The Douchebag Bible (69 page)

days, I focus on the hate. It’s a lot better to hate than

to despair. But then there are moments like these

when they hate isn’t large enough to drown out the

truth: You are unhappy, TJ.

You always have been. You always will be. No

matter what wealth or status you accrue, no matter

how many people love and support you, no matter

how many battles you win—you will always be

unhappy. There’s something wrong with your

brain chemistry. You’ll never stop tearing yourself

apart. You’ll never stop being your own worst critic.

I am so damn weary of it all. I’m so tired of

living a life where I live in hatred and take long

vacations in depression. I’m so tired of this mental

dissonance that plagues me.

It’s becoming unbearable.

The mistake I was making when I wrote that is that

I was still judging myself on the basis of what society

expected from me. I was still viewing the world as

though I were owned by my culture, rather than

being my own property. But I changed my

perspective, as I am free to do.

The human experience is largely subjective, so

rational thought still offers a wide variety of thought

and opinion. It’s not as if rational thought will cause

us to coalesce into some beastly collective of twin-

minded freaks who agree on everything.

The greatest gift we human beings have is our

ability to choose to perceive the world differently

than we've been instructed. We can even override

our own predispositions with enough willpower!

And as my friend, author Howard Bloom, often says,

“new ways of seeing lead to new ways of being.”

I have never aspired to change the world,

simply because that task is beyond me. There are too

many variables involved; too many disparate wills

pushing and pulling the world in too many different

directions. If I genuinely aspired to improve the

world, I’d be crippled by depression, never able to

shake from my head the inescapable conclusion that

my efforts are exercised in futility. The world will not

change because I tell it to, and even if it did change,

I would have no control over the nature of that

change.

Yet, if I realize that it's not my job to chance the

world and that I'm only responsible for myself and

my own actions, then I don't feel powerless any

more. I don't feel like I'm a speck of dust, but the

center of the universe. Because I am my own

universe. And when I die, my mind is gone and my

universe is gone with it. I know, objectively, that

matter and energy will continue to exist long after

my demise, but I don't need to concern myself with

that too much. It's beyond my ability to affect or

control and accepting that is far more sublime a

feeling than wishing things were otherwise.

I’ve not, since adopting my new worldview, felt

a tremendous need in myself for a deeper meaning.

I’m a fairly worldly and hedonistic fellow who finds

the pleasures of this plane of existence sufficient to

sustain myself.

I think that many people like to wander

through the desert of their own elaborate self-

markers—grandiose little chunks of narrative that

they plant into the ground to remind themselves of

their perceived highs and lows. Plant a flag where I

met my wife, plant a flag where my dog died, plant a

flag where I started working an administrative job

over a the offices of Penguin Publishing.

And they look back at the landscape, pocked

with flags waving in the harsh dessert wind and they

say to themselves, “I had a life. I had a self. These

flags prove it.”

But then the camera pans back and we discover

that the desert is vast beyond reckoning. And our

protagonist, the flag-planting human being who

affirms himself to the universe, has journeyed less

than a millimeter across this barren wasteland’s

surface. The flags that he planted are microscopic.

Why then compare yourself to the desert? Why

not compare yourself instead to the millimeter you

have traveled and say, “Ah. It was a god millimeter.

A good speck.” Accepting insignificance and

embracing limitation is so much more satisfying

than aspiring to accomplish great things when you

are too small and too temporary to truly do so.

Others find the value of their live in the concept

of God. Religion. I don't address it too much in this

book, but I will harken back to a series of questions

I once asked about God.

What is God? Is it a what? Or is it a who? Is it an it?

Is he a he? Is she a she?

Believers say that God is the entity that

created creation. Everything you see is the work of

God: trees, hills, bumble bees, pancakes, stars,

chocolate pudding, lava, incandescent light bulbs.

God made it all. He’s a busy guy, if he is a guy, and

if he exists, and if he is discernible to the human