#thecompleteguidetomisery

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Make a Difference Day Shows Us How Useless We Are

Welcome back to The Complete Guide to Misery!

Each post in this absurd series promotes a different form of human suffering and encourages readers to adopt self-destructive habits that will bring them mountains of anguish.

This silliness is intended to be satire, not self-help. However, if readers’ lives are enriched in some way beyond laughter, all the better.

Despite the attempts at humor, this is not meant to make light of the suffering of blood-filled people by the world’s myriad forms of abuse.

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Make a Difference Day

Today, October 23rd, is National Make a Difference Day. Americans have celebrated it, on the fourth Saturday in October, annually since 1992.

The idea is to encourage people to volunteer or do something intentional to make the world a better place.

This kind of prosocial activity is also described as being the change you want to see in the world.

“Be the change,” quote all those self-impressed do-gooders who have nothing better to do than to quote from other self-impressed do-gooders.

And it’s because they quote silly slogans that those naïve do-gooders have no friends with any sense of fun, and therefore have nothing better to do than quote Chicken Soup for the Soul to all their unfun friends.

There is so much wrong with even the idea of this annual celebration of making the world a better place that I hesitated to write this piece.

But then I decided that creating this bit of satire, this lumbering Frankenstein in prose, is my way of making a difference.

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The Problem

The problem with Make a Difference Day is that it implies that what of us does individually can make the world better and that the whole enterprise is worth the trouble.

And that is the attitude of all those exhausting do-gooders.

To maximize your misery, take for granted that nothing you do will ever make the slightest difference in the world.

Actually, if you consider chaos theory and the law of unintended consequences, the chances are good that your effort to leave the world a better place will probably make things much worse.

What’s that phrase about the road to hell?

Any time you have the opportunity to be proactive and make a decision in line with your values, choose instead to be overwhelmed and passive.

I mean, seriously, with so much wrong in the world, where would you even start?

Finally, to be really miserable in the face of an offensive day like Make a Difference, it’s critical to disregard your finer qualities and focus on your worst ones.

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Karen and the Scouts

Karen had just finished rushing through her Saturday errands and was hurrying home in time to do nothing.

She stepped out of the grocery store into the path of an enthusiastic group of children, all between the ages of six and nine, from what Karen could tell, and dressed as Scouts.

“Hello,” said the leader of the group. “My name is Maia.” She looked, to Karen, like an earnest young lady who would one day be a confident adult. “Hello,” said Karen, guardedly.

“Did you know that today is National Make a Difference Day?” asked Maia. “We’re on a mission to make people aware of the day, and are hoping you’ll take the opportunity to volunteer or contribute to the public good in whatever way works for you.”

Karen decided that this young woman was just too much and that it was time an adult let her know how things really worked.

“Even if I did have the power to make a difference,” Karen started, “which I don’t, where would I start? what on earth gives me the idea that anything I have to offer is really good enough to make the world a better place?”

Maia, confused, looked around to her fellow Scouts for an answer. They all shrugged their shoulders. One of them, the six-year-old, picked his nose and showed his discoveries to his fascinated neighbors.

“Anything I can do can surely be done much better by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people,” continued Karen. “Besides, with my history of mistakes and screw-ups, chances are good I’d end up just messing up somebody else’s good deed. Better for me to stay home and not do any more damage than I’ve already done out there.”

Karen gave Maia and the other kids a chance to retort before walking away. They were silent.

“Hmm,” she thought as she glanced one last time at a very dejected-looking Maia. “Maybe I’m wrong. Looks like I really made a difference in that young woman’s life,” she thought proudly.

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What We Can Learn from Karen

Embrace Make a Difference Day, because it offers seemingly mentally healthy people the chance to be confronted by how really powerless, useless and lacking-in-character they really are.

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If you want more misery, check out this bit of silliness: https://southparksdblogger.com/2021/10/02/gratitude-is-for-quitters/

[thecompleteguidetomisery]

Welcome back to The Complete Guide to Misery!

Each post in this absurd series promotes a different form of human suffering and encourages readers to adopt self-destructive habits that will bring them mountains of anguish.

This silliness is intended to be satire, not self-help. However, if readers’ lives are enriched in some way beyond laughter, all the better.

Despite the attempts at humor, this is not meant to make light of the suffering of blood-filled people by the world’s myriad forms of abuse.

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Please assume that you have free will. 

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Human beings are social creatures. Other people help shape who we are and will become. Therefore, nurture relationships that will support the development of your misery.

When meeting someone new it’s best to assume their worst intentions. This will help you feel horrid immediately, and is a necessary building block in the developing a lifetime of anguish.

Once you assume others’ worst motives, you’ll be prepared to take the most innocent remark as a personal affront and wallow in the joys of despair.

By the way, the impact of assuming others’ worst intentions on the quality of ALL your relationships cannot be overstated!

Remember, strangers are just enemies you haven’t met yet.

 CASE STUDY: KAREN AND THE STRANGER

Karen got together with her childhood friends Caroline, Kathy, and Joanne, at Joanne’s place. Karen had been busy lately and hadn’t been to the last few gatherings. She was looking forward to catching up over a quiet evening.

When she arrived, though, she was surprised to find someone new in Joanne’s living room. Every time Karen met a newcomer, or intruder as she liked to think of them, she assumed three things.

And she counted out all three to herself every time:

1.     The stranger (“they”) thought Karen was a piece of trash,

2.     Through remarkable perceptive skills, they had already assessed and determined Karen’s fundamental flaws and most embarrassing secrets,

3.     They planned to assassinate Karen’s character as soon as Karen left the room.

Karen instantly felt ready to misread and defensively react to anything this intruder said or did.

Caroline introduced the newcomer, her friend, Marcia, to Karen.

Marcia smiled and said, “Hello.”

Karen thought, “We just met and she’s already showing off her social skills. What a phony piece of crap. I’ve been at this party for thirty seconds and I already hate it. I shouldn’t have to put up with this superficial nonsense!”

Karen was proud of herself for approaching this new relationship with such a helpful mindset.

What We Can Learn from Karen

Before being introduced, Karen put herself on the defensive by assuming Marcia didn’t respect her, knew her worst secrets, and would ruin her friendships if given the chance.  This prepared Karen to interpret anything Marcia did as hostile and antagonistic.

 A Word of Caution

A dedicated pattern of assuming others’ worst intentions, specifically, that the universe stopped what it was doing to ruin your day, is called paranoia.

Paranoia is beyond the scope of this blog.

However, reader, I feel obliged to inform you that all of your acquaintances, friends and enemies got together, while you were on vacation, and coordinated the details of how to ruin the rest of your life.

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Thanks for reading and stay tuned!

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Savage Pessimism

Welcome to The Complete Guide to Misery!

Each post in this absurd series will promote a different form of human suffering and encourage readers to adopt self-destructive habits that will bring them mountains of anguish.

This silliness is intended to be satire, not self-help. However, if readers’ lives are enriched in some way beyond laughter, all the better.

Despite the attempts at humor, this is not meant to make light of the suffering of blood-filled people by the world’s myriad forms of abuse.

Please assume that you have free will. Because the jokes don’t work otherwise.

Cosmo Quiz

What is your relationship with the present tense?

How do you approach this moment, what Eckhart Tolle refers to as The Now in his book, The Power of Now.

Do you narrate the moment to yourself?

For example, if you are in your kitchen, pouring milk into a bowl of cereal, you hear yourself say to yourself, “Here I am, in the kitchen again, pouring milk into another bowl of cereal.”

Do you distract from this moment?

Same scenario as above, and, in your mind’s ear, you silently wonder, “What’s the right amount of milk anyway? How much cereal should the milk cover? All of it? Eighty-three percent?”

Do you reject it?

Still in the kitchen, you think, “This breakfast business is boring. I’m going to sit here and wait until there’s a better moment for me to enjoy. Something more exciting, a moment with a funny romantic twist and the discovery of a great fortune. Oh, yeah, and chocolate.”

Do you run from it?

Back in the kitchen, you don’t even notice that you’re pouring milk because all your mental energy is tied up in anticipation of what will go wrong later today. Or tomorrow. And definitely the day after tomorrow.

Maybe you do all of the above depending on your mood and the context. Well done. It’s important to be flexible and have a variety of strategies.

What Not to Do

To maximize your misery, the one thing you must NOT do is accept and experience the current moment. This is lately known as practicing “mindfulness,” wherein the alert, aware practitioner allows thoughts, feelings, and sensations to pass through consciousness without internally passing judgment or even commenting.

Mindfulness is about noticing the nuances of this moment without the additional burden of applying values, meaning, or even language to the experience.

Don’t be fooled by the recent popularity of this mindfulness business, especially in psychotherapy and self-help communities.

And don’t be misled by the centuries of disciplined meditation that Buddhist monks practiced in order to learn how to restrain their wandering mind so that they could live in a perpetual state of alert acceptance of this moment.

When’s the last time one of those monks had to deal with the thorny question of how much milk to pour in their cereal?

I hope you get my point.

Get Out of Here. Now.

So the general strategy for maximizing your misery is to run from your experience of this moment. Get out of the here and now. Hurry to the there and then.

Live in the past, mentally jump to a parallel universe, or fly into the future.

The last is my personal favorite skill, and the subject of this post: awfulizing. Also called catastrophizing.

