Category: Wyatt’s Words

If you haven’t read my hit post titled: Charity, Brought to you by Facebook! from yesterday then here’s your chance.

Ok, all caught up?  Good.

A few breezy, late-breaking developments:

1) I was banned from Facebook (for a full 24 hours!) for calling someone a “bully”.

Before I even wrote my post above, I explained how real bullies brag about their humble, HUMBLE charity donations to make you feel crappy about yourself (text below).

Apparently Facebook finds that offensive and has put me in a grown-up time-out, because that’s the world we live in now.

Of course it’s self-reported. Facebook doesn’t monitor profiles for buzzwords or unusual activity then shut people down.

Hell, if they did, the 14 people killed by terrorists in San Bernardino might be alive today.

tfw you accidentally take a picture with the front facing camera

You have to *report* something to Facebook as offensive, then I guess some tribunal body reviews it, then you get put in time out from being able to post.

Mind you, you’re still able to access everything, but heaven forbid you post something for 24 hours.

Needless to say, I think we all know who “reported” me calling someone a bully as “offensive”, which is a sentence I never thought I’d have to say, it sounds super doubleplusungood.

2) More of Dana Amireh’s (Gretchen Wieners’s) friends have responded — and boy, do they have some doozies! (pardon the asterisks, even pottymouths like me have to abide by language restrictions sometimes)

warning: long-azz image ahead, skip past then you can go back to read

Seung-Hui Cho over here wants to shave off my eyebrows to protect an attractive girl he wants to impress.

well hell, it’s cheaper than threading

Ollie Amireh, who is prob related to her (I know “Amireh” is common like “Smith”, but stick with me here) posted an exquisite response calling me “sick” and “twisted”, telling me I’m “disrespectful” and “hideous” (but not in reference to appearance, thank God, I couldn’t live with myself otherwise), with “cold, dead, black insides”, a “negative pr*ck”, all of which culminates in telling me to “remove myself from this world completely”.

thanks for the love, Ollie!

Funny how people with such a hard-on for charity are the first ones to basically tell someone to off themselves!

Sarah Amireh gets in on the action too, calling me “the absolute worst people” because of my name(?), a “sad lil gingerbread man” (the absolute worst Christmas carol), and “that douche canoe from Twitter” (god, I hope when I run away to the circus I’m introduced as such).

If you want to note some gender differences (and who doesn’t?) note the typical male response is coarse/fightin’ words, while the typical female response is a hack attempt at psychology coated in fake pity like a doodie-flavored cake pop.

Apparently people are still trying to dig up that whole attention-whorey meme after the Paris terrorist attacks that basically said “stop paying attention to this tragedy, bad things happen other places too!” because there’s no better way to memorialize those who laid dead on the floor of the Bataclan as “welp, sh*t happens”.

But back to gender differences.  There’s the other kind of male response that isn’t alpha, it’s beta in the most depressing way: desperate white-knighting.

Dalton Runberg (I think this might be a tie-in with the Trumbo movie) calls me a “piece of garbage human being”, “f*cking petty”, a “piece of sh*t” “d*ckbag”.

he sounds like a treat!

But the kicker is when web expert Dalton calls out my “stupid blog”, saying I have “no right to call anyone out for not being “humble” when [Wyatt] has an opinion blog with a URL that is literally just his name.”

oh sh*t, he caught me!  ABORT MISSION 

Apparently Dalton Runberg (former editor-in-chief of The Daily Collegian at Fresno State, now “web guy” with iHeartMedia) is so humble that he doesn’t have an opinion blog, just a site where he literally promotes himself: http://DaltonRunberg.com

You can’t blame a man for self-promotion or trying to get some, but when I want to please myself and feel I’m gonna get lucky I usually do it behind closed doors with Cetaphil and a box of Kleenex.

when you all excited but bae says “i can’t come over right now”

And speaking of masturbation, that’s what this all comes back to.

Publicly bragging about your charitable exploits to make others feel bad is a really disturbing form of masturbation.

That’s the opposite of what charity is supposed to be.

Charity is giving to give, not to get.

If you don’t get enough enjoyment from the act of giving, then do everyone a favor: don’t give.

There’s an old-timey saying I just invented that says “the only people who should know about your charity work are the IRS and your Maker”.

Which makes it all the more gauche that recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced he was donating 99% of his income to charity because he had a kid, or something like that.

i’m sure if this was a gif, you’d see his left hand pumping up and down

Most people with kids will tell you that once they “pop out a unit” the last expense they want to worry about is charity. But then again, most people with kids don’t have net worths that rival the GDP of even the most profitable African dictatorships.

Bokassa literally spent 1/3 of the Central African Republic’s budget on his coronation — that’s ballsy

Good on Zuckerberg for amassing his fortune and for having a kid, mirroring the trajectory of most people around our age we went to school with minus the fortune part.

But that “charity initiative” he’s bragging about for his kid? It’s just a giant trust fund LLC so he doesn’t have to pay taxes on the majority of his fortune and can dispense his money most efficiently.

the arrow indicates where the money goes…and stays

I don’t fault him for that either. What I do fault is all the dishonesty about it.

Why not just claim that the taxes in this country are out of control and this is your only resort to avoid being penalized for amassing enormous wealth?

Why not shed light on the fact that it’s your money, that you’d like to do with it what you see fit, and it’s none of the government’s business?

Why not point out the fact that you’re worth more to the IRS dead than alive?

Because you don’t get “positive vibes” from calling out a fakakta tax system or getting into the depths of corporate structure.

What you *do* get is tons of likes, hearts, stars (why don’t we just skip all these meaningless indicators of approval and go straight to a little fellatio emoji you can click?) for bragging about your charity.

explain to your grandkids you didn’t amass actual dollars as they’re waiting in line outside the Chan-Zuckerberg soup kitchen but you got a sh*tton of likes!

Which brings me to basics shouting from the Facebook rooftops about their charity work.

Exhibit A: this girl Hailey Mayo, who made an unctuous Facebook post about all the charity she did in a day.

Give her a medal!

Give her ALL the medals.

She did all this charity yet still had enough time at the end of the day to write an extraordinarily complex public post detailing that specific charity.

Think of how many more handicapped transgender orphans would’ve been helped if she spent the hour detailing her charity efforts doing something to help them instead.

“i don’t care if you don’t have a can opener to crack open that dollar store soup, i’m too busy Instagramming me unloading the cans from the back of my Highlander”

I have no qualms with people bragging about their accomplishments.

But charity isn’t an accomplishment.

It’s our duty as human beings.

You don’t see people bragging about the fact that they made a bowel movement *in* the toilet this time on facebook.

It’s your duty as a good person to not just squat and crap wherever you like just as much as it is to be charitable.

For my more simple readers, please don’t confuse the two and try to flush a can of green beans in your Kohler while popping a squat in a Salvation Army kettle. I’ll be impressed you made it through the coin slot, but the bell ringer won’t be.

only a FAKE bell ringer would wear a vest saying “I AM A “BELL RINGER””

Bragging about your charity while claiming to be humble is like bragging about your weight loss while double-fisting turkey legs.

I pointed that out as follows:

Hailey Mayo’s do-gooder-partner-in-crime, Dana Amireh, snapped, bless her.

I’d be upset too if I was the Gretchen Wieners to Regina George.

Unsatisfied with her dotty replies to everyone who responded to my post, she took matters into her own hands, making a public post calling what I did “bullying”.

Let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge: guys don’t do this.

Guys don’t brag about their charity work unless they’re trying to get laid (*cough* Richard Branson *cough*).

Girls fold charity into their social standing, along with manipulating their less-cute friends to do things for them.

and into *staying* less-cute than them

Girls are also more effective bullies than guys could ever be.

Guys will beat you up.

Girls are psychological.

Drunk guys punch.

Drunk girls tell you they were never your friend to begin with.

If guys are a bunch of brawling Irishmen after a soccer match, girls are Aum Shinrikyo.

guys: “no hard feelings, let’s have a pint”

girls: “i will make sure you die from the inside out”

Dana claims to be a victim of “bullying” (while, you know, actually bullying).

But how?

