What happens when you wrap excuse, escape, entitlement and exaggerated self-importance into one taco? This alliterative junk food has many names.
Psychology, the gentlemanly cigar-smokin uncle that it is, calls it bias. Self-help, the nauseous, processed food that it is, calls it the story you tell yourself. Of course, I, the cosmic vastness that is my vocabulary, call it bullshit.
Every century has floated in a boatload of it. And has believed the people producing and propagating this bovine belief-system across centuries are out there somewhere.
Obviously, it can’t be you. It’s why you have this constant feeling that everything is messed up outside you. And to quietly believe you are not responsible for this mess is the secret. The secret to delude yourself. The secret to happiness. The secret to not feel like shit.
In its simplest form, this belief-system takes the characteristic of self-pity. Self-pity is a love affair with yourself. What’s loony about it, is that there’s one person you definitely don’t want finding out about this affair:
You.
Your boss a wackamole guacamole, and everyone working with you nutjobs with the IQ of lab mice. But have you ever paused to think, what if you were actually terrible at your job?
This isn’t about taking responsibility or fancy philosophies. It’s about coming to recognize how unspecial you are. And from thereon, to carefully listen to your rants and advice to everyone else. Because inside every piece of advice you want to dole out to clean up the world are your own limitations. The bias is a validation. The story, a cover-up. The bullshit, the bullshit.
Here’s a corollary of this system: you don’t deserve anything.
What you think you deserve is your expectations of people. It’s the bedtime story you have told yourself to stay in bed and do nothing. The universal taco that connects us all is our idea of kindness. You think you are the definition of utmost goodness and that most people are jackasses. But let’s face it. Kindness is the bullshit demeanor you have been putting up to get people to like you.
These realizations are hard. What’s harder is to stop bullshitting yourself after these realizations. We think the world’s a burning pile of lies. But the bigger lie is the one you have been telling yourself on its behalf. The sooner you figure out the difference, the truer you can be to yourself. And the sooner you can get out of the toilet you have been living out of. That’s the only secret.
Meditations 