LONDON FRIDGE.

Most of the nonsense on Brobible won't win awards for its depth and fortitude into the human experience, but this, I have to say, is alarmingly relatable. I've read tons of books on the human psyche, evolutionary behavior, sexual evolution, and I've never seen anything from this perspective. It's a ballsy move, but a well thought one. I'm not saying it's all right, but I will say that everyone has had moments in life when they've wondered what it's all for...why they battle the marching ants of taillights in the morning and evening, the massive mortgages, the ever-increasing stuff that just accumulates that doesn't really make a difference in one's life. What are the things that really matter? What are the things that are ok to feel apathy toward? Does it make you lazy or just acutely aware? Im not sure, but I think it's pretty f'ing good...And, David is a cool mf, so read his stuff.

http://www.brobible.com/author/david-covucci/
(A link to all his stuff)

Again, I do not own any of this content.

http://www.brobible.com/life/article/in-defense-of-apathy/

dog-meh2

By: David Covucci

When I was 12, my mother—upset with what she felt was a middling academic performance, especially when compared to my two all-star sisters—took me to a psychologist.

Alec Lebedun. Sometimes, if I asked, he would let me sit upright in his chair while he took a prone position on the couch. We met every Wednesday night, but not for long. After only the fourth or fifth session, mom told me I wasn’t going to be going back.

I thought I’d won. So, of course, I had to needle her. I asked her to tell me what the psychologist thought was wrong with me, knowing there couldn’t be a problem if I didn’t have to return.

“Nothing,” she said and I felt vindicated, but only in the moment before her voice turned angry. Harsher than anything I’d ever heard come out her mouth.

“You’re just lazy.”

She said is so bitterly. It stung.

But I kept getting B’s and C’s through middle school. What’s, I thought, the point of doing anything more than the bare minimum? If that is what is set as an acceptable achievement point, achieving it should be acceptable.

Not when you are me. Not me, David Covucci—I’m nothing special—but rather someone ‘blessed’ (I hate that word) with a level of intelligence that surpasses average, and other attributes, ones society thinks are both indicative of and essential to success. Because of what you’re given, you have to do more.

I don’t want to do more. I only want to do what’s necessary. Often times, I don’t even want to do that. Exerting any excess effort seems superfluous to me.

What do I like to do? I enjoy my couch at the end of the day. Everything else, I’m pretty apathetic to. Success. Family. Relationships. Mattering. None of it.

Why try at anything, really?

When I was 18, I joined my high school cross-country team. I wasn’t into running at all, but our lacrosse coach said that if we didn’t play a sport in the fall, we shouldn’t even think about stepping on his field come spring. He wanted us all to play football. I went the easier route. I ran. I turned out to be alright at it, thanks to having the long, lanky legs requisite for distance running. After one performance at some meet, at the next practice, my coach was running alongside me. He’d seen me train, do sprints, etc., and asked why I hadn’t passed a person ahead of me in the last 100 meters of the race. He felt I could.

I shrugged a response.

“You don’t want to win?”

“No, not really.”

“You’re saying to me you don’t see a person in front of you and immediately think, ‘I’m better than them. I can beat them?’”

I shrugged again. I shrug a lot.

I won a lot, too, back when I was younger. When I was 12 and 13 and 14, I was virtually unbeatable swimming. But victories didn’t come with some thrilling rush or any puff of pride. All winning really did was place untoward pressures on me. As someone who won, it was expected I keep winning. It’s a lot easier to lose. You can work less hard. Be less focused. Cede the silly notion that you are the best.

As I got older, no one began expecting anything of me again.

That was nice. When not as single person thinks you can succeed, it makes failure not at all awful to accept.

“Do you want to be a failure?” is the instant, reflexive, callous, mean retort I always get (it’s designed to hurt). It’s an acceptable response—that’s what everyone is thinking, so why not say it?—but, no, it doesn’t bother me. It bemuses me that a great number of people feel I should be some thriving one in seven billion, as opposed to what seems much more reasonable to me, just being one of seven billion.

Success is a form of abuse we’ve become conditioned to enjoy. It’s not my responsibility to perpetuate that perpetuation. And that strident belief that hard work will help you escape the modern subservience we’ve created for ourselves?

No. What if I want to escape another way? By not trying? The other option, the ‘right’ one, seems so Sisyphean to me. If I begin to put in nine hours, ten becomes expected. How is eight not enough? How are five days not okay? Really, how is it possible that all we do is create for each other more and more and more work?

It’s like we live in a world that breaks its own physics.

I don’t get how everyone thinks spinning their wheels faster than everyone else will solve anything. All I see is more spinning. More and more and more. To what end? Leave a mark? If you don’t, someone else will. So why bother?

It’s around the time in this rant that someone will mockingly ask if I have a girlfriend

Not in six years.

That was a long time ago. I don’t even know how to find one these days. I’m not going to be the guy who goes out to a bar to pick up girls. Never have been. I hate that conceit. Going out on a Friday or Saturday with the express intention of fucking someone else? Fucking awful. Why would you place upon yourself the same damn burden of expectations you endure every other day of the week? It’s no different. It’s the requirement to successfully complete a task and gain the plaudits of people you want to impress, be it your boss or your friends or yourself. Why would you want to succeed on the weekends? I’m forced by everyone else to try and do that all the time. I’m much happier drinking at home.

