I Can’t Believe You Think That Just Because it Actually Happened

by Jason Almanis, Certified Life Coach

As someone who has been in a few moderately difficult situations, but was otherwise born with remarkably good looks, blessed with well-connected professional advancement opportunities and a big heap of dumb fucking luck, I have both the total lack of insight and excess of confidence required to go around believing any stupid shit I read in a self-help book. I then enjoy parroting it at anyone else who has to listen to me, in a desperate attempt to believe that the world is a level playing field – mainly, of course, so I can take credit for my accomplishments.

This is why, when I heard about how you lost your job based on a number of things that you personally experienced, I was shocked: I can’t believe you think things worked out in a way based on how they actually happened.

I mean, hold on a second – have you ever stopped to consider a completely different, more palatable perspective on the matter? One that is based on absolutely nothing, and exists in direct contradiction to the basest evidence of your senses? If not, the first thing you really need to do is ‘admit’ that you fail to do so based on your lack of courage to accept things as they not-are.

And wait: You thought that workplace was a rudderless dump of overpaid management, zombie hacks and empty platitudes? Why? Just because nothing is ever firmly accomplished there in a way that makes any significant impact whatsoever? Well, I’m sorry to hear about your outlook.

An outlook based solely on events as they occurred.

Haven’t you ever considered that you yourself are the problem, albeit for no particular reason? And that with a completely false viewpoint on things you might’ve been able to feebly motivate yourself to fight an insurmountable tsunami of nonsense to do excellent work, knowing full well from every single time that something similar happened before that someone else will just take credit for it, even if you somehow manage to succeed in the first place?

But, of course, you also don’t have to think that just because it is true: Instead, you could believe that it was a team effort, even though nobody else made any meaningful contribution to it, as based on the actual work that is a real, tangible thing within the boundaries of space and time.

Wouldn’t that be preferable?

Also, I think you need to consider this complete and utter bullshit I am talking about as it relates to your personal life. For example, you seem to think that the reason you are unable to find a satisfying relationship is because you are extremely physically unattractive, and why? Because in spite of your varied interests and compatibilities, as well as the fact that on hundreds of occasions you have gotten along very well with members of the opposite sex, they have completely cringed at the idea of intimacy with you, and gone off with people with who they have nothing in common?

Well, I’m sorry, but that overwhelming, mountainous amount of evidence from your personal experience – literally, the dozens and dozens of times it has happened, over and over again, in exactly the same way – is nothing but a bad attitude, because I have just said so.

Instead of having extensive cosmetic surgery, you should just be nicer, because that is what absolutely nothing about the baseline realities of intimate relationships suggests or implies.

Also, the overwhelming, twisted association between love and pain that these repetitive, traumatic experiences have seared into your psyche are also not something that I will attach any merit to, even though they are completely explicable and rational as per your precise, horrendous memories of how they impacted your life in a linear, causal fashion that has now transformed you into a bitter, desperate monster that everyone around you can sense as both dangerous and unstable: Instead, you are just being kind of a dick, and you need to chillax. Bro.

Also, you may need therapy, because all of those ideas you have that are thoroughly and exclusively grounded in reality? They are crazy.

All I am saying is that I really think it is sad and pitiful that your only reason for believing something like all of the things you currently believe are demonstrable, factual precedents.

How could we possibly build a better world of if all of us ever did was behave in accordance with things as they uninterruptedly exist?