How to Avoid Doing Anything Significant with Your Life: Five *Easy Steps

1)Victimization. I cannot emphasize this enough. The first step towards avoidance of significant accomplishment, as with any momentous directive, is mental. You must realize that you are the pawn of forces beyond your control - be they God, genetics, Pavlovian psychology, or the Coca-Cola Corporation. They are not influencing you, my friend, they are absolutely controlling you.

If you are a "person of faith", there are undoubtedly factions within your religion that will try to convince you that you have the capacity to make choices and influence events - this is bollocks! Remember that you are only in your religion because of a series of events being controlled by some outside force. If you happen to be a Christian, you might consider throwing your hat in with the Determinists, who often hang out and shoot the poo (as they say) with the hardline Calvinists. Joining them will not, of course, constitute a choice... you'll merely be acquiescing to the inevitability of the Divine Will, which predetermined that you'd be a Calvinist. I actually highly endorse this approach, as it will provide you with a catch-all reply to those who try to pressure you to do something significant... "Get thee behind me, Satan... for GAWwwUD hath made me this wayuh!"

Got it? Sure?

Remember: you are someone else's puppet. Breathe it, accept it, live it.

2) Emoting. It is not enough, friend, to grasp this concept rationally. Most of the time we are not driven by reason, but by emotion. Emotions are the under(and over)currents of our **souls. Emotions push us every which way, driving our actions in directions unintended by our more cogent levels of consciousness. Herein lies the danger - while there are a lot of emotions that will help you avoid significant action, emotions can just as easily be hijacked by malevolent outside forces that would use them to manipulate you into doing some truly worthwhile things. I know, I know, it's a mindful - but there it is. We'll go into it more in the following steps, but for now it is enough to be aware. This will help you sidestep outside interests that would, given the chance, derail your insignificant direction.

3) Sloth. The best way to ensure that you aren't doing significant things is to do as little as possible of anything. Even the most degrading of jobs, when approached with the wrong attitude, can have some kind of significance. Minimize this by working as little as possible. If you happen to live in a welfare state, so much the better! Go on welfare. This will leave you with much more time to stay at home and be mindlessly entertained... which leads directly to the next step.

4) Distraction. Any activity in which you are primarily a passive recipient is excellent. Active involvement is a no-no. Television, movies and the internet are excellent sources of distraction. You'll have to be careful, though, to avoid looking at anything with real content... there are those at work even in Hollywood itself, trying to hijack your entertainment for their own nefarious, activity-inducing purposes. Do not be fooled, but don't be overly worried, either - with enough practice, you can divest anything - even something as magnificent as a mountain - of meaning. For religious help in this area, try Zen Buddhism (but remember to ignore it's ultimate objectives - objectives, bad; nothingness, good).

5) Selfishness. This is the binding principle that will glue all the others together. If you always focus on your Self, your more base and paltry emotions will become more important to you. Since it is in your nature to be lazy and easily distracted (trust me, it is), the focus on your Self will create a snowball effect, the cumulative result being less significant activity, which you will then easily justify and understand as an inevitable result of your victimization. This is where you won't want to learn from Buddhism and/or Christ, both of which tend to take the focus off of the self and onto nothing (Buddhism) or others (Christ). In your efforts to be more selfish, you might want to consider Hedonistic Consumer Conformity as a ****religion precisely fitted to your needs.

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That's it, then - the Five Easy Steps to Avoiding Doing Anything Significant with your Life. Before I finish, though, I should probably say a little bit about what it is you are trying to avoid: know thy enemy, and all that hoo-rah. Basically, Significant Things can be categorized as those that are counter to the fifth and unifying step. You, as an individual, are in fact significant. However, your significