People who consider it in their interest that no rules inhibit or limit their behavior find the pleasures of their excesses short-lived and incomplete. Why else would they keep repeating them so neurotically?
Archive for the ‘neurosis’ Category.
Whatever happened to harmonic dissonance? People seem oblivious to their not even having tried to merit the lofty attributes their egos require them to ascribe to themselves.
The problem with self-delusion is not that you are hiding shameful actions and qualities from other people (simple lying and deception take care of that) or even from yourself (a sense of mounting dread prevents this from occurring) but rather that your unwillingness to see yourself for what you are eliminates the only means whereby you might regain your bearings before that sense of mounting dread drives you into outright insanity in order for you to escape conclusively the truth about yourself.
Despite appearances, most people’s behavior is not irrational; it’s neurotic, i.e., dysfunctional in rational ways. But because we imagine that certain people—most of them, in fact–are irrational, we solicitously counter their bizarreness with our light-wand of rationality, to no avail, because their maladjustment is spawned not in the intellectual faculty but in the awful chaotic swirl of modern life. I think we ought to reverse the terms of the process and purposely act irrationally in order to snap such people out of their neuroses. The next time you run into that smarmy little self-deprecator who works down the hall, ask, “Why did you dye your hair blue?” and instantly leave the room. The baffled neurotic, imploding with uncertainty and doubt, will then take a couple of baby steps along the path to eventual normalcy by hastening to find a mirror so he can verify his hair color, then wondering why you might have spoken so strangely. (Point #1: Your insanity acts like a cattle prod, shocking his malady into the open.) The second time you see the patient, offer this assurance: “I don’t blame you for killing your wife. Your secret is safe with me”; and then go away again. After this encounter, the subject will begin to objectify his thinking as he tries to figure out what in the hell your problem is. (Point #2: Objectification is the sine qua non of emotional salubrity.) Keep this going, and the day will come when you two collide at the water cooler and the former human ant colony says, “You don’t play badminton, do you? I just took it up and it looks like I’ve got a real talent for it!”
The problem is not that people shy away from doing what they need to do (because they’re afraid to fail or look silly). The problem is that they automatically shy away.
There are actually people who resent children for being free of the responsibilities that impinge upon their own (the adults’) ego-satisfaction and pleasure-getting. In fact there are adults who hate children for this.
A distrustful person only imagines that he distrusts others. What he knows—but won’t confront, and thus doesn’t know that he knows—is that he doesn’t trust himself to manage the complications that develop during relationships. The imaginary faux-distrust of which he is aware, therefore, is a protective device allowing him to slip-slide around on the surface of things.
Apathy is the last exit on the highway to Depression. You had better stop and get some gas.
Carrying a grudge is tantamount to feeding your soul into a cheese shredder, not to mention that you’re aggravating and perpetuating the injury inflicted by your victimizer. I am sure that if he knew how you’ve unmanned yourself, he’d laugh his ass off. Is that what you wanted to happen when you swore your vengeance?
Euphoria smothers prudence. I drank so much whiskey that now I’m an alcoholic. I overeat so much that I’ve become obese. I have collected 15,000 books, 3500 LPs, tape cassettes and CDs, and 3200 movies. I guess I’ll stop getting carried away when they carry me away.
“Busy” does not mean never resolving anything so that you are always out of time and breath, under the gun, harried and hot, in order to turn people off from asking you to do something else while at the same time enhancing your image of being heroically overtaxed. “Busy” means having more legitimate chores to take care of than you have the time to do them in, as distinct from acting as though you’re doing them.
The Cell Phone’s Connected to the Self-Image Bone. [2002] Just about everything people do in public these days is intended to “send a message” or “make a statement.” The first generation of cell phone users, whipping the little chirping gadget out of their shoulder bags, purses and jacket side-pockets, were saying to the world, “Look how damned important I am!” Today’s cell-phoner takes a different approach, because more people own cell phones now, and consequently everybody’s getting more calls. This enables the user to announce on the whip-out, via body language and facial expression, that, “I’m connected to such a far-flung elaborate network of contacts that one or another of them always needs to check in with me!” Incidentally, the cell phone today is perhaps only half the size it was during the first generation, and with that in mind we may propose the following theorem: Thompson’s Law of Cell Phones: Egos have ballooned in volume in direct proportion as cell phones have shrunk.
