize you never really knew them at all. You'll find that some of the causes you stood up for were corrupt, that you obsessed over minutia while ignoring what really mattered. You will do some of the things you used to harshly judge others for, and pray that the world is more lenient now than you were back then. 8 Oh, And You Will Sometimes Curse The Person You Are Now I assume some of you do this already, wishing you could go back in time and kick your own ass. Not just for what you did ("Why in the hell did you smoke that first cigarette? Did you think it would make you look cool???"), but what you failed to do -- the plans you didn't make, the crises you didn't prepare for. But it's hard to grasp that Future You will feel the exact same way. ("Why didn't you quit smoking while your lungs were still healthy enough to recover? What did you think would happen???") And having been through a few decades now, I can tell you that yeah, that never changes. The personality traits you like the most about yourself now will make Future You cringe. A whole lot of your present bravery will turn out to be youthful ignorance of consequences. You will someday groan at the thought of what 2020 you took for granted, all the chances you wasted. I mean, you will if you're lucky. Improving a thing means the past version now sucks in comparison. The worst outcome is a Future You who mourns the awesome person you once were. If you play your cards right, if you try to fix one tiny thing every day, your reward will be that Future You will scramble to erase all evidence that Current You ever existed. Related: 5 Things People Mistake For Being Grown-Up 9 It Will Go Much, Much Faster Than The Previous 10 Years I know this seems contradictory, considering this whole list is about how the entire geography of your life can and will change in just ten years. This is just the way your brain perceives time. This ten years will be a smaller portion of your life experience than the previous ten. That's why I can absolutely guarantee you that at some point, you'll have some version of this conversation: "Hey, I noticed that sweater I borrowed a little while back is still in my closet, do you want it?" "You borrowed it six years ago! What does it matter now, after a volcano has destroyed the entire American Southwest?" A decade sounds like forever. A 10-year prison sentence would sound like a lifetime. Yet problems that seem temporary now will still be hanging around then. The habits you're writing off to immaturity will still be going strong. Projects you're determined to complete soon will still be sitting there, mocking you. 10 The World Won't Have Ended (And May Not Even Be Worse) If you undid the past 10 years, you'd be reversing marriage equality in the USA (that ruling came in 2015), kicking 20 million Americans off their health insurance, throwing a few hundred million people worldwide back into extreme poverty, and trans rights would barely be in the conversation. Problems sneak up on us, but so do solutions. That's why the world is still here. It'll be the same for your own life. The thing that will wind up saving your ass seven years from now might just turn up randomly on your doorstep. The thing that caused your ass to need saving may have arrived the same way. There may be friends you haven't met yet, talents you haven't discovered yet. You may lose burdens you didn't even know you were carrying. Some things you're dreading may wind up being no big deal, and some of your deepest fears may turn out to be based on silly myths and childish misunderstandings. Who knows? But if you stick around long enough to find out, you've pretty much already won.

addon <David Wong aka Jason Pargin's articles and there many gems, are at http://www.cracked.com/members/David+Wong/ > 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person By David Wong December 17, 2012 2013, motherfuckers. Yeah! LET'S DO THIS. "Do what?" you ask. I DON'T KNOW. LET'S FIGURE THAT OUT TOGETHER, MOTHERFUCKERS. Feel free to stop reading this if your career is going great, you're thrilled with your life and you're happy with your relationships. Enjoy the rest of your day, friend, this article is not for you. You're doing a great job, we're all proud of you. So you don't feel like you wasted your click, here's a picture of Lenny Kravitz wearing a gigantic scarf. For the rest of you, I want you to try something: Name five impressive things about yourself. Write them down or just shout them out loud to the room. But here's the catch -- you're not allowed to list anything you are (i.e., I'm a nice guy, I'm honest), but instead can only list things that you do (i.e., I just won a national chess tournament, I make the best chili in Massachusetts). If you found that difficult, well, this is for you, and you are going to fucking hate hearing it. My only defense is that this is what I wish somebody had said to me around 1995 or so. #6. The World Only Cares About What It Can Get from You Let's say that the person you love the most has just been shot. He or she is lying in the street, bleeding and screaming. A guy rushes up and says, "Step aside." He looks over your loved one's bullet wound and pulls out a pocket knife -- he's going to operate right there in the street. You ask, "Are you a doctor?" The guy says, "No." You say, "But you know what you're doing, right? You're an old Army medic, or ..." At this point the guy becomes annoyed. He tells you that he is a nice guy, he is honest, he is always on time. He tells you that he is a great son to his mother and has a rich life full of fulfilling hobbies, and he boasts that he never uses foul language. Confused, you say, "How does any of that fucking matter when my (wife/husband/best friend/parent) is lying here bleeding! I need somebody who knows how to operate on bullet wounds! Can you do that or not?!?" Now the man becomes agitated -- why are you being shallow and selfish? Do you not care about any of his other good qualities? Didn't you just hear him say that he always remembers his girlfriend's birthday? In light of all of the good things he does, does it really matter if he knows how to perform surgery? In that panicked moment, you will take your bloody hands and shake him by the shoulders, screaming, "Yes, I'm saying that none of that other shit matters, because in this specific situation, I just need somebody who can stop the bleeding, you crazy fucking asshole." So here is my terrible truth about the adult world: You are in that very situation every single day. Only you are the confused guy with the pocket knife. All of society is the bleeding gunshot victim. If you want to know why society seems to shun you, or why you seem to get no respect, it's because society is full of people who need things. They need houses built, they need food to eat, they need entertainment, they need fulfilling sexual relationships. You arrived at the scene of that emergency, holding your pocket knife, by virtue of your birth -- the moment you came into the world, you became part of a system designed purely to see to people's needs. Either you will go about the task of seeing to those needs by learning a unique set of skills, or the world will reject you, no matter how kind, giving and polite you are. You will be poor, you will be alone, you will be left out in the cold. Does that seem mean, or crass, or materialistic? What about love and kindness -- don't those things matter? Of course. As long as they result in you doing things for people that they can't get elsewhere. For you see ... #5. The Hippies Were Wrong Here is the greatest scene in the history of movies (WARNING: EXTREME NSFW LANGUAGE): For those of you who can't watch videos, it's the famous speech Alec Baldwin gives in the cinematic masterpiece Glengarry Glenn Ross. Baldwin's character -- whom you assume is the villain -- addresses a room full of dudes and tears them a new asshole, telling them that they're all about to be fired unless they "close" the sales they've been assigned: "Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Good father? Fuck you! Go home and play with your kids. If you want to work here, close." It's brutal, rude and borderline sociopathic, and also it is an honest and accurate expression of what the world is going to expect from you. The difference is that, in the real world, people consider it so wrong to talk to you that way that they've decided it's better to simply let you keep failing. That scene changed my life. I'd program my alarm clock to play it for me every morning if I knew how. Alec Baldwin was nominated for an Oscar for that movie and that's the only scene he's in. As smarter people have pointed out, the genius of that speech is that half of the people who watch it think that the point of the scene is "Wow, what must it be like to have such an asshole boss?" and the other half think, "Fuck yes, let's go out and sell some goddamned real estate!" Or, as the Last Psychiatrist blog put it: "If you were in that room, some of you would understand this as a work, but feed off the energy of the message anyway, welcome the coach's cursing at you, 'this guy is awesome!'; while some of you would take it personally, this guy is a jerk, you have no right to talk to me like that, or -- the standard maneuver when narcissism is confronted with a greater power -- quietly seethe and fantasize about finding information that will out him as a hypocrite. So satisfying." That excerpt is from an insightful critique of "hipsters" and why they seem to have so much trouble getting jobs (that doesn't begin to do it justice, go read the whole thing), and the point is that the difference in those two attitudes -- bitter vs. motivated -- largely determines whether or not you'll succeed in the world. For instance, some people want to respond to that speech with Tyler Durden's line from Fight Club: "You are not your job." But, well, actually, you totally are. Granted, your "job" and your means of employment might not be the same thing, but in both cases you are nothing more than the sum total of your useful skills. For instance, being a good mother is a job that requires a skill. It's something a person can do that is useful to other members of society. But make no mistake: Your "job" -- the useful thing you do for other people -- is all you are. There is a reason why surgeons get more respect than comedy writers. There is a reason mechanics get more respect than unemployed hipsters. There is a reason your job will become your label if your death makes the news ("NFL Linebacker Dies in Murder/Suicide"). Tyler said, "You are not your job," but he also founded and ran a successful soap company and became the head of an international social and political movement. He was totally his job. Or think of it this way: Remember when Chick-fil-A came out against gay marriage? And how despite the protests, the company continues to sell millions of sandwiches every day? It's not because the country agrees with them; it's because they do their job of making delicious sandwiches well. And that's all that matters. You don't have to like it. I don't like it when it rains on my birthday. It rains anyway. Clouds form and precipitation happens. People have needs and thus assign value to the people who meet them. These are simple mechanisms of the universe and they do not respond to our wishes. If you protest that you're not a shallow capitalist materialist and that you disagree that money is everything, I can only say: Who said anything about money? You're missing the larger point. #4. What You Produce Does Not Have to Make Money, But It Does Have to Benefit People Let's try a non-money example so you don't get hung up on that. The demographic that Cracked writes for is heavy on 20-something males. So on our message boards and in my many inboxes I read several dozen stories a year from miserable, lonely guys who insist that women won't come near them despite the fact that they are just the nicest guys in the world. I can explain what is wrong with this mindset, but it would probably be better if I let Alec Baldwin explain it: In this case, Baldwin is playing the part of the attractive women in your life. They won't put it as bluntly as he does -- society has trained us not to be this honest with people -- but the equation is the same. "Nice guy? Who gives a shit? If you want to work here, close." So, what do you bring to the table? Because the Zooey Deschanel lookalike in the bookstore that you've been daydreaming about moisturizes her face for an hour every night and feels guilty when she eats anything other than salad for lunch. She's going to be a surgeon in 10 years. What do you do? "What, so you're saying that I can't get girls like that unless I have a nice job and make lots of money?" No, your brain jumps to that conclusion so you have an excuse to write off everyone who rejects you by thinking that they're just being shallow and selfish. I'm asking what do you offer? Are you smart? Funny? Interesting? Talented? Ambitious? Creative? OK, now what do you do to demonstrate those attributes to the world? Don't say that you're a nice guy -- that's the bare minimum. Pretty girls have guys being nice to them 36 times a day. The patient is bleeding in the street. Do you know how to operate or not? "Well, I'm not sexist or racist or greedy or shallow or abusive! Not like those other douchebags!" I'm sorry, I know that this is hard to hear, but if all you can do is list a bunch of faults you don't have, then back the fuck away from the patient. There's a witty, handsome guy with a promising career ready to step in and operate. Does that break your heart? OK, so now what? Are you going to mope about it, or are you going to learn how to do surgery? It's up to you, but don't complain about how girls fall for jerks; they fall for those jerks because those jerks have other things they can offer. "But I'm a great listener!" Are you? Because you're willing to sit quietly in exchange for the chance to be in the proximity of a pretty girl (and spend every second imagining how soft her skin must be)? Well guess what, there's another guy in her life who also knows how to do that, and he can play the guitar. Saying that you're a nice guy is like a restaurant whose only selling point is that the food doesn't make you sick. You're like a new movie whose title is This Movie Is in English, and its tagline is "The actors are clearly visible." I think this is why you can be a "nice guy" and still feel terrible about yourself. Specifically ... #3. You Hate Yourself Because You Don't Do Anything "So, what, you're saying that I should pick up a book on how to get girls?" Only if step one in the book is "Start making yourself into the type of person girls want to be around." Because that's the step that gets skipped -- it's always "How can I get a job?" and not "How can I become the type of person employers want?" It's "How can I get pretty girls to like me?" instead of "How can I become the type of person that pretty girls like?" See, because that second one could very well require giving up many of your favorite hobbies and paying more attention to your appearance, and God knows what else. You might even have to change your personality. "But why can't I find someone who just likes me for me?" you ask. The answer is because humans need things. The victim is bleeding, and all you can do is look down and complain that there aren't more gunshot wounds that just fix themselves? Everyone who watched that video instantly became a little happier, although not all for the same reasons. Can you do that for people? Why not? What's stopping you from strapping on your proverbial thong and cape and taking to your proverbial stage and flapping your proverbial penis at people? That guy knows the secret to winning at human life: that doing ... whatever you call that ... was better than not doing it. "But I'm not good at anything!" Well, I have good news -- throw enough hours of repetition at it and you can get sort of good at anything. I was the world's shittiest writer when I was an infant. I was only slightly better at 25. But while I was failing miserably at my career, I wrote in my spare time for eight straight years, an article a week, before I ever made real money off it. It took 13 years for me to get good enough to make the New York Times best-seller list. It took me probably 20,000 hours of practice to sand the edges off my sucking. Don't like the prospect of pouring all of that time into a skill? Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the sheer act of practicing will help you come out of your shell -- I got through years of tedious office work because I knew that I was learning a unique skill on the side. People quit because it takes too long to see results, because they can't figure out that the process is the result. The bad news is that you have no other choice. If you want to work here, close. Because in my non-expert opinion, you don't hate yourself because you have low self-esteem, or because other people were mean to you. You hate yourself because you don't do anything. Not even you can just "love you for you" -- that's why you're miserable and sending me private messages asking me what I think you should do with your life. Do the math: How much of your time is spent consuming things other people made (TV, music, video games, websites) versus making your own? Only one of those adds to your value as a human being. And if you hate hearing this and are responding with something you heard as a kid that sounds like "It's what's on the inside that matters!" then I can only say ... #2. What You Are Inside Only Matters Because of What It Makes You Do Being in the business I'm in, I know dozens of aspiring writers. They think of themselves as writers, they introduce themselves as writers at parties, they know that deep inside, they have the heart of a writer. The only thing they're missing is that minor final step, where they actually fucking write things. But really, does that matter? Is "writing things" all that important when deciding who is and who is not truly a "writer"? For the love of God, yes. See, there's a common defense to everything I've said so far, and to every critical voice in your life. It's the thing your ego is saying to you in order to prevent you from having to do the hard work of improving: "I know I'm a good person on the inside." It may also be phrased as "I know who I am" or "I just have to be me." Don't get me wrong; who you are inside is everything -- the guy who built a house for his family from scratch did it because of who he was inside. Every bad thing you've ever done has started with a bad impulse, some thought ricocheting around inside your skull until you had to act on it. And every good thing you've done is the same -- "who you are inside" is the metaphorical dirt from which your fruit grows. But here's what everyone needs to know, and what many of you can't accept: "You" are nothing but the fruit. Nobody cares about your dirt. "Who you are inside" is meaningless aside from what it produces for other people. Inside, you have great compassion for poor people. Great. Does that result in you doing anything about it? Do you hear about some terrible tragedy in your community and say, "Oh, those poor children. Let them know that they are in my thoughts"? Because fuck you if so -- find out what they need and help provide it. A hundred million people watched that Kony video, virtually all of whom kept those poor African children "in their thoughts." What did the collective power of those good thoughts provide? Jack fucking shit. Children die every day because millions of us tell ourselves that caring is just as good as doing. It's an internal mechanism controlled by the lazy part of your brain to keep you from actually doing work. How many of you are walking around right now saying, "She/he would love me if she/he only knew what an interesting person I am!" Really? How do all of your interesting thoughts and ideas manifest themselves in the world? What do they cause you to do? If your dream girl or guy had a hidden camera that followed you around for a month, would they be impressed with what they saw? Remember, they can't read your mind -- they can only observe. Would they want to be a part of that life? Because all I'm asking you to do is apply the same standard to yourself that you apply to everyone else. Don't you have that annoying Christian friend whose only offer to help anyone ever is to "pray for them"? Doesn't it drive you nuts? I'm not even commenting on whether or not prayer works; it doesn't change the fact that they chose the one type of help that doesn't require them to get off the sofa. They abstain from every vice, they think clean thoughts, their internal dirt is as pure as can be, but what fruit grows from it? And they should know this better than anybody -- I stole the fruit metaphor from the Bible. Jesus said something to the effect of "a tree is judged by its fruit" over and over and over. Granted, Jesus never said, "If you want to work here, close." No, he said, "Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." The people didn't react well to being told that, just as the salesmen didn't react well to Alec Baldwin telling them that they needed to grow some balls or resign themselves to shining his shoes. Which brings us to the final point ... #1. Everything Inside You Will Fight Improvement The human mind is a miracle, and you will never see it spring more beautifully into action than when it is fighting against evidence that it needs to change. Your psyche is equipped with layer after layer of defense mechanisms designed to shoot down anything that might keep things from staying exactly where they are -- ask any addict. So even now, some of you reading this are feeling your brain bombard you with knee-jerk reasons to reject it. From experience, I can say that these seem to come in the form of ... *Intentionally Interpreting Any Criticism as an Insult "Who is he to call me lazy and worthless! A good person would never talk to me like this! He wrote this whole thing just to feel superior to me and to make me feel bad about my life! I'm going to think up my own insult to even the score!" *Focusing on the Messenger to Avoid Hearing the Message "Who is THIS guy to tell ME how to live? Oh, like he's so high and mighty! It's just some dumb writer on the Internet! I'm going to go dig up something on him that reassures me that he's stupid, and that everything he's saying is stupid! This guy is so pretentious, it makes me puke! I watched his old rap video on YouTube and thought his rhymes sucked!" *Focusing on the Tone to Avoid Hearing the Content "I'm going to dig through here until I find a joke that is offensive when taken out of context, and then talk and think only about that! I've heard that a single offensive word can render an entire book invisible!" *Revising Your Own History "Things aren't so bad! I know that I was threatening suicide last month, but I'm feeling better now! It's entirely possible that if I just keep doing exactly what I'm doing, eventually things will work out! I'll get my big break, and if I keep doing favors for that pretty girl, eventually she'll come around!" *Pretending That Any Self-Improvement Would Somehow Be Selling Out Your True Self "Oh, so I guess I'm supposed to get rid of all of my manga and instead go to the gym for six hours a day and get a spray tan like those Jersey Shore douchebags? Because THAT IS THE ONLY OTHER OPTION." And so on. Remember, misery is comfortable. It's why so many people prefer it. Happiness takes effort. Also, courage. It's incredibly comforting to know that as long as you don't create anything in your life, then nobody can attack the thing you created. It's so much easier to just sit back and criticize other people's creations. This movie is stupid. That couple's kids are brats. That other couple's relationship is a mess. That rich guy is shallow. This restaurant sucks. This Internet writer is an asshole. I'd better leave a mean comment demanding that the website fire him. See, I created something. Oh, wait, did I forget to mention that part? Yeah, whatever you try to build or create -- be it a poem, or a new skill, or a new relationship -- you will find yourself immediately surrounded by non-creators who trash it. Maybe not to your face, but they'll do it. Your drunk friends do not want you to get sober. Your fat friends do not want you to start a fitness regimen. Your jobless friends do not want to see you embark on a career. Just remember, they're only expressing their own fear, since trashing other people's work is another excuse to do nothing. "Why should I create anything when the things other people create suck? I would totally have written a novel by now, but I'm going to wait for something good, I don't want to write the next Twilight!" As long as they never produce anything, it will forever be perfect and beyond reproach. Or if they do produce something, they'll make sure they do it with detached irony. They'll make it intentionally bad to make it clear to everyone else that this isn't their real effort. Their real effort would have been amazing. Not like the shit you made. Read our article comments -- when they get nasty, it's always from the same angle: Cracked needs to fire this columnist. This asshole needs to stop writing. Don't make any more videos. It always boils down to "Stop creating. This is different from what I would have made, and the attention you're getting is making me feel bad about myself." Don't be that person. If you are that person, don't be that person any more. This is what's making people hate you. This is what's making you hate yourself. So how about this: one year. The end of 2013, that's our deadline. Or a year from whenever you read this. While other people are telling you "Let's make a New Year's resolution to lose 15 pounds this year!" I'm going to say let's pledge to do fucking anything -- add any skill, any improvement to your human tool set, and get good enough at it to impress people. Don't ask me what -- hell, pick something at random if you don't know. Take a class in karate, or ballroom dancing, or pottery. Learn to bake. Build a birdhouse. Learn massage. Learn a programming language. Film a porno. Adopt a superhero persona and fight crime. Start a YouTube vlog. Write for Cracked. But the key is, I don't want you to focus on something great that you're going to make happen to you ("I'm going to find a girlfriend, I'm going to make lots of money ..."). I want you to purely focus on giving yourself a skill that would make you ever so slightly more interesting and valuable to other people. "I don't have the money to take a cooking class." Then fucking Google "how to cook." They've even filtered out the porn now, it's easier than ever. Damn it, you have to kill those excuses. Or they will kill you. The 10 Most Important Things They Didn't Teach You In School By David Wong June 21, 2010  By the time you're 30, you'll be hit with the crushing truth of just how much the grownups didn't teach you when you were in school. And, while liberals and conservatives haggle over whether public schools need more funding or more lessons on the Ten Commandments, we think all can agree there are some very basic, useful things that our children really, really should know. Therefore when Cracked starts its line of private schools, know that your kids won't graduate without having passed... #10. Sex Ed (for Girls): How to Spot a Douchebag  Young ladies, you're in your teens now and already you have no doubt run into some guys who are being suspiciously nice to you. Likely you have figured out that in many cases, this has nothing to do with them being nice guys and everything to do with them desperately wanting you to touch their boner. What you may not realize is that over the next few years, a string of rejections will cause many of these men to start hating you. Some of them hate you already, because they grew up hating their mothers and it kind of carries over. Boys are like that. Now, some of these men will then become members of the Pick Up Artist Community, also known as the Seduction Community. This is a loose club of guys who see females as a collection of walking masturbation aids. They have websites and seminars and chat rooms where they trade tips on how to manipulate you into having sex with them. They believe the male/female relationship is adversarial in nature, and that sex is a way of conquering you. Thus many of their techniques work by playing on your insecurities, like "the Neg," where they first engage you in conversation, then drop subtle criticisms that will undermine your self-esteem and subconsciously make you want to gain their approval (by letting them touch your boobs). Believe it or not, it works--if you're not ready for it. This is just one type of douchebag; this class will cover several varieties. And, while we're not telling you not to sleep with these men, the lesson you will learn from this course is that they will put the same effort into making you happy as they do the semen-encrusted sock under their bed. Chapters Include: I. Types of Douchebag;
II. How to Tell When He's Lying;
III. Why Your Male Friends Almost Certainly Want to Have Sex With You;
IV. Why There is Nothing to be Gained by Showing Your Boobs to a Camera. #9. Sex Ed (for Boys): Why Porn is Not a Good Way to Learn About Sex  Young men, you're in your teens now and that means already you've seen several thousand hours of Internet porn. Many of you will soon engage in your first sexual encounter, having no practical instruction to guide you beyond those videos. Unfortunately, what you see on PornTube represents only what certain men wish sex was like. We're not saying that you'll never meet a woman who enjoys, say, having semen squirted into her eyes, or having sex on camera with five strangers in the back of a decorated van. What we're saying is that just about everything you see in those videos--including the ones that claim to be hidden camera or "reality" porn--is there specifically because real women are not like that. These videos fill a gap between fantasy and reality. So how do you figure out what to do when you're finally alone with a lady? Well, we can give you the basics, but the rest will be up to you. Chapters Include: I. It's a Vagina, Not a Slab of Meat You're Trying to Tenderize;
II. Your Penis Size is Probably Perfectly Fine;
III. Why Your First Time is Going to be a Humiliating Disaster, No Matter What You Do;
IV. Most Women Are Not Sexually Stimulated by Spanking;
V. Every Woman is Different and You Will Only Learn What She Likes Via Practice;
VI. That's OK, Because the Practice is Awesome. #8. Phys. Ed: Practical Self-Defense  We're calling this course "Practical Self-Defense" but a more accurate title would be, "How To Get Away From Somebody Who is Trying to Mug or Rape You." Yes, "Get Away." Some of you guys who grew up on The Matrix still fantasize about beating the shit out of a street full of thugs in a fight that looks like a choreographed dance. This class will not teach you how to do that. No class will teach you how to do that.
Will not happen. Oh, there are guys out there capable of kicking ass. They're called criminals. They're good at fighting because they have poor impulse control and anger management, and thus are constantly getting into fights. If you, on the other hand, are going to be civilized and successful parents and homeowners and taxpayers, the odds are overwhelming you will not ever be good at fighting. This fact is thus reflected in our curriculum. Chapters Include: I. Why Your Wallet is Not Worth Dying For;
II. Why Guns and Knives Are Not Awesome (Includes Visual Aids Depicting Wounds of Gnarled Strips of Exposed Fat, Tendons and Skin, Plus Graphic Descriptions of Life in a Wheelchair);
III. How to Break Off an Argument With a Hobo Before He Stabs You;
IV. Why You Can't Reason With a Screaming Drunk;
V. Why Believing Action Movies Are Real Will Get You Killed;
VI. How to Tell When That Guy Walking Toward You is Concealing a Weapon.
 #7. Industrial Arts: Emergency Repairs  This does not require a great deal of elaboration. Quite simply, there are certain things a person who is about to be living on their own needs to know how to do. Building a goddamned birdhouse is not one of them. Chapters Include: I. How to Patch and Paint a Wall So You Can Get Your Deposit Back From Your Landlord;
II. Identifying Which Wires in Your House Will Kill You if You Touch Them;
III. What to do When You Wake Up to Find Your Toilet/Refrigerator/Hot Water Heater/Air Conditioner/Sink is Puking Water Onto Your Floor;
IV. When to Call the Repair Guy;
V. How to Figure Out if the Repair Guy is Screwing You;
VI. Foreign Objects You're Going to Try to Put in the Microwave at Some Point so Let's Just Get it Out of Your System Now. #6. Business: Success = Meeting the Right People  All of those successful people you see around town, with their convertibles and huge televisions? Approximately 100 percent of them got where they are because they had three things. All three are absolutely essential, but one of them is almost never mentioned. They are: * Talent
* Hard Work
* Randomly Meeting the Right People and Not Pissing Them Off The autobiographies of famous people will do everything they can to downplay that third part, because it has the element of sheer luck. People get offended when you mention it, because they think it somehow undermines the first two. But remember, we said you need all three. For instance, let's take maybe the most successful movie actor of all time, Harrison Ford. He farted around Hollywood for nine years, taking bit parts without anything major ever coming his way. Clearly talented, very hard-working. Yet not once did anybody look at him and say, "This guy will sell several billion dollars' worth of tickets and action figures some day!" He was just another ambitious, pretty face, in a city full of them. He got so fed up, he quit acting and became a carpenter.
 There's a parallel world without this man as Han Solo, and we don't want to live there. Then one day he got hired to install cabinets in the home of a guy named George Lucas. They became friends. That got him the role of Han Solo a few years later. Click the link; that's a true story. Decades earlier another Ford, Henry, was just one of many engineers screwing around with early car engine designs until he became friends with a wealthy businessman named Alexander Malcomson who forked over the money to get Ford Motor Company started. This also works for guys not named Ford; Justin Bieber was one of several hundred thousand teenagers singing on YouTube videos before a former record exec named Scooter Braun clicked on one of his videos by accident and got him a record deal.
But everyone already knew he was an accident. On the other end of the spectrum, you have guys like Edgar Allan Poe, whose legendary poem "The Raven" earned him... nine dollars. He burned so many bridges he wound up basically begging the public for money before dying at 40. At some point Poe probably met his George Lucas, but made such a horrible impression on him the guy wouldn't return his calls.
"Oh, shit, honey, he's at the door! Pretend we're not home! Did he see me?" Chapters include: I. First Impressions are Really Important;
II. Subsequent Impressions Are Also Important;
III. No, You're Not Terrell Owens (aka Why Acting Like a Douchebag is a Bad Investment). #5. Health: How to Stop Throwing Your Money Away on Snake Oil  Go to the drug aisle in your grocery store. In between the pills and the vitamins will be a huge shelf full of herbal supplements that promise to do everything from helping you lose weight to easing joint pain to making your brain work better. And it's all bullshit. All of it. Worse, it's bullshit that we spend $34 billion a year on, almost a third as much as we spend on prescription drugs that actually do something. Just to be clear: Scientists have spent billions in government money carefully testing the effectiveness of this stuff. Their results? No, echinacea can't cure your cold. Gingko doesn't do anything for your brain, glucosamine and chondroitin won't fix your arthritis. Hoodia gordonii won't help you lose weight.
If it were good for you, it probably wouldn't be covered in horrible spikes. Don't get us wrong; we completely realize that lots of the drugs we have now were once naturally occurring in plants and that it is therefore possible that out there, somewhere, is a leaf yet undiscovered by science that will cure your diabetes. But if so, these jerkoffs in the grocery aisle aren't going to be the ones who find it. They're scam artists. They're so sure their supplements don't do anything they don't do any actual quality control to track how much of the supplement is in each pill. They just throw a little bit in there and shrug. Aren't they worried about people accidentally overdosing? No, they're not. They know you can't overdose on a placebo. All they're doing is "curing" ailments that either naturally go away on their own (colds, joint pain) so you wind up falsely attributing the relief to the supplement, or they're claiming to cure conditions that are hard to quantify (see supplements for "alertness" or "stress relief"). Snake oil salesmen have been getting away with that technique for thousands of generations. Students, we're counting on you to make sure that ours is the last. Chapters Include: I. Pharmaceutical Companies Are Dicks, But at Least They Use Scientists;
II. Why Hippies Have Never Discovered a Single Disease Cure;
III. "Homeopathic" is Another Word for Voodoo Bullshit;
IV. Just Go See a Doctor You Big Baby. NOTE: Weight Loss supplements will be explored in-depth in... #4. Health: Why Losing Weight Requires Some Amount of Suffering  First of all, know that some people are naturally thin. They often skip meals just because they forgot to eat, and/or enjoy hobbies that involve burning calories as a byproduct--basketball, cycling, whatever. They'll never be fat and they'll never have to think about it. They're excused from this class.
Take a walk. This course is for the rest of you, who will spend your life fatter than what our society considers ideal, and who will forever be uncomfortable in your own skin as a result. You'll spend many dollars on bullshit exercise equipment that promises to make working out "easy." You'll jump on diet fads, eating a bunless hamburger with a knife and fork one week, eating nothing but cabbage soup the next. Each and every one of these will fail (the success rate for dieters over the long term is close to 0 percent) because they're all based on the utterly false premise that you can lose weight without ever feeling sore or hungry or some other negative sensation. It is not possible. Students, imagine that in front of you is a castle. That's where you want to be. But surrounding that castle is a moat, full of piranha. The only way to get into Sexy Abs Castle is to swim across the moat and let the little fish painfully chew off hunks of fat. The real situation is exactly like that, only the swim will take years.
Sexy Abs Castle is also heavily guarded. Your body will get really mad at you when you try to lose weight, because it thinks you're starving to death. You have to go into any weight loss plan knowing that you will suffer, and just have to man up in preparation for it. Otherwise, just live with it. Being fat isn't the end of the goddamned world. Chapters Include: I. Hunger is Fat Leaving the Body;
II. Eating Three Square Meals a Day Will Absolutely Make You Fat if You Sit in a Chair All Day;
III. Have You Considered Walking Instead of Driving;
IV. How to Dress in Ways That De-Emphasize Your Fatness. NOTE: The above class is a prerequisite for... #3. Home Economics: How to Cook Cheap Food That Won't Kill You  Most of you will gain weight in college. You'll be poor, and cheap food makes you fat, as adding salt and fat is the easiest way to make poor quality food taste good. Ramen noodles, Taco Bell burritos, six-dollar pizzas from Papa John's... all of it is dirt cheap, and all contains way more calories than you're going to burn while sleeping through classes and playing Guitar Hero. Fortunately, there are ways around this if you're willing to put in a little time. As it turns out, spices are also cheap, as are some meats, and dried pasta, and vegetables. You just have to combine them the right way. But no matter what you come up with, it would be extremely difficult to cook something as unhealthy as a Quarter-Pounder Value Meal.
 Chapters Include: I. Pay Attention to Serving Sizes on the Label, They're Laughably Small;
II. Fat Free Versions of Fat Foods Are Terrible, Don't Bother;
III. Seriously, Fat Free Cheese Doesn't Melt;
IV. It's Hard to Screw Up Spaghetti;
V. Why if You Eat Fruity Pebbles for Dinner, You'll be Hungry Again 30 Minutes Later;
VI. If You Make a Pot of Chili and Freeze Bowls of It You'll Totally Have Like Two Months' Worth of Meals There. #2. Political Science: Why Talk Radio is a Terrible Source of Information  Politics are boring, and for the 20 percent or so of you who will spend a lot of time following politics, many of you will do so via entertaining political talk shows on radio or cable. Now, we don't have time to go into the mind-boggling list of idiotic things Glenn Beck has said, and will not laboriously debunk the rantings of the hundreds of other political talk show hosts like him. What you need to understand is that with talk radio and TV, the format itself makes accuracy utterly impossible. It's fairly simple, really. If a political talk show is going to get ratings, it has to have two things in every episode: A. A clear, simple thesis (ie, Liberals Are Destroying America, Corporations Are Destroying America) that continues through every single segment;
B. Up to the minute commentary on current events.
"Things are happening in the world. But more importantly, look at me." You see the problem: These two things are going to sometimes conflict. Even if the thesis of a show is Pie is Awesome, the host is still going to wake up one day and see headlines about a pie recall because some tainted filling killed 173 people. Guess what: he still has to do a show that day about why Pie is Awesome. He will manipulate B to make it fit A, even if he has to lie. He doesn't draw a paycheck otherwise. Likewise, if the big headline tomorrow is that Barack Obama single-handedly fought and slew Lucifer, Glenn Beck still has to do a show about how Obama is an Anti-Christian Communist out to destroy America. That's what his show is about; that's what the listeners tune in for, that's what his advertisers paid for. If he doesn't follow through, his audience will simply turn the dial until they find someone who's willing to tell them what they want to hear. So, because a talk show has to, by necessity, sometimes skew or outright lie about current events in order to maintain the entertainment value of their show, trying to learn about current events by listening to a talk show is like learning physics by watching cartoons. Chapters Include: I. If the Host Compares His Opponents to Communists or Nazis, He is Crazy; II. Why Politics Cannot be Simplified; III. If the Host Uses Derisive Nicknames for His Opponents, He Has Nothing to Teach You. #1. Social Studies: Life is Hard and You Will Die, Get Over It  We're not foolish enough to think one semester of this course can deprogram years of Hollywood bullshit. That's why we make this a daily class, that continues from K through 12. Many of you will get very depressed in your 20s, and some of you will stay that way the rest of your lives. Over the years your garage band will break up, you career dream will fall through, a girl will break your heart, you'll be unhappy with your body, you'll lose your parents, your favorite pet will die, you will endure at least one very terrible injury that requires hospitalization and breaks new boundaries for what kind of pain you thought was possible.
And your childhood memories will be exploited to buy vast amounts of cocaine. Deal with it. The reason why this will lead to depression, where it may not have done so for an equivalent person 200 years ago, is because you were raised on illogical stories where things always work out for the main character for utterly arbitrary reasons. Han Solo can shoot straight, but none of the bad guys can--even though they train more. John McClane beats the terrorists because he has toughness and perseverance--something the bad guys lack, even though they should be equally desperate. If a guy and a girl are right for each other, they always wind up together, careers and geography and personal hang-ups be damned. Here's the problem: these fantasies were created by adults, as a means of escape from the real world. You, however, have been watching them since you were five--for most of us these were our first impressions of how the adult world works, even if on a subconscious level. You had no context to realize they were bullshit. It sounds frivolous, but that doesn't change the fact that some of you reading this will not survive the long process of learning how different the real world is. If it helps, try to remember that you're still one of the one percent of humanity that was born in a time and place where there is such a thing as anesthesia. Chapters Include: I. You Can Die at Any Moment, Get Over It;
II. Required Reading: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy;
III. Roleplay Exercise: Various Scenes from The Road, by Cormac McCarthy;
IV. Yes, It Takes 10,000 Hours to Get Really Good at Something, But At Least You're Not Scavenging Through a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland. 5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)By Jane Jones, David Wong February 17, 2009 If 80s movies taught us anything, it's that at some point you're going to run into a mysterious relic that lets you switch bodies with other people. Would you use it? Would you choose to switch lives with, say, Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie or Dale DeBone? Most people would. But let's say the artifact doesn't let you choose, but will instead switch you randomly with one of the other six billion people on the planet. Virtually nobody will take that deal, for fear they'd switch with some poor villager in Nigeria. So what does that say about us? Well, according to experts, it says almost everything we think about what would make us happy is dead wrong. Let's look at the five things we're most wrong about, with some pictures of adorable animals for good measure. #5. Fame  Go to the little girls' aisle at the department store, if you're not there already. On the shelves you'll see the dominant little girl fantasy isn't Cinderella or even Dora the Explorer. It's Hannah Montana. Playsets come complete with a camera, makeup and a mirror for Hannah to admire herself in. The girls play with that when they're eight, and by 16 they're on MySpace, pouting at the camera in their underwear and watching the friend requests pour in. In a recent survey of high school kids, 51 percent said their ultimate goal was to become famous. This is brand new to humanity; for thousands of years, material goods and security dominated. Now, fame is at the top. Obviously part of the reason is the perception that anybody can get famous these days--reality TV and YouTube have proven that you can become a celebrity for doing not a goddamned thing. But there's another, less obvious factor. And it explains why so many famous people are miserable. So What's the Problem? Experts say where you find kids who desperately want to be famous, you find a history of neglect at home. Parents were either absent completely or, at best, emotionally distant dicks. It turns out the whole surge in aspirations for fame came right along with the explosion of single parents and "broken" homes. Only half of today's children live with their original two parents. You can see how this sad mechanism works in the attention-starved mind. The kid is programmed by biology to love a parent, but the parent doesn't return the love. Fame lets them turn the tables on that arrangement. When you're famous, millions love you, but you don't even know their names. It's purely one-sided. They wait for hours in the cold for your autograph, you barely glance at them on the way to your limo. You get to take their love and wipe your ass with it, the same as your parents did to you. 
"I love you!" "Your deaths would mean nothing to me." But it turns out that kind of massive, paper-thin adoration is a poor substitute. Famous people are four times as likely to commit suicide as the rest of us (Hell, you'd think it'd be higher--everybody reading this has seen more than one of their favorite performers self-destruct). Wait, it Gets Worse... If you're saying that your parents were awesome and that fame still looks pretty freaking cool, well, we're not done. Studies show nothing is more stressful for a human than when their goals are tied to the approval of others. Particularly when those "others" are an enormous crowd of fickle strangers holding you up to a laughably unrealistic ideal built by publicists, thick makeup and heavily Photoshopped magazine covers. You could seek comfort from your circle of friends, only now your friends have been replaced Invasion of the Body Snatcher's-style with hangers-on, vultures, unscrupulous characters and plain dumbasses who only want a piece of the spotlight. . . even if it means selling you out later. For example, have you ever lit up a bong at a party? Were you worried that one of your friends would snap a photo of you, sell it to a tabloid for thousands of dollars and ruin your career? Well become famous, and then try it. #4. Wealth  Let's not bullshit each other. You see those ads on the side of the screen? And at the top? And at the bottom? Go look at one of them. We just made $800, baby. Seriously, they're set up to detect the position of your eyeballs. If you actually click on one, we make enough to fill our SnoCone machine with Cristal. Most of us get out of bed everyday purely because it edges us one step closer to some kind of financial future we want. If we won the lottery, most of us would show up to the office the next day wearing an ankle-length fur coat and enough bling to make Mr. T look Amish, and only stay just long enough to take a dump in our boss's inbox. So What's the Problem? Hey, remember when we said earlier that most people wouldn't do the body-switching thing for fear they'd wake up in Nigeria? Well according to surveys, Nigerians are happier with their lives than the people of any other country. The USA came in 16th. Hey, did we mention that the average Nigerian makes $300 a year? That's less than a hundredth of what the average American makes. America being the country that hands out 120 million prescriptions for anti-depressants every year. China is turning into a great object lesson in this, as their economy explodes and incomes skyrocket, but levels of happiness and personal satisfaction are dropping at the same rapid rate. There's a couple of reasons for it. First, your brain adjusts feelings of happiness downward after you've reached some goal or other. It regulates the good feelings, presumably so that you have motivation to reach the next goal instead of just lounging by the pool for the rest of your days. The second one is that as social creatures, we compare ourselves to our neighbors. This is why executives can cry about the $500,000 salary cap that comes with taking government bailout money. Their friends are making $3 million a year and live in igloo made out of cocaine. We can laugh at their complaints, but of course then you're giving the Nigerian permission to laugh at yours. That guy made 100 times more than you, you make 100 times more than the Nigerian. Once you start hanging around the other high earners, you'll want all the stuff they have. No, that's not right--you'll want the stuff that's so much better than their stuff that they'll vomit with envy. As one magazine for Wall Street bigshots put it, you want the stuff that will be "a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home." 
"Yeah, same model as yours. Only covered in solid fucking gold." But what about sudden wealth, like if you won the lottery, or sold your novel for $10 million? That'd be cool, right, because you'd still remember your former life and appreciate your new riches! Well, just ask William "Bud" Post, who wound up broken and bankrupt after he won $16 million in the lottery. It turns out that while he knew how to handle the stress of being poor thanks to a lifetime of experience, he had no concept of how to handle the new and alien stresses of wealth. Wait, it Gets Worse... Remember the whole Invasion of the Body Snatchers phenomenon we talked about with famous people, where suddenly all of your friends turn into leeches? Same here, only worse. With your newfound riches, suddenly "friends" pop up from all over. Cousins who you've never met, forgotten classmates from school, women who'd never even look your way before, all suddenly in your orbit, complimenting you, doing you favors. Then they casually slip it into conversation that they're going to have to default on their mortgage unless somebody helps out.
Your very own entourage! Suddenly every relationship is in doubt. Do they actually care about you? Or do they just want a seat on the Bling Train? Would they sell you out to get to your cash? That lottery winner we mentioned above . . . somebody hired a hitman to take him out, to get to his money. That somebody was his own fucking brother. #3. Beauty  We know all about this one first-hand. That old stereotype about how comedy writers and heavy Internet users tend to have bodies chiseled out of solid sex? It's true. One visitor remarked that the Cracked office "Looked like a Manowar album cover came to life." 
Yes, being physically attractive has concrete advantages. Attractive people earn more, get better grades, have better jobs and find more successful partners than average or ugly people. Strangers are more likely to help them in a crisis. They have wider social circles. So What's the Problem? Remember, we're talking about happiness here, not success. For one, attractive people have the same self-esteem problems the ugly people do. Like money, attractiveness is relative and if you're hotter than your friends, at that stage you start comparing yourself to people in the media. You know, like the magazine covers we mentioned before, the ones that that have had the living shit Photoshopped out of them. In other words, they've adjusted to the experience of being attractive the same as our high income earners have adjusted to having money; they just pick other flaws to worry about. Sure, if you used the magical artifact up there to become Angelina Jolie tomorrow, you'd notice the difference over how you're treated now. But if you were born Angelina Jolie, you'd have no way of grasping it, the same as right now you don't realize what it's like to live life with some kind of horrible deformity (if you do have a horrible deformity, then you don't know what it's like to live with a worse one. Work with us here). Wait, it Gets Worse... You know how when the hot girl at the bar tells an unfunny joke, all the guys laugh anyway? Or when the office stud makes a mistake, the female boss laughs it off? Attractive people live in a world where most feedback they get is bullshit. The compliments mean nothing--they've learned that's just the sound people make when they walk by. That's why studies show they tend to dismiss the genuine compliments they get in other areas (their work, personality, sense of humor, creativity) because it gets lumped in with the same counterfeit flattery they've been getting their whole lives. #2. Genius  We're using the broader definition of the word "genius" here, meaning anyone with an extraordinary talent or skill. So for instance Dennis Rodman was a genius when it came to rebounding basketballs, but was probably not a genius in the way that Einstein was. But as Dennis demonstrates, genius--whether it involves writing ground-breaking computer code, picking stocks or writing the dopest rhymes--means one thing above all else: You are forever granted an exception to society's rules. The fictional archetype for this these days is TV's Dr. House, whose being a genius means he gets a free pass to do drugs on the job, break hospital policy, insult his superiors and treat patients like shit. But don't blame the writers, the real world examples are just as extreme, from Hemingway to Kanye West. Being a genius means you get to do great things, sure, but it's also a blank check for douchebaggery. Who could turn that down? So What's the Problem? Want to know what it's like to live life as a genius? All you have to do is go hang around with the stupidest, most incompetent people you know. Cringe at their stupid jokes, feel the frustration as they fumble even the easiest tasks and fail to grasp the simplest concepts. Being a genius must be like that, only everyday. Everyone is an idiot compared to them. They're living Idiocracy. We can't imagine what it's like to make friends in that world. Genuine connections will be rare indeed when every honest expressions of thought or feelings on your end is met with a look of dull Keanu Reeves-esque befuddlement. If you're not the Einstein kind of genius, it doesn't matter, any situation where you're 10 levels above your coworkers is going to be daily frustration. If you're a genius at spreading concrete, that feeling only occurs to you in the form of everyone else being sloppy and helpless. No wonder they wind up treating people like dirt. Not that you'd have time for friends anyway. Genius takes practice. Lots of it. Shows like House don't tell you that to become as good at your job as Dr. House, you've got to devote an enormous amount of time to working, studying and practicing your craft (at least 10 thousand hours, according to that Malcolm Gladwell book everyone is quoting these days). Behind the genius is hundreds of weekends spent pouring over texts while everyone else was at the party, playing bikini Twister. All of this is a great recipe for the stereotypical depressed, moody genius who dies alone and bitter. Wait, it Gets Worse... If your genius lies in some kind of creative field, then there's a good chance you have actual mental illness to deal with. While only one percent of the population suffers from bipolar disorder, it is claimed that 50 percent of poets, 38 percent of musicians and 20 percent of painters have it. It's just part of the package. Compare the number of great musical innovators who have died of suicide or drug overdose versus, say, the number of plumbers who have died the same way. It might be better to just stand in the poop all day. #1. Power You never hear little kids say they want to be "powerful" when they grow up. Parents don't encourage that sort of thing, since it's kind of terrifying coming from a toddler. Yet, power is what everything else on this list is about. Fame is about having power in the relationship with the fans. Beauty is about gaining power through others' sexual desire and jealousy. Genius means society needs your skills more than you need its approval. Money . . . well, money and power are conjoined twins. So it's pretty safe to say that while not many of you reading this specifically aspire to go into any kind of political office, a great many of you do aspire to some kind of power. Maybe you're eying the kind of job where you'll be the boss, or maybe you want to go into law enforcement. Or maybe you're just driven by that bitter, unspoken urge almost all of us feel at least once in our youth: "I'll show them! I'll show them all." So What's the Problem? Saying "power corrupts" is stating something so obvious we feel stupid even typing it. It's like saying elevators elevate. If you found out tomorrow your congressman was caught firing orphans out of a cannon, you'd barely raise an eyebrow. It has nothing to do with the "culture of corruption in Washington DC" the Libertarians are always talking about. You find it everywhere, from the asshole supervisor to the bitter gym coach. Small people driven to mindless, unethical behavior, drunk on just a few drops of bullshit power. They often can't make friends, their marriages end badly, they self destruct. The world is full of these miniature, sad Tony Montanas, destined for a proverbial bloody downfall.
Usually instead of a mansion it's a cubicle, and instead of bullets it's a series of pissy emails Wait, it gets worse... The thing is, it's the desire itself that's poisonous. You find that need for power most in the type of person who hates having to obey all of society's social contracts, particularly the ones that require them to not act like cocks all day. These are the people who are only nice guys because of fear of retribution if they do otherwise, so their main goal is to become strong enough that no retribution is possible (this is why sociopaths tend to seek positions of power, by the way). So it's not just that power will destroy you. It's that the urge itself is bad news. That desire for power is a vicious, ravenous animal and feeding it only makes it strong enough to tear its way out of your belly and go on a bloody rampage. 
"So what will make me happy, Cracked.com writers? What's left?" For the next 10 seconds, stare at this picture of a guy hugging a tiger. Notice how you weren't worrying about your job during those 10 seconds? Experts have figured out that the brain has no ability to actually predict your emotional reaction to life changes that haven't happened yet. In other words, you physically do not know what you want. The act of sitting around pondering it is apparently what fucks you up. This might be because for most of human history, we didn't have time to do that. We were too busy gathering berries and running from wild animals. Now that we've got things so under control that the animals hug us. . . well, we're like the guy up there who didn't know what to do with his lotto winnings. This may be why studies show friendships, altruism and religious practices bring happiness. It may be that taking the focus off your own happiness is what makes happiness possible.  If that sounds like a mind-boggling, ridiculous paradox, clearly arranged by the gods to torment us. well, we agree. 6 Brainwashing Techniques They're Using On You Right Now By David Wong September 23, 2008  Brainwashing doesn't take any sci-fi gadgetry or Manchurian Candidate hypnotism bullshit. There are all sorts of tried-and-true techniques that anyone can use to bypass the thinking part of your brain and flip a switch deep inside that says "OBEY." Now I know what you're thinking. "Sure, just make an ad with some big ol' titties on there! That'll convince people!" While that's certainly true ... ... they've got a whole arsenal of manipulation techniques that go way beyond even the most effective of titties. Techniques like ... #6. Chanting Slogans  Every cult leader, drill sergeant, self-help guru and politician knows that if you want to quiet all of those pesky doubting thoughts in a crowd, get them to chant a repetitive phrase or slogan. Those are referred to as thought-stopping techniques, because for better or worse, they do exactly that. Sounds like: "Say it with me now, folks!" "FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!" "One, two, three, four, I, Love, The Marine, Corps. One, two..." Why It Works:
The "Analytical" part of your brain and the "Repetitive Task" part tend to operate in separate rooms. But you didn't need an expert to tell you that. You know you can't solve a complex logic puzzle if I force you to scream the chorus to that Chumbawamba song over and over again while you're doing it. Try it. Meditation works the same way, with chants or mantras meant to "calm the mind." Shutting down those nagging voices in the head is helpful for stressed-out individuals, but even more helpful to a guy who wants to shut down an audience full of nagging internal voices suggesting that what he's saying might be retarded. Recently Seen:
At the political conventions, notice how they trained the audiences to fill the gaps between applause lines with chants ("U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!") rather than, say, pensive silence to carefully consider what the speaker has just said. Also, those of you who've worked at Wal-Mart are familiar with the "Wal-Mart Cheer" that begins every shift: They used to sacrifice a goat at the end, but PETA put a stop to it. #5. Slipping Bullshit Into Your Subconscious  The rise of the internet news portal has given birth to a whole new, sly technique of bullshit insertion. What They (and from here on, "They" with a capital T means anyone who draws a paycheck by manipulating your opinion) have figured out is that most of you don't read the stories, you just browse the headlines. And there's a way to exploit that, based on how the brain stores memories. The Drudge Report lives off this. A single anonymous source will report to some news blog that, say, Senator Smith runs a secret gay bordello in New Orleans. Drudge will run the headline: NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT SMITH'S SECRET GAY BORDELLO Or perhaps there'll just be a question mark on the end: SMITH: SECRET GAY BORDELLO ASS MASTER? It doesn't matter that the headline merely involves "questions" about the bordello. The idea has been planted, and two months later when somebody mentions Senator Smith around the water cooler you'll say, "The gay bordello guy, right?"
 Sounds like: "WHAT IS OBAMA'S CONNECTION TO LEFT-WING EXTREMISTS?" "TOYOTA PRIUS - MORE WASTEFUL THAN A HUMMER?" "OFFICIAL SAYS WTC COLLAPSE 'UNEXPLAINED'" Why It Works:
They call it "Source Amnesia." For instance, you know what a wolverine is, but probably don't remember exactly how you learned that piece of information. The brain has limited storage, so it stores just the important nugget (that a wolverine is a small, ferocious animal) but usually discards the trivial context, such as when and where you learned about it (the movie Red Dawn, probably).  In the era of the web and information overload, that's a mechanism They can exploit very easily. What They have found is that a piece of information--say, an ugly rumor about a politician--can be presented with all sorts of qualifiers (a question mark, attribution to a shitty source, the word "unconfirmed") but often the brain will only remember the ugly rumor and completely forget the qualifier. And get this: it happens even if the headline we read was specifically about the rumor being untrue. You'll see this daily, in every election cycle. The entire point of putting a shaky rumor into the press is to force your opponent to deny it. Why? Because They know that the denial works just as well as the accusation. Thanks to Source Amnesia, for millions of people all three of these ... SMITH DENIES GAY BORDELLO RUMORS SMITH REFUSES COMMENT ON GAY BORDELLO RUMORS SMITH ADMITS GAY COCK BORDELLO ... register as the exact same headline. Recently Seen:
During the presidential primaries, Drudge ran a huge photo of Barack Obama wearing a turban. Under it was an inflammatory headline about how disgusting it was that Clinton staffers were circulating such a picture. But a huge number of people who saw it only remembered the picture (months later, 13% of voters still thought he was a muslim). That's the idea. #4. Controlling What You Watch and Read  Restriction of reading and/or viewing material is common to pretty much every cult. Here on the internet, we've all heard horror stories about Scientology, which goes as far as filtering members' internet access. Obviously the idea is to insulate the members from any opposing points of view, to keep them marching in line. That technique works just as well outside of the cult world, but They have to be more subtle about it. It just takes a little poison in the well, that's all. Sounds like: "Of course the public is misinformed! They're reading that trash in the liberal mainstream media!" "Of course the public is misinformed! They're watching Faux News and the other trash in the corporate mainstream media!" Why It Works:
Studies show the brain is wired to get a quick high from reading things that agree with our point of view. The same studies proved that, strangely, we also get a rush from intentionally dismissing information that disagrees, no matter how well supported it is. Yes, our brain rewards us for being closed-minded dicks. So with a little prodding, the followers will happily close themselves in the same echo chamber of talk radio, blogs and cable news outlets that give them that little "They agree with ME!" high. This wouldn't have been possible even 20 years ago. I grew up in the 80s, in a house with three TV stations. Three. We got one newspaper, the local one. You didn't get to pick from the conservative news or liberal news, back in my day you took what you got and you were thankful for what you had, dammit.  Today, I go through that many outlets a day just to get my freaking video game news. And now, that explosion of the 24-hour cable news stations and, later, the web and blogosphere, has created these parallel universes of Right vs. Left media outlets, complete with their own publishing arms.  And for each, their favorite topic of discussion is how corrupt and ridiculous the other side's media is. They each even have "watchdog" groups that exist purely for the reason of hammering away at each other (the left has FAIR and MediaMatters, the right has the Media Research Center). Recently Seen:
When an MSNBC interview with candidate John McCain got tense, he responded to the question by openly accusing the reporter of being an operative for the other side: Just days later the campaign called The New York Times "a pro-Obama advocacy organization." This technique is relatively new, but you'll see a lot more of it in future elections. The candidate will talk right past the reporter asking the questions and says to his supporters, "These guys work for the enemy, don't believe a word they say. Their lies will only poison your mind." What is the Monkeysphere? By David Wong September 30, 2007  "One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic." -Kevin Federline What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere. "What the Hell is the Monkeysphere?"  First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy. Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you'd be if Slappy died. Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We'll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they're all your personal monkey friends. Now imagine a hundred monkeys. Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn't remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there's a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies. So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring? That's not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number. "So this whole thing is your crusade against monkey overpopulation? I'll have my monkey castrated this very day!" Uh, no. It'll become clear in a moment.  You see, monkey experts performed a monkey study a while back, and discovered that the size of the monkey's monkey brain determined the size of the monkey groups the monkeys formed. The bigger the brain, the bigger the little societies they built. They cut up so many monkey brains, in fact, that they found they could actually take a brain they had never seen before and from it they could accurately predict what size tribes that species of creature formed. Most monkeys operate in troupes of 50 or so. But somebody slipped them a slightly larger brain and they estimated the ideal group or society for this particular animal was about 150. That brain, of course, was human. Probably from a homeless man they snatched off the streets. "So that's the big news? That humans are God's big-budget sequel to the monkey? Who didn't know that?"  It goes much, much deeper than that. Let's try an example. Famous news talking guy Tim Russert tells a charming story about his father, in his book Big Russ and Me (the title referring to his on-and-off romance with actor Russell Crowe). Russert's dad used to take half an hour to carefully box up any broken glass before taking it to the trash. Why? Because "The trash guy might cut his hands." That this was such an unusual thing to do illustrates my monkey point. None of us spend much time worrying about the garbage man's welfare even though he performs a crucial role in not forcing us to live in a cave carved from a mountain of our own filth. We don't usually consider his safety or comfort at all and if we do, it's not in the same way we would worry over our best friend or wife or girlfriend or even our dog. People toss half-full bottles of drain cleaner right into the barrel, without a second thought of what would happen if the trash man got it splattered into his eyes. Why? Because the trash guy exists outside the Monkeysphere. "There's that word again..."  The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150. Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away. And even if you happen to know and like your particular garbage man, at one point or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern. It's the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people, usually our own friends and family and neighbors, and then maybe some classmates or coworkers or church or suicide cult. Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They're sort of one-dimensional bit characters. Remember the first time, as a kid, you met one of your school teachers outside the classroom? Maybe you saw old Miss Puckerson at Taco Bell eating refried beans through a straw, or saw your principal walking out of a dildo shop. Do you remember that surreal feeling you had when you saw these people actually had lives outside the classroom? I mean, they're not people. They're teachers. "So? What difference does all this make?"  Oh, not much. It's just the one single reason society doesn't work. It's like this: which would upset you more, your best friend dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees? Which would hit you harder, your Mom dying, or seeing on the news that 15,000 people died in an earthquake in Iran? They're all humans and they are all equally dead. But the closer to our Monkeysphere they are, the more it means to us. Just as your death won't mean anything to the Chinese or, for that matter, hardly anyone else more than 100 feet or so from where you're sitting right now. "Why should I feel bad for them? I don't even know those people!" Exactly. This is so ingrained that to even suggest you should feel their deaths as deeply as that of your best friend sounds a little ridiculous. We are hard-wired to have a drastic double standard for the people inside our Monkeysphere versus the 99.999% of the world's population who are on the outside. Think about this the next time you get really pissed off in traffic, when you start throwing finger gestures and wedging your head out of the window to scream, "LEARN TO FUCKING DRIVE, FUCKER!!" Try to imagine acting like that in a smaller group. Like if you're standing in an elevator with two friends and a coworker, and the friend goes to hit a button and accidentally punches the wrong one. Would you lean over, your mouth two inches from her ear, and scream "LEARN TO OPERATE THE FUCKING ELEVATOR BUTTONS, SHIT CAMEL!!" They'd think you'd gone insane. We all go a little insane, though, when we get in a group larger than the Monkeysphere. That's why you get that weird feeling of anonymous invincibility when you're sitting in a large crowd, screaming curses at a football player you'd never dare say to his face. "Well, I'm nice to strangers. Have you considered that maybe you're just an asshole?"  Sure, you probably don't go out of your way to be mean to strangers. You don't go out of your way to be mean to stray dogs, either. The problem is that eventually, the needs of you or those within your Monkeysphere will require screwing someone outside it (even if that need is just venting some tension and anger via exaggerated insults). This is why most of us wouldn't dream of stealing money from the pocket of the old lady next door, but don't mind stealing cable, adding a shady exemption on our tax return, or quietly celebrating when they forget to charge us for something at the restaurant. You may have a list of rationalizations long enough to circle the Earth, but the truth is that in our monkey brains the old woman next door is a human being while the cable company is a big, cold, faceless machine. That the company is, in reality, nothing but a group of people every bit as human as the old lady, or that some kind old ladies actually work there and would lose their jobs if enough cable were stolen, rarely occurs to us. That's one of the ingenious things about the big-time religions, by the way. The old religious writers knew it was easier to put the screws to a stranger, so they taught us to get a personal idea of a God in our heads who says, "No matter who you hurt, you're really hurting me. Also, I can crush you like a grape." You must admit that if they weren't writing words inspired by the Almighty, they at least understood the Monkeysphere. It's everywhere. Once you grasp the concept, you can see examples all around you. You'll walk the streets in a daze, like Roddy Piper after putting on his X-ray sunglasses in They Live. But wait, because this gets much bigger and much, much stranger. "So you're going to tell us that this Monkeysphere thing runs the whole world? Also, They Live sucked."  Go flip on the radio. Listen to the conservative talk about "The Government" as if it were some huge, lurking dragon ready to eat you and your paycheck whole. Never mind that the government is made up of people and that all of that money they take goes into the pockets of human beings. Talk radio's Rush Limbaugh is known to tip 50% at restaurants, but flies into a broadcast tirade if even half that dollar amount is deducted from his paycheck by "The Government." That's despite the fact that the money helps that very same single mom he had no problem tipping in her capacity as a waitress. Now click over to a liberal show now, listen to them describe "Multinational Corporations" in the same diabolical terms, an evil black force that belches smoke and poisons water and enslaves humanity. Isn't it strange how, say, a lone man who carves and sells children's toys in his basement is a sweetheart who just loves bringing joy at Christmas, but a big-time toy corporation (which brings toys to millions of kids at Christmas) is an inhuman soul-grinding greed machine? Strangely enough, if the kindly lone toy making guy made enough toys and hired enough people and expanded to enough shops, we'd eventually stop seeing it as a toy-making shop and start seeing it as the fiery Orc factories of Mordor. And if you've just thought, "Well, those talk show hosts are just a bunch of egomaniacal blowhards anyway," you've just done it again, turned real humans into two-word cartoon characters. It's no surprise, you do it with pretty much all six billion human beings outside the Monkeysphere. "So I'm supposed to suddenly start worrying about six billion strangers? That's not even possible!"  That's right, it isn't possible. That's the point. What is hard to understand is that it's also impossible for them to care about you. That's why they don't mind stealing your stereo or vandalizing your house or cutting your wages or raising your taxes or bombing your office building or choking your computer with spam advertising diet and penis drugs they know don't work. You're outside their Monkeysphere. In their mind, you're just a vague shape with a pocket full of money for the taking. Think of Osama Bin Laden. Did you just picture a camouflaged man hiding in a cave, drawing up suicide missions? Or are you thinking of a man who gets hungry and has a favorite food and who had a childhood crush on a girl and who has athlete's foot and chronic headaches and wakes up in the morning with a boner and loves volleyball? Something in you, just now, probably was offended by that. You think there's an effort to build sympathy for the murderous fuck. Isn't it strange how simply knowing random human facts about him immediately tugs at your sympathy strings? He comes closer to your Monkeysphere, he takes on dimension. Now, the cold truth is this Bin Laden is just as desperately in need of a bullet to the skull as the raving four-color caricature on some redneck's T-shirt. The key to understanding people like him, though, is realizing that we are the caricature on his T-shirt. "So you're using monkeys to claim that we're all a bunch of Osama Bin Ladens?"  Sort of. Listen to any 16 year-old kid with his first job, going on and on about how the boss is screwing him and the government is screwing him even more ("What's FICA?!?!" he screams as he looks at his first paycheck). Then watch that same kid at work, as he drops a hamburger patty on the floor, picks it up, and slaps in on a bun and serves it to a customer. In that one dropped burger he has everything he needs to understand those black-hearted politicians and corporate bosses. They see him in the exact same way he sees the customers lined up at the burger counter. Which is, just barely. In both cases, for the guy making the burger and the guy running Exxon, getting through the workweek and collecting the paycheck are all that matters. No thought is given to the real human unhappiness being spread by doing it shittily (ever gotten so sick from food poisoning you thought your stomach lining was going to fly out of your mouth?) That many customers or employees just can't fit inside the Monkeysphere. The kid will protest that he shouldn't have to care for the customers for minimum wage, but the truth is if a man doesn't feel sympathy for his fellow man at $6.00 an hour, he won't feel anything more at $600,000 a year. Or, to look at it the other way, if we're allowed to be indifferent and even resentful to the masses for $6.00 an hour, just think of how angry the some Pakistani man is allowed to be when he's making the equivalent of six dollars a week. "You've used the word 'monkey' more than 50 times, but the same principle hardly applies. Humans have been to the moon. Let's see the monkeys do that."  It doesn't matter. It's just an issue of degree. There's a reason why legendary monkeytician Charles Darwin and his assistant, Jeje (pronounced "heyhey") Santiago deduced that humans and chimps were evolutionary cousins. As sophisticated as we are (compare our advanced sewage treatment plants to the chimps' primitive technique of hurling the feces with their bare hands), the inescapable truth is we are just as limited by our mental hardware. The primary difference is that monkeys are happy to stay in small groups and rarely interact with others outside their monkey gang. This is why they rarely go to war, though when they do it is widely thought to be hilarious. Humans, however, require cars and oil and quality manufactured goods by the fine folks at 3M and Japanese video games and worldwide internets and, most importantly, governments. All of these things take groups larger than 150 people to maintain effectively. Thus, we routinely find ourselves functioning in bunches larger than our primate brains are able to cope with. This is where the problems begin. Like a fragile naked human pyramid, we are simultaneously supporting and resenting each other. We bitch out loud about our soul-sucking job as an anonymous face on an assembly line, while at the exact same time riding in a car that only an assembly line could have produced. It's a constant contradiction that has left us pissed off and joining informal wrestling clubs in basements. This is why I think it was with a great burden of sadness that Darwin turned to his assistant and lamented, "Jeje, we're the monkeys." "Oh, no you didn't." If you think about it, our entire society has evolved around the limitations of the Monkeysphere. There is a reason why all of the really phat-ass nations with the biggest SUV's with the shiniest 22-inch rims all have some kind of representative democracy (where you vote for people to do the governing for you) and all of them are, to some degree, capitalist (where people actually get to buy property and keep some of what they earn).
Above: Democracy A representative democracy allows a small group of people to make all of the decisions, while letting us common people feel like we're doing something by going to a polling place every couple of years and pulling a lever that, in reality, has about the same effect as the darkness knob on your toaster. We can simultaneously feel like we're in charge while being contained enough that we can't cause any real monkey mayhem once we fly into one of our screeching, arm-flapping monkey frenzies ("A woman showed her boob at the Super Bowl! We want a boob and football ban immediately!") Conversely, some people in the distant past naively thought they could sit all of the millions of monkeys down and say, "Okay, everybody go pick the bananas, then bring them here, and we'll distribute them with a complex formula determining banana need! Now go gather bananas for the good of society!" For the monkeys it was a confused, comical, tree-humping disaster. Later, a far more realistic man sat the monkeys down and said, "You want bananas? Each of you go get your own. I'm taking a nap." That man, of course, was German philosopher Hans Capitalism. As long as everybody gets their own bananas and shares with the few in their Monkeysphere, the system will thrive even though nobody is even trying to make the system thrive. This is perhaps how Ayn Rand would have put it, had she not been such a hateful bitch. Then, some time in the Third Century, French philosopher Pierre "Frenchy" LaFrench invented racism. 
Above: The French This was a way of simplifying the too-complex-for-monkeys world by imagining all people of a certain race as being the same person, thinking they all have the same attitudes and mannerisms and tastes in food and clothes and music. It sort of works, as long as we think of that person as being a good person ("Those Asians are so hard-working and precise and well-mannered!") but when we start seeing them as being one, giant, gaping asshole (the French, ironically) our monkey happiness again breaks down. It's not all the French's fault. The truth is, all of these monkey management schemes only go so far. For instance, today one in four Americans has some kind of mental illness, usually depression. One in four. Watch a basketball game. The odds are at least two of those people on the floor are mentally ill. Look around your house; if everybody else there seems okay, it's you. Is it any surprise? You turn on the news and see a whole special on the Obesity Epidemic. You've had this worry laid on your shoulders about millions of other people eating too much. What exactly are you supposed to do about the eating habits of 80 million people you don't even know? You've taken on the pork-laden burden of all these people outside the Monkeysphere and you now carry that useless weight of worry like, you know, some kind of animal on your back. "So what exactly are we supposed to do about all this?"  First, train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency. So reject binary thinking of "good vs. bad" or "us vs. them." Know problems cannot be solved with clever slogans and over-simplified step-by-step programs. You can do that by following these simple steps. We like to call this plan the T.R.Y. plan: First, TOTAL MORON. That is, accept the fact THAT YOU ARE ONE. We all are. That really annoying person you know, the one who's always spouting bullshit, the person who always thinks they're right? Well, the odds are that for somebody else, you're that person. So take the amount you think you know, reduce it by 99.999%, and then you'll have an idea of how much you actually know regarding things outside your Monkeysphere. Second, UNDERSTAND that there are no Supermonkeys. Just monkeys. Those guys on TV you see, giving the inspirational seminars, teaching you how to reach your potential and become rich and successful like them? You know how they made their money? By giving seminars. For the most part, the only thing they do well is convince others they do everything well. No, the universal moron principal established in No. 1 above applies here, too. Don't pretend politicians are somehow supposed to be immune to all the backhanded fuckery we all do in our daily lives and don't laugh and point when the preacher gets caught on video snorting cocaine off a prostitute's ass. A good exercise is to picture your hero--whoever it is--passed out on his lawn, naked from the waist down. The odds are it's happened at some point. Even Gandhi may have had hotel rooms and dead hookers in his past. And don't even think about ignoring advice from a moral teacher just because the source enjoys the ol' Colombian Nose Candy from time to time. We're all members of varying species of hypocrite (or did you tell them at the job interview that you once called in sick to spend a day leveling up on World of Warcraft?) Don't use your heroes' vices as an excuse to let yours run wild. And finally, DON'T LET ANYBODY simplify it for you. The world cannot be made simple. Anyone who tries to paint a picture of the world in basic comic book colors is most likely trying to use you as a pawn. So just remember: T-R-Y. Go forth and do likewise, gents.

master Hsuan hsua- "The eight winds blow but do not move me." What are the eight winds? They are praise, blame, suffering, bliss, gain, loss, slander, and good reputation. If it happens that when one is blown by the eight winds one's mind is shaken, then that's a case of your foundation not having been well laid. What is it that we refer to as the foundation? It's just virtuous conduct. If one's virtuous conduct is insufficient then one's anger is very great and one's ignorance is extremely heavy. If one possesses virtuous conduct then there is no anger at all and ignorance has been transformed. It's been transformed into wisdom. Therefore, when we cultivate it's necessary to nurture virtuous conduct. (p.140) personally I'm ok with bliss, gain and good reputation. And would be willing to set my sail by them. course I am no master.

hmnn if Megamind got his wish, bought the site w/ the lottery money we'd have to add to the disclaimer. ie.. No Racism, Sexism, Right wing propaganda, Neo-nazi, Klan, White power or Mo Pai allowed on the board. That would be read by everyone who joined up. Somehow it might not send the right message.

Sometimes the illness is the cure. ie telling us to slow down, stop taking one's health for granted. A bug, some sort of cold been making its rounds through my family. Not too bad, cough, congestion.. no temperature.. takes a week for it to pass by. In the meantime the fallen gets plenty of advice on zinc, sambucca/elderberries and plenty of chicken soup .