A really effective form of bullying is for a bully to claim they’re a victim while shaming everyone “beneath” them because it leaves no fingerprints.

As the recipient of that kind of covert bullying, you feel bad about yourself and you don’t know why.

You also feel bad for the person claiming to be a victim.

It’s manipulative – when it works.

Almost as manipulative as claiming that you’re giving away 99% of your wealth – to your own tax-dodging trust fund.

Exciting update: there’s a part 2 to this story!

As a culture we’re approaching a point (with increasing speed) where more speech is actually leading to a worsening of society. There is little delineating anymore between thought and speech. Nothing is off limits, nothing is left better off unsaid. Self-censorship is at an all time low. Unfortunately the florid prose of centuries past has given way to a coarsening of what comes out of our mouths. If there are no guardians at the gates, what’s the point of having gates at all?

More speech leads to louder speech and louder speech leads to only the most simplistic, worst things being heard. In fact, that’s how free speech brings about its self destruction – through the zenith of its proliferation.

More darkly, the more that speech is allowed the more that people want to censor. “You can’t say that”, “you hurt my feelings”, “your speech creates a climate of [insert unsavory thing here]”. Speech is racist now, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, agoraphobic.

Phobia.

Fear.

What is there to fear in speech besides someone else being correct?

Why should that be feared?

By allowing speech to be free we’re not understanding *its* limitations, but ours. More things appear to be taboo the more that things are uncovered. We’re less comfortable with more uncharted territory. A “naughty word” used to be representative of sex. Now naughty words are no longer sexual, there’s “hate” speech. There are certain words that “represent hate”.

Which is patently ridiculous. Words represent nothing but a series of letters and a clinical definition. Intent, tone, context, audience – THOSE can be hateful, prurient. A change in tone can turn a cold statement into a pickup line. A sharpness of voice can change an academic description of terminology into a racist slur meant to cause injury.

Text culture places more undue burden on speech. It takes the emotions out of words, the tone, and leaves it to our imagination, which is usually a horrible place to go. It’s made us understand more about what was said (it’s right in front of us) but pay less attention (we don’t have to impolitely ask to repeat, it’s right in front of us). It’s made us robotic, turning previously face-to-face human interaction into robotic, quick phrases.

Which explains why emojis are so popular. People want to impart *feeling*. There’s a reason why hieroglyphics, cave paintings, oral histories, and ritual re-enactment were one of the earliest forms of communication – we have to “monkey see, monkey do” with each other to know what the f*ck is going on.

The more we communicate, the better we are in the long term. The more we talk, the bigger our brains get. The less limitations we have as humans.

Freedom of speech means no limitations.

Without it, how could I be saying what I’m saying now?

I’m already bored with the 2016 election and it’s not even 2016 yet.

The only thing making it semiexciting is Trump. At least he has a sense of humor unlike the rest of these buffoons.

i will never not love this

How do we keep putting these smarmy, harping scolds up there?

Rand Paul consistently looks seconds away from shi**ing his pants.

after the campaign, he can do infomercials.  “this toilet paper is the GOLD standard”

Carly Fiorina is, without a doubt, the “can I speak to the manager?” lady.

“what do you mean the chowder in bread bowl isn’t gluten free?!”

Also, Jeb Bush is there.

“can i go home yet?”

Instead of wishing we could remove Rubio’s pitifully small brain and replace it with Cruz’s, let’s focus on a more realistic candidate:

Me.

That’s right, folks.

Instead of bothering with how many ways Hillary can and will screw this up for herself, let’s focus on the future — 2028, to be exact, when thanks to being just a couple months from being eligible to run in 2024 (thanks, MOM) I’d be able to continue the inexorably slow and painful path of driving this country into the ground the RIGHT way.

if any of you love me you’ll get me this hat for christmas…i’m sorry, for “Starbucks(TM) red cup day”

Why double, then triple the national debt and feel like you have nothing to show for it? Is your life any better now that we’re more in debt to the Chinese than a drunk British gambler at a Macau casino?

Of course it’s not. Your life sucks. You spend half your time scrolling through other people’s Instagram feeds and the other half working at a sh*t job…that is, if you even have one.

i just reposted a tweet without attribution, am i the fat jew yet

If we’re going to have a debt equivalent to the age of consent in most states (way to go Mississippi) times a trillion, shouldn’t we all have hoverboards or something?

the next person who calls this a “hoverboard” deserves to be stabbed by ben carson

My campaign promise is to only increase the debt if I can buy really cool stuff. Like a space-age capital city in the middle of the country so it’s easier to get to (I’m looking at you, Lebanon Kansas) or a fleet of supersonic jets to get you from LA to NY in less time than one episode of Grey’s Anatomy and the subsequent crying spell.

Otherwise what’s the damn point? Underfunded entitlements? Wars with countries that don’t rhyme with “Trance”? You can’t join the mile-high club and land before climax with any of those!

“can you stop using my armrest before i punch you in the testes?”

While we’re on the topic of sex — I can promise there will be no sex scandals under my administration unless America can be proud of who I’m shtupping in the Oval Office. Clinton only lied because…well, have you seen Monica? There was another rumor that he and Barbra Streisand did it in the Lincoln Bedroom on Election Night 92, which goes to show he should’ve been impeached on taste alone. You’ll only see me in supermodels in my administration, but tbh running the country leaves little time for anything except a quick jerk between meetings.

When it comes to women’s issues, I agree — they have them. Protip: if a woman says “I’m fine”, run for the hills! *ducks stiletto flung at the stage*

“this is a chart of the number of times you’ve used your period as an excuse.  if you were telling the truth, you must be 164 years old” *ducks second stiletto*

I don’t think illegal immigration will be an issue by 2028 because the country will either become a client state of Mexico or there won’t even be jobs for illegals anymore. I’m not in favor of amnesty, but for sending us 20 million people can we at least have Baja California? We’d add like 7 beach cities *and* solve the expensive housing problem in SoCal.

I have a very proactive foreign policy. You remember that scene in V for Vendetta where they talked about wars in “Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria before and after, Sudan”? That was weak compared to what I have in mind. Any country without a Starbucks is on my sh*tlist. My apologies in advance to Italy, but how else am I supposed to truly feel basic when I go to Rome and re-enact the Lizzie McGuire Movie scene by scene?

someday i’d like to serenade myself *outside* of my bathroom

I’m also for decreasing the size of government. In my administration, I will specifically fire one useless individual: the press secretary. Why let some schmuck go out there to answer questions from the press? I can do that myself just fine. And why does the press get to ask questions? Why not just make it a random panel of 10 random Americans who can ask whatever they want once a week? If you can’t face a tough question about what kind of underwear you wear (none) how can you face Putin (the only current world leader who will still be in power by 2028)?

when he say “netflix and chill” but you know he ain’t got a netflix account

See folks? This whole presidenting thing (it’s a verb, I said it’s a verb, I’ll issue an executive order to make it a verb, which is 221 less executive orders than Obama’s issued) isn’t that hard. Our country (“Estados Unidos”, because apparently every candidate has to dribble out a few lines in Spanish to satisfy loud interest groups that don’t actually care about Mexican people) deserves a leader that believes in small government (but increases the size of it), a strong national defense (then wastes it), and is pro-life (but doesn’t do crap about abortion, which is somehow still a political issue).

If you’re all going to elect someone who promises the moon and can’t even get us there again, why not make it me?

the candidate you want to have too many glasses of wine with!

It’s hard for me to speak the truth sometimes to people I love. In a way, it’s easier to tell it to complete strangers. For some reason they just seem more forgiving – they don’t know the experiences you’ve been through (which usually would engender some sort of sympathy I guess?) but when you get rejected by complete strangers the rejection is, at the surface, less painful. It’s harder to get rejected by someone close to you.

It’s harder still when you know you gave them every reason to reject you.

We should commission stories from people who live through suicide attempts just to see the last emotion they feel before they pull the trigger. Is it euphoric? Is it numb? Maybe if we understood that better, we could help more people who get to that point. Maybe we can simulate that feeling right before and give it to them in a healthy way. Maybe in the future we can just download emotions from a cloud-based network, 3D printing them in flesh with neural tissue and synthesizing the chemical reactions behind them.

I always knew right before I was going to barf because I’d get a weirdly salty taste in my mouth. It was never enough for me to be able to warn people around me. I barfed in the back of my parent’s car on a trip to LA to see the Hercules premiere as a kid. I barfed on my teacher, Ms. Matson’s, shoes in 2nd grade. I barfed when I got food poisoning from Giulia’s, an Italian restaurant in West Fresno. I think I probably barf more now than when I was a kid, probably at a rate of about once per year. At 3 meals a day which I definitely don’t eat, that means that 1 out of 1095 meals hits the porcelain before its time. That’s a pretty good rate I guess. I’d feel really bad if I bought an expensive meal and then threw it up.

Sometimes we don’t realize the kind of underlying situations that create how we feel. That’s why we feel hopeless or depressed or euphoric. I don’t want to understand why I’m euphoric, I just want to feel it. If I rechecked why, I’ll probably find a reason I shouldn’t be and then stop feeling euphoric.

I wonder how that guy who drove through the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market felt. I wonder if he was rejected by his friends and family. I wonder how he felt, knowing that strangers knew the truth about what happened sooner than the ones he loved. I wonder if he felt suicidal. I wonder if he knew what a cloud-based network or 3D printing was. I wonder if he threw up. I wonder how he felt having a meal again with produce from a farmer’s market.

I wonder if he ever felt happy again.

In the future, we can download emotions and all of these concerns will seem as trivial to us as remembering the crank the engine on the Mercer before we drive to the market is today.

The only thing we have to worry about is getting there in one piece.

It’s hard for me to speak the truth sometimes to people I love. In a way, it’s easier to tell it to complete strangers. For some reason they just seem more forgiving – they don’t know the experiences you’ve been through (which usually would engender some sort of sympathy I guess?) but when you get rejected by complete strangers the rejection is, at the surface, less painful. It’s harder to get rejected by someone close to you.

It’s harder still when you know you gave them every reason to reject you.

We should commission stories from people who live through suicide attempts just to see the last emotion they feel before they pull the trigger. Is it euphoric? Is it numb? Maybe if we understood that better, we could help more people who get to that point. Maybe we can simulate that feeling right before and give it to them in a healthy way. Maybe in the future we can just download emotions from a cloud-based network, 3D printing them in flesh with neural tissue and synthesizing the chemical reactions behind them.

I always knew right before I was going to barf because I’d get a weirdly salty taste in my mouth. It was never enough for me to be able to warn people around me. I barfed in the back of my parent’s car on a trip to LA to see the Hercules premiere as a kid. I barfed on my teacher, Ms. Matson’s, shoes in 2nd grade. I barfed when I got food poisoning from Giulia’s, an Italian restaurant in West Fresno. I think I probably barf more now than when I was a kid, probably at a rate of about once per year. At 3 meals a day which I definitely don’t eat, that means that 1 out of 1095 meals hits the porcelain before its time. That’s a pretty good rate I guess. I’d feel really bad if I bought an expensive meal and then threw it up.

Sometimes we don’t realize the kind of underlying situations that create how we feel. That’s why we feel hopeless or depressed or euphoric. I don’t want to understand why I’m euphoric, I just want to feel it. If I rechecked why, I’ll probably find a reason I shouldn’t be and then stop feeling euphoric.

I wonder how that guy who drove through the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market felt. I wonder if he was rejected by his friends and family. I wonder how he felt, knowing that strangers knew the truth about what happened sooner than the ones he loved. I wonder if he felt suicidal. I wonder if he knew what a cloud-based network or 3D printing was. I wonder if he threw up. I wonder how he felt having a meal again with produce from a farmer’s market.

I wonder if he ever felt happy again.

In the future, we can download emotions and all of these concerns will seem as trivial to us as remembering the crank the engine on the Mercer before we drive to the market is today.

The only thing we have to worry about is getting there in one piece.

Sometimes you just feel so empty that you have to escape your body, look at yourself, and laugh at yourself for how empty you feel.

“i enjoying mysekf by the lake, but then i remembered instances of regret in my life, and pain i have caused others” — @bakkooonn

Expectations are a b*tch, aren’t they?

You have expectations for how your life will go and they’ll never materialize. You have expectations for how relationships will turn out and you wind up in divorce court arguing over just how few of the wedding gifts you’ll get to enjoy in your studio apartment.

no room for the breadmaker

With anxiety comes that small, shouting voice in your head saying “IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. IT’S GOING TO FALL APART AND BE A HOUSE OF CARDS AND YOU’RE GOING TO BE A LAUGHABLE EMBARASSMENT”. Normally this should be a voice of reasonable doubt, but the doubts are never reasonable because the expectations are never reasonable. You live on the edge of possibility forcing something to work because you want it to, deluded that desire is the only thing keeping you from the true thing you want.

But is it really ever what you want?

Is it what you think others want for you?

Do we know what we want?

Or are we just boundless electrons, hovering full of negative charge around a nucleus more immense than we could ever imagine and sparked with pure imagination?

Imagination helps you get through difficult times in the short term. It’s a safe place to escape to, a place where everything goes right when everything around you is going wrong.

In the long term it’s toxic, separating you from reality like an astronaut unmoored from the shuttle.

You’ll rewrite history, you’ll insert how you wish things went in place of how you see them going, you’ll cling to the good times and kick dust over the failures.

You’ll tear out every nerve ending in hopes to not feel it anymore, not feel you kicking the living crap out of your bruised and battered limp body for having expectations only to lose them.

I wish I could end with a thumbs up and a Colgate smile and say to have no expectations and that life will be wonderful.

for god’s sake of all the countries you could’ve asked to smile…

Because you won’t.

I won’t.

We’ll imagine and we’ll expect and we’ll set ourselves up for fantastic disappointment.

The only thing we can do is strap ourselves in for next time and relish that rollercoaster as part of being alive.

don’t worry, only one person’s been killed on thunder mountain!

I was talking to a friend of mine when she was saying that she couldn’t just “chill out”.

Being too lazy to offer to come by and “Netflix and chill”, I realized that maybe I could talk through this one.

this man is an american hero

After asking her what’s wrong, she said she felt like a “slacker because I’m sick” and that it was “[keeping] her from bringing [her] A game which was the plan”.

I don’t know what came over me, but I responded as follows:

that’s ok
you just have to respect the process

I paused, not knowing what the hell I just said.

i know it sounds weird
but you have to have some tolerance and acceptance of where you’re at
and then once you’re there, it will be easier to be more productive and move forward

What have I gotten myself into? This is completely incomprehensible. She knows it, I know it, dammit why didn’t I just drive over for some for some N’n’C?

sage advice

As she was describing how she felt, the first thing that struck me was how hard she was being on herself.

Normally I’m not one to criticize something like that. I usually feel that people should be harder on themselves than they already are.

that time peta fat-shamed doe

But it seemed so negative, and not in a pitying way either, more in a “I take full responsibility for this situation but that obviously doesn’t make it any less shitty way”.

And then it hit me – you’re most intolerant of yourself.

We spend a lot of time and even more air talking about intolerance towards this group, or that person, or some identity you didn’t even know existed until last week.

If you’re an intolerant person to others, chances are you’re more intolerant of yourself than anyone else – after all, you spend more time around yourself than anyone else. You being intolerant to yourself is the number one opportunity to be intolerant every single day, and that accumulates.

what are the other two?  THIS IS OUR WATERGATE PEOPLE

But what exactly is intolerance?

Impatience.

Criticism.

Holding yourself to an excessively higher standard than you hold others.

By the way – excessive self-love is a form of intolerance. It’s trying to heal wounds through a form of self-gratification. You shouldn’t love yourself, you should accept yourself to improve yourself.

too small to read sorry folks i can’t improve

Also, acceptance without change is intolerant of yourself.

Doesn’t sound like you’re not fully representing yourself.

Sounds like you’re doing a crap job as your own attorney in the court of life.

“WU TANG CLAN AINT NOTHIN TO–”

*judge furiously bangs gavel*

Being tolerant of yourself is acceptance and still trying to change.

The tolerance comes in when you accept the speed at which you move to change, the steps you have to take, the setbacks and the pushes forward.

Even if you’re, as she describes herself, a “spleenless mess mad scientist but shi**y scientist”.

People think analysis paralysis is the inability to make a decision. Too many options in front of you and you freeze up like a girl on a date when she hears your job title is “disruptor”.

But that’s not how your brain works. Your brain is constantly making decisions, mostly without you knowing. Millions of tiny decisions every second — where to look, the frequency of your breathing, where to put your hand (not on my leg, your brain just screwed up big time).

Actually, the problem is your brain is making too many decisions at once. Analysis paralysis is the equivalent of when your run out of RAM and you just want to google something quickly and Chrome is not being helpful rn and keeps giving you the rainbow wheel and you wish Apple and Google could just get the fug along as you feel like the child of these two divorced parents of tech.

So when a friend of mine told me analysis paralysis was ruining my life, I started thinking about exactly how much time and how much RAM I spend shuttling between decisions.

Let’s say I have 4GB of RAM like my increasingly-frustrating MacBook Air.

In the same way that my Air uses at least 1GB of RAM just with idle processes, my brain is using that with idle processes: breathing, blinking, you know…*not dying*.

Now say I’m just waking up in the morning.

I normally don’t bolt awake, it’s more of a gradual process for me that usually ends with falling back asleep multiple times.

But before my eyes open, my mind is building thought processes. What do I have to do today? How am I gonna get that done?

That takes up another, let’s say, 1GB of RAM.

I’m half outta RAM and I haven’t even moved.

Then let’s layer in some anxiety. The more I think about what has to get done, the more anxiety builds. I have to have an uncomfortable conversation with this person. That person is waiting to hear back from me. I can’t possibly get this done on time!

3GB.

And now I roll unhappily out of bed, trudge towards the shower, and begin my day.

That’s another half GB. 3.5 GB and I’m just in the shower. I’m not communicating with anyone, I’m scanning through emails on my phone as I towel off and plan out what I need to get done.

And since I’m running near capacity, I usually look at “what I need to get done” through the lens “of what do I feel like doing?”

I get set up with work and immediately have to close out of all the documents and programs on my computer. And as I start working, I’m fielding messages and calls, making notes on other things that need to get done, writing, planning, researching, doing, coordinating.

All of this and I’m not even having a face-to-face interaction with another human yet.

People have often thought IQ is RAM, but it’s more likely a combo between processing speed and overall memory. RAM is much more raw, base, and biological. Not getting enough sleep, being stressed or anxious, can all affect RAM.

And this is where analysis paralysis comes in.

When too much of your RAM is being consumed by too many decisions and trying to anticipate what’s next, you’re unable to process, or fully digest, the magnitude or results of the next decision you’re making.

You can’t think up that title for that article because your RAM is being burdened by everything else. It’s not that you just have this wealth of options to choose from and you can’t decide on one. It’s that you’re not fully grasping the consequences of this choice and you want to, but you’re low on RAM and until that clears up you’re unable to make a decision.

This is why decisions are easier to make in low stress situations. It’s why going home and “sleeping on it” is best. The more you try to think, overthink, and force-process something in the moment, the more everything else is grinding to a halt and your brain’s spinning that evil little rainbow wheel of death. When you’re hung up on one thing, you get hung up on EVERYthing. Similarly, the wheel doesn’t let you use Chrome PERIOD, even if just one window or tab is acting up.

So how do you solve this? And none of those eat better, sleep more, do meditation crap solutions. We know that. That’s like telling someone they should shower or drink water. Useless.

1) An important question to ask yourself before making a decision is: “how am I going to think about this choice in 5 years?” While you’re twiddling your thumbs over menu options, you’re probably not going to remember whether you had chicken or fish unless you’re on a certain Airplane. It helps to put things into perspective, and cuts out the ridiculous everyday decisions that stress the hell out of us for no good reason.

2) Make a choice based not on who you are right now, but who you want to be. Right now you’re a work in progress. Right now you might want to have an extra piece of cake. But you want to be someone who isn’t swayed so easily by delicious desserts. Turn down that cake and become that person.

3) Don’t choose the people-pleasing option. If you’re like me and this is your default, this will be the hardest to change. But it’s also eating up more memory than anything else.

DON’T…try to force the decision. This never works. There are indeed times in life where the buzzer rings and you need to have an answer, but chances are that this isn’t one of them. If you’re taking the time to think through it and that time is available, it’s likely not one of those decisions.

Anyway I’m stressed af/rn and have so much work to get done and it’s 3:30AM and…

…and I’m going to stay up until it gets done at a moderate pace because 1) I’m not going to remember being groggy in the AM in 5 years 2) I want to be a more productive person 3) I don’t want to go to bed now and have to wake up super early to make people happy.

Ahhh. Crisis averted.

I read an article today saying that the phrase “the middle class” was only mentioned 3 times in the last Republican debate that inexplicably took place in front of Air Force One, which would be like the Pope giving his address in Washington this week in front of a decommissioned former Popemobile.

“can I catch a ride while the next guy’s on vacation?”

Imagine doing a job interview while standing in front of your dad’s first car.

Yes, it’s cool that the Reagan Library has the real Air Force One there. But you don’t see the President give a speech in the lobby of the National Archives to talk about the Second Amendment.

Mostly because it would give too much cover for a very broke Nicolas Cage to steal and later pawn the Declaration.

Do you know how much it costs to lease a fleet of Rolls-Royces?

watch out lady, nicolas cage might try to have sex with you!

Speaking of things that don’t matter to “the middle class”, the phrase was only said three…THREE times in the debate.

To be fair, that’s 3 more times than “the middle class” needed to be uttered. It’s said far too much and means far too little.

You know what hurts “the middle class”? Talking about “the middle class”.

I don’t want to talk about “the middle class”, or class in general. I don’t want to separate people into class. I don’t believe that to be a principle in line with the values of America. Our whole gig is not upward mobility – it’s the freedom to be upwardly mobile.

Or to not be!

Maybe you’re more concerned with your art than profiting from it.

Good!

You’re pursuing your American Dream – just like the guy staying extra hours at work to get a promotion to earn a manager’s salary by the end of the year.

The more you identify with a class, the more you give others the right to pigeonhole you in that class.

“We’re middle class”, “we’re lower-middle-class”, “we’re upper-middle-class”. You notice how rarely people try to claim that they’re lower class or upper class?

we laugh audibly at your poverty!

There’s a fear of identifying as poor or wealthy.

In fact, instead of “lower class” we use “working class”.

“We’re poor…but we’re working!”

Or the great “I come from a working class background”.

Nobody cops to coming from a “lazy non-working background”.

But looking at the welfare rolls, there’s gotta be a lot of lazy, non-working people to explain the stratospheric increase.

yeah but she can still get it

Like “middle class, “working class” is more of a Soviet idea than an American one.

We lionize an ideal of “middle-class”…why? So we create more taxpayers to subsidize more wasteful government projects?

If you want to work, work. If you don’t want to work, don’t work. We won’t subsidize you. If you can’t work, then we will subsidize you – but have a good reason for it.

Sounds a lot like school, right? We’re slowing down the smart kids to keep pace with the slower kids, we’re ignoring the slower kids because we have to move the whole class along, and everyone gets ignored as the train moves forward.

This isn’t how America is supposed to work. We created a new country to function with participation, not drone along like a complex machine that nobody quite understands how it works and is easily exploitable by anyone who’s clever enough.

When you look at the less-obvious internal versus the obvious reasons why the Soviet Union disintegrated, an ungovernable and unwieldy government combined with widespread and victimless, diffuse, endemic corruption are at the top of the list.

but you wouldn’t know it by their jaunty propaganda posters

One could argue that when government works effectively, it becomes far too susceptible for one person to control. But the real problem is that when it works ineffectively, it becomes far too easy for many people to exploit.

We’ve tried paying government workers more to lure them from the private sector. We’ve tried hiring a purposefully-diverse government workforce. All while blaming decentralization for inefficiencies.

When you have to wait for an answer from “the top”, that’s the largest inefficiency.

And is there anything less efficient than waiting for “answers” from a group of thirsties who want the top job?

except this guy, he’s fun