Plus, I’m not great at talking to people. Like when they ask me what I like.

“Uhh, nothing?”

Still, at my age–especially at my age–I’m starting to feel like I have to have someone to fit in. But these mechanisms we have now, facilitating the experience is harder than ever. I’m on Tinder and Hinge, but I can’t bring myself to look at either app but once every few weeks.

“That’s your problem,” people practically fall over themselves to tell me. “You gotta try harder for them to work.”

I guess I don’t care enough to work towards finding someone.

You’d think I can’t work at anything, but that’s not true. I can, when I have to. When it’s the best option. To me, it’s always about finding the path of least resistance.

Like my internship my junior year of college. I knew it had serious potential to lead to a job. And I really didn’t want to do the pre- and post-graduation career hunt, a situation so fraught with anxiety and dread. Instead, I got in early every day. Stayed late. Did more than what was asked of me. It was weird and uncomfortable—and yea, it felt alright. Before the summer was out, I was offered a job.

Out of school, I didn’t last long. It wasn’t a mere few weeks in before I was ready to quit. They wanted me to care. Not like, in the quality of my work, I already did that, but in the overall importance of the company itself and they work they were doing. Saying stuff like “we matter” and “this is important.”

Ugh.

It was the kind of company where if you fucked something up, you had to apologize. And not just apologize. You had to show remorse. My perpetual smirk didn’t sit well with them.

“Do you not give a shit?” adults screamed at me for the most minor of mistakes. The truth was I didn’t. I felt like I could do my job without caring. Same way I got through school without caring.

Once they knew that was my attitude, they ate me alive. When I was working by myself in San Francisco, when I once fucked up something, two different bosses flew cross country to chew me out.

Fun. All that did was inspire me to take things less seriously. If it’s all gonna end in bullshit no matter what…

Within two years, I was gone. My whole time working there, I was also involved in a long-distance, quasi-relationship with my college girlfriend. One where we were both holding on to each other while each actively looked for someone else. Pretty good stuff. But it was fine. We both hated each other. We both hated the situation. It wasn’t that hard to place all the blame on the other person.

Everyone kept asking me what the fuck I was doing. My sisters, my mother, my friends. They couldn’t—they said—fathom why someone would allow themselves to be involved in an experience that makes them unhappy (forgetting that is pretty much what everyone always does). The answer I never gave was the truth. Once you reach a status quo you are comfortable with, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes you, you go with.

You keep doing what it is that you are doing it, because doing it is all you know. Happy, sad, it doesn’t matter. It’s just the thing you do. Her and I, we knew how to keep doing that, whatever it was. Doing anything else was different. Exponentially hard.

It turned my life into a four year long malaise, which in retrospect is alright. Not much happens in your twenties, anyway. But now I find it impossible to associate love with anything other than that dragged down feeling.

So why bother, is sort of my attitude. I’m not subjecting myself to future pointless pain by abstaining now, and that’s a good thing. I think.

My next job, which began right around when that relationship ended, was lobbying for the real estate industry. Rental housing, to be precise. The work I did was and is the reason your rents keep going up. Terrible, but they paid. Except one summer, when my landlord hit me with a six percent increase. I asked for a commensurate raise.

No, my boss said.

I lost interest in all people in business after that. Fucked up world, right? So why care? I kept working for them. Finding something else was hard. And they paid well. I didn’t actually need that extra money.

Until I got this job. I took a pay cut when I came here. Obviously, blogging instead of lobbying. I knew it was gonna happen and was fine with it, but my boss was very accommodating, saying we could reevaluate my salary sooner rather than later. Around my one year anniversary, back in September, my father asked me if I’d gotten a raise yet.

“No,” I sheepishly told him.

“They refused?”

“No,” I confessed. I hadn’t asked. I made enough. I’d gotten shot down once before, albeit in another industry. It was enough to make me reticent. It would require asking someone to do something they might not necessarily want to do. I don’t want to make anyone do that, because I don’t want anyone to make me do that.

Lots of people in the world disagree with my sentiment. I sort of think maybe we’d all get along a little more if we all gave one less fuck. About everything. I stopped giving a shit about my own well-being a long while ago. I’m doing alright. It doesn’t hurt ya. And so what if I’m not gonna have a legacy or some shit. It won’t bother me if no one shows up to my funeral. I’ll be just fine being dead.

That sounds like a death wish. I don’t have one of those, I just have never particularly had a life wish. I like being alive. It’s fun and all. But I feel like since I didn’t ask to be here, I don’t need to act in accordance with the world around me, with the responsibilities of someone else’s construct from long ago.

I tried to use that argument once to justify not paying parking tickets.

“I didn’t agree to be part of the system that penalizes me for this.”

Of course, technically I did, by buying a car, but that wasn’t the argument I was trying to have.

“Well,” said the girl I was seeing at this time, and having this conversation with, who was not at all impressed with my cool, languorous disdain for like, society, man.

“What if everyone thought that way about everything? Wouldn’t everything fall apart? Wouldn’t the world collapse?”

Even if she’s right, I can’t think of a single thing that is anything less of my fucking problem. I am not here to keep this Earth spinning. It does that just fine on its own, and I’ve never seen it slow down, not even a bit, because I didn’t respond to an email I was “supposed to” at 10:45 p.m. on a Wednesday night.

Shit would suck, I guess, if society completely fell apart and like, humanity ended… I guess. I don’t really know. Neither do you. But it doesn’t matter what side of the argument you fall on. None of us is big enough to bring down whatever this churning mechanism is that we’ve created for ourselves. That’s the truth—that’s the truth—and since it is, I’d much rather live within it entirely on my own terms.

“You’re just lazy,” mother said to me some nineteen years ago.

Of course, I couldn’t leave it at that.

“What’s so wrong with being lazy?”

“You’re too smart to be lazy,” she said.

She was wrong. I hate to say it, but my mother’s wrong. I’m smart enough to know it doesn’t matter if I’m lazy or not.

1. Always act as if you are in total control.

There's a saying often credited to Ignatius: "Pray as if God will take care of all; act as if all is up to you." (Cool quote.)

The same premise applies to luck. Many people feel luck has a lot to do with success or failure. If they succeed, luck favored them, and if they fail, luck was against them.

Most successful people do sense that good luck played some role in their success. But they don't wait for good luck or worry about bad luck. They act as if success or failure is completely within their control. If they succeed, they caused it. If they fail, they caused it.

By not wasting mental energy worrying about what might happen to you, you can put all your effort into making things happen. (And then if you get lucky, hey, you're even better off.)

You can't control luck, but you can definitely control you.

2. Put aside things you have no ability to affect.

Mental strength is like muscle strength — no one has an unlimited supply. So why waste your power on things you can't control?

For some people it's politics. For others it's family. For others it's global warming. Whatever it is, you care … and you want others to care.

Fine. Do what you can do: Vote. Lend a listening ear. Recycle and reduce your carbon footprint. Do what you can do. Be your own change — but don't try to make everyone else change.

(They won't.)

3. See the past as valuable training … and nothing more.

The past is valuable. Learn from your mistakes. Learn from the mistakes of others.

Then let it go.

Easier said than done? It depends on your perspective. When something bad happens to you, see it as an opportunity to learn something you didn't know. When another person makes a mistake, don't just learn from it — see it as an opportunity to be kind, forgiving, and understanding.

The past is just training; it doesn't define you. Think about what went wrong but only in terms of how you will make sure that next time you and the people around you know how to make sure it goes right.

4. Celebrate the success of others.

Many people — I guarantee you know at least a few — see success as a zero-sum game: There's only so much to go around. When someone else shines, they think that diminishes the light from their stars.

Resentment sucks up a massive amount of mental energy — energy better applied elsewhere.

When a friend does something awesome, that doesn't preclude you from doing something awesome. In fact where success is concerned, birds of a feather tend to flock together — so draw your unsuccessful friends even closer.

Don't resent awesomeness. Create and celebrate awesomeness, wherever you find it, and in time you'll find even more of it in yourself.

5. Never allow yourself to whine. (Or complain. Or criticize.)

Your words have power, especially over you. Whining about your problems always makes you feel worse, not better.

So if something is wrong, don't waste time complaining. Put that mental energy into making the situation better. (Unless you want to whine about it forever, eventually you'll have to make it better.)

So why waste time? Fix it now. Don't talk about what's wrong. Talk about how you'll make things better, even if that conversation is only with yourself.

And do the same with your friends or colleagues. Don't just serve as a shoulder they can cry on. Friends don't let friends whine; friends help friends make their lives better.

6. Focus only on impressing yourself.

No one likes you for your clothes, your car, your possessions, your title, or your accomplishments. Those are all "things." People may like your things — but that doesn't mean they like you.

(Sure, superficially they might seem to like you, but superficial is also insubstantial, and a relationship not based on substance is not a real relationship.)

Genuine relationships make you happier, and you'll form genuine relationships only when you stop trying to impress and start trying to just be yourself.

And you'll have a lot more mental energy to spend on the people who really do matter in your life.

7. Count your blessings.

Take a second every night before you turn out the light and, in that moment, quit worrying about what you don't have. Quit worrying about what others have that you don't.

Think about what you do have. You have a lot to be thankful for. Feels pretty good, doesn't it?

Feeling better about yourself is the best way of all to recharge your mental batteries.

LONDON FRIDGE.

Monday, November 3, 2014

Thanks for nothing history teacher.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

If you don't know Brobible, you should. Check out my man David Covucci's work. Poignant stuff, ladies and gentlemen.

Monday, October 13, 2014

This is not John Travolta

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Achievement is earned, not found.

1. Always act as if you are in total control.

2. Put aside things you have no ability to affect.

3. See the past as valuable training … and nothing more.

4. Celebrate the success of others.

5. Never allow yourself to whine. (Or complain. Or criticize.)

6. Focus only on impressing yourself.

7. Count your blessings.

Don't wait...life won't

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