Do The Opposite Of What Works

Sometimes we live our lives believing that life has to be a certain way. We all have to have a certain color of hair, we all have to have straight, white teeth, we all have to be extremely fit and make ridiculous amounts of money, you know what I’m talking about.

Yet the reality of life is that what we want is usually the collective ultimatum: something we all wish we could start our lives at. Of course, we all know that life isn’t really about making millions of dollars a month and being extremely fit because the reasons we feel this way aren’t realistic. They aren’t born out of true desire but out of desire for the other.

Essentially what we’re obsessing ourselves over is what we’d like to see in other people. Now having standards like these are fine and all but life is all about finding the balance between how we treat ourselves and what we hope to find in the people we meet in this world. Unfortunately, since most of us conflate the reality of our desires with who we really are, we tend to believe that if we just worked hard enough we could make it to this extreme standard and never have problems again. This belief is born out of a sensitivity which starts off benign at a young age but quickly turns into a part of us that we begin to avoid.

So we end up in this situation in which we’re both suppressing our true nature and putting this pressure on ourselves to live like kings and queens. This pressure, let’s make a note, is born out of the infinite potential of the mind. It isn’t real or healthy, but is it interesting? Oh yes.

So what’s the point of this article. The point—as mentioned by the title—is to try the opposite of what works, the opposite of what we believe is right. Spend a day a little dirtier than you normally would be, say something creepy to your crush, cry pitifully on the streets near your home or even better outside someone else’s home.

Now don’t run away, I can feel the hair standing up on your forearm all the way over here, you don’t really have to do any of these things, but that’s exactly my point. Life isn’t about pressuring ourselves to live under some ideal. It’s about recognizing that the way we’re living is an embodiment of the choices we make and what that means to us. This is important because life isn’t always good. Life isn’t always beautiful. In fact, the underlying dichotomy of life dictates that in order to have beauty, you must have ugliness, in order to have good, you must have evil.

What boggles my mind is that there are people out there who believe that only good must live in us and any evil vanquished.

Yes, we would all like to be saints who deserve every desire we’ve ever had but the truth is that all of us are truly evil bastards who smell a lot of the time, lie even more of the time and pretend like we know what’s going on when we really don’t. And if there’s even a hint of sadness in our hearts—which there’s really a lot of—we go *zip* nada, you saw nothing.

I’d like you to know that I, for one, see the human in you. I don’t care if there’s sadness and evil in your heart. It’s all part of the nature of human experience. Now this doesn’t mean you can come and chop people’s heads off or start stealing and what not. No, that’s breaking the law which is about something other than the nature of the human soul and it’s experience in life. What I’m talking about is recognizing yourself for who you really are so that when you want to shine the light of good and happiness on the world it shines with a brightness never seen before, all because you’ve accepted the darkness that is a part of who we really are, the darkness that gives emphasis to what it means to have light in the world in the first place.

And until you feel confident living like this, try doing the opposite of what works. Yes, it’s weird, but who the fuck really cares besides you? I just hope we can live in a world in which being weird and wrong is looked upon as a sign of normalcy instead of as a sign of something that needs to be changed or fixed.

Until then, try pessimism.