One way you can identify solipsistic people is by the wide-ranging variety of their grotesque facial expressions coupled with their manic head-tossing.
We’ve got to give people a little sympathy, even if they’re obnoxious or clearly wigged out. If we don’t, they’ll never get better because they won’t be able to relax, and their not getting better will continue to pose a problem for us. Captain Qweeg was a ravening neurotic, but his clear-thinking ambitious officers, in refusing to cut him slack, demonstrated that they were nastier than the bacteria feeding on the mold that forms on corpses’ anuses.
From the age of 9 to the age of 13, I was the oldest kid in my neighborhood. None of the other children challenged me, and they all did what I told them to, so I became accustomed to feeling good about myself, albeit without knowing it, for being the neighborhood tyrant—I was never a bully. In the second year of high school the challenges started coming, and I, who had been deprived of learning how to deal with opposition, became an appeaser, a so-called people-pleaser, rather than making a habit of rising to the moment. Thereafter I spent decades feeling like a coward, despising myself, and compensating in various disastrous ways. In my late thirties, writing the first section of my autobiography (the only section I’ve attempted), I figured all this out, and starting then my life and attitude improved tremendously. The factor that kept me from annihilating myself during those years was my profession as a salesman, which induced me to acquire the knowledge I needed to succeed in give-and-take.
Numerous fellow Americans would despise their country less if they loved themselves more.
If you’ve never sweated the small stuff, you would probably find clinical depression to be greatly to your liking, for it’s a condition in which you never sweat any size stuff, not even whether to get out of bed or not—ever.
If you think you might be clinically depressed, my advice is that you save the cost of doctors’ bills and especially of pharmaceuticals—which the shrinks have waiting for you when you walk in for your first appointment—and rather than travel that route launch a systematic exposure to classical music in all of its complicated healing efficacy. Start with early Baroque and commit to memory the period’s myriad structural formulas as you listen your way forward to Bach, double back to Gregorian Chant (again ingesting all the formats), then go back to Bach again and keep on keeping on. The point is to internalize music’s structural designs until you can actually trace the individual courses of events—two or three or four of them simultaneously—within the music itself. By now you’re ready to plunge into opera. After a little over a year of doing this my spirits lifted and the light returned to my soul as the music operated on my nervous system through my sensibility in a most musical way I’m sure the composers never could have dreamed of, by “resolving” my “dissonance” and harmonizing my interior chords.
Mondo Cane has the appalling consequence of leading people to lie when they are presented with evidence that they’ve wound up doing the opposite of what they started out to do. They reply that no, this is the right thing after all, you’re mistaken, night is day, black is white. And thus the universities absurdly continue to maintain that they are “havens of free speech” and “arenas of contending ideas” though they have long since stopped being either, while the secondary and primary schools continue to call themselves “educational” institutions when in truth they are destroying our children’s minds.
I have given ample evidence of believing that a much greater number of Americans than could possibly be considered normal, afflicted with poor or no mental agility (a consequence of miseducation), the absence of viable normative standards and a dizzyingly kinetic and mobile society, display both a profound sense of inadequacy and a mortifying fear of acknowledging that dilemma lest they unmask themselves as being wriggling little worms. These lamentable cases are consigned to decades of needless corrosive anxiety while the cognoscenti debate the best means of curing them. I say to hell with that. The sufferers are suffering because of highly charged words as much as anything. If we call “neurosis” something like “covering up your fear” and go on from there—in other words re-objectify their malady rather than continue to shame and scare the bejesus out of them—, they will shed the fear and begin to go to work on themselves.