To catastrophize is to assume the outcome of this moment will be much worse than it actually will be, or even could realistically be.

You know that friend of your that always thinks that something awful is about to happen? Same one who shoots every idea out of the sky with an exhaustive list of what could go wrong with any plan. Channel their restless and savage pessimism for this skill.

Whatever is going on in your life, good or bad, it’s about to get a lot worse. Whatever is working, won’t. And when things go wrong, they will go very wrong. It will be your own private hell on earth.

Repeat this daily to enjoy a lifetime of crippling anxiety.

Since anger is sometimes a secondary response to anxiety, if you want more anger, create more anxiety.

Treat every minor setback or problem as a devastating, life-altering disaster.

Exaggerate whatever challenges you’re facing until they’re unrecognizable.

For example, if you need to make a phone call and might be on hold for twenty minutes, convince yourself before you dial that you’ll probably be on hold for five hours, have a nervous breakdown halfway through, be hospitalized against your will, taken to court, lose everything you own, and die soon thereafter, of course suffering in some horrid way.

Imagine how angry you’ll be at the company you’re calling, the VP in charge of customer service, and the specific representative you speak to if you’re convinced that the result of you being on hold during this phone call is that you will soon perish in a manner that secures your spot on The Hundred Worst Ways to Die.

PRO TIP

To streamline your awfulizing, just consult the following list and insert each qualifier into each statement about your future:

Horrible

Awful

A disaster

The most horrendous

The worst

The most worst (I’m hoping this one catches on).

CASE STUDY: KEN’S FENDER BENDER

Ken was sitting in gridlock on his way home from his last appointment, at The Vanity Spa for Rich Narcissists. He was relieved because, just today, he had met his quota for the quarter. He had freaked out at a few months ago, as he did at the beginning of every quarter, when he saw his updated quota. “It always seemed to be updated upwards – This quota system is a disaster waiting to happen,” Ken thought.

And that’s when his car was bumped from behind. Ken and the other driver pulled over and exchanged information. No one was hurt, and the damages were minor. Even the information exchange was uneventful. They both had current insurance and IDs. Ken got back in his car and could barely contain his runaway thoughts.

“Sure this was just a minor fender-bender,” he decided, “and they bumped me, but this will ruin me. My insurance company probably won’t believe that it isn’t my fault and will try to charge me to repair the other car’s damages. Then everyone will take me to court and I’ll lose everything.”

His internal disaster continued. “I’ll have to sell the house to pay my attorney’s fees and will still lose the case. I mean, I might as well already go turn myself in at the nearest maximum security prison. And I never learned to fight. Damn, I’m going to be locked up any day now and don’t even know how to make a shank. I’ll be dead in a week.”

Ken was so livid at the prospect of his upcoming death sentence that he ran to the other car, still parked in behind him, and yelled into the windshield, “Your stupid driving is gonna get me stabbed to death!”

What You Can Learn from Ken

Ken jumped from one conclusion to another, each one exponentially more horrid. He’d be blamed for the accident, get sued, lose his house, be sentenced to incarceration and murdered in prison.

And he responded to each as though it was already a reality. This brought the future horror into the present moment and provided ample fuel for Ken’s misery.

Students of all levels can benefit from this simple demonstration. To create more misery, convince yourself that the future consequences of this moment will be more than you can bear.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next installment of The Complete Guide to Misery!

[thecompleteguidetomisery]

Gratitude is for Quitters

Welcome to The Complete Guide to Misery!

Each post in this absurd series will promote a different form of human suffering and encourage readers to adopt self-destructive habits that will bring them mountains of anguish.

This silliness is intended to be satire, not self-help. However, if readers’ lives are enriched in some way beyond laughter, all the better.

Despite the attempts at humor, this is not meant to make light of the suffering of blood-filled people by the world’s myriad forms of abuse.

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Please assume that you have free will.

Of all the choices you make every day, one of the most important is: where do you focus your attention?

Because how you focus, and on what, make an enormous difference in your quality of life.

Attentional focus is also one of the easiest things to change. Following is an exercise to illustrate the point.

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Take a moment to think about something to which you’re looking forward.

Maybe you can’t wait to get together with friends you haven’t seen in a while.

Or are eagerly anticipating seeing the leaves change colors.

Or fantasize about your upcoming trip to Cancun. Or is it Cozumel? I can never remember which is which.

And notice what focusing on an enjoyable future does to your mood.

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Now take a moment and focus on an aggravating or disappointing moment from your past.

You might remember the person who didn’t say, “Thank you” after you held open a door for them.

Or that time when you tripped and dropped an arm load of dishes.

Or when your least favorite cousin gave you a charley horse.

Now how’s your mood?

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Hopefully you got the point: changing where and on what you focus can alter your internal experience of this moment.

As you go about your day, notice where your attention automatically tends:

Do you concentrate on the past, present or future?

Do you focus your mental energy on yourself or others?

Do you zero in on things you can control or those things you can’t?

Do you revel in tasks and accomplishments or feelings and relationships?

Whatever your tendencies, it’s important to know you have options. You can choose to focus on something different and, in time, it will become as much of an unconscious habit as your current practice.

Optimistic types fool themselves by focusing on a positive future that they can control, while maintaining an awareness of their place in the wider social context, and are alert to the needs of other human beings. They claim it is part of their larger mission of being “happy.”

Is it just me or does that sound exhausting? Planning and thinking ahead, delaying gratification, monitoring progress, being mindful of others, showing empathy, etc.

No, let’s leave all that happiness for the uptight, obsessive types who have too much to prove and don’t have anything else to do with their lives.

Much better to filter out that naïve nonsense and get right to heart of the matter. Because you don’t want to convince yourself that life is going well only to have the universe kick you in the teeth.

Better to disregard the positive and concentrate on the miserable. And that brings us to our first skill: Filtering.

To filter means to discount any evidence contrary to your beliefs. And the beliefs you’ll want to protect are those that maximize misery.

Look for trouble.

Mentally note anything that goes wrong in your life and how miserable every setback makes you.

Overlook the hundred things that go right every day.

Take for granted all the stuff that works in your world.

Remember: Gratitude is for quitters!

Encircle yourself with negative people who can help you notice and remember all the ways the world has treated you horribly.

Or just continue to spend time on social media. Those algorithms will take care of the rest.

In summary, the most effective filter to increase your misery is anything that makes you a victim.

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CASE STUDY: KEN’S DAY AT THE PARK

Ken got together with friends at a local park one afternoon. On the way there, someone cut him off in traffic. He got to the party without any other problems and made good time doing so.

When he arrived, he was greeted by some buddies, who helped him carry and setup his Foosball table. He played a couple rounds of Cornhole and, like a lot of people, wondered for just a second about the person who named that game.

A new person arrived, was introduced to Ken, and gave him a bland, distracted greeting.

Ken got back to the festivities and crushed a few games of Foosball. He had an amazing dinner of ribs, corn-on-the-cob, baked potatoes, and pie thanks to everyone’s collective contributions.

While he and his buddies sat around their campfire and chatted about this-and-that, the guy with the lousy greeting disagreed with Ken’s point about the negative economic impact of COVID on small businesses. The moment passed, the party continued and Ken left a couple hours later when things were winding down.

The next morning, Ken made his weekly call to his parents. He knew they were looking forward to hearing about his time at the picnic.

He appreciated their interest in his social life, but felt like they didn’t understand him. They’d admitted to him multiple times over the years that they didn’t understand all his misery.

When his parents asked how he enjoyed the picnic, Ken said, “Oh, what a waste of time. First, there was this jerk-face who cut me off on the road. Ohhh, that idiot made me so mad. People like that shouldn’t be allowed to get a license.

“But that’s not even the best part. Next was this new guy who totally ignored my greeting and was about as exciting as a dishrag. Why did some like that even bother coming to a party if they aren’t going to try to have a good time? I hate people like that; they shouldn’t be allowed at parties.

“Oh, and then, and then, the kicker was that this same dishrag thought he was suddenly some kind of expert on economics and attacked me about some stuff I was saying about small businesses. People like that jerk always seem to have something to say. He’s just a know-it-all. Damn, people like that just make me so mad. He should know when to keep his stupid mouth shut. Seriously, I’ve got a subscription to The Economist, for Pete’s sake and I’ve actually read some of the short articles. I mean, I own a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and plan to read it one day. What has the dishrag ever done?”

Ken was proud of himself for giving his parents such a complete picture of his day.

**

What We Can Learn from Ken

Ken narrowed his memory of the picnic to the parts he didn’t like and framed himself as the victim each time. He told his parents he was cut off by another driver, ignored upon introduction, and intellectually attacked by a new arrival to his social circle.

Ken didn’t mention, because he didn’t notice it in the first place, what went right, such as the entire drive to the party except the moment he was cut off, freedom to gather with friends, blessing to have people to help with the Foosball table, chance to play Cornhole, opportunity to meet a new person, and joy of sharing a great meal.

Ken demonstrated his expert-level misery skills by repeating how others made him mad. This disavowal of responsibility is one of the sine qua non for a lifetime of misery.

Please note Ken’s relentless consistency. He framed himself as the victim and blamed others for making him mad three times in that short tale.

Remember readers: the key to lasting change is practice, practice, practice!

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Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next installment of The Complete Guide to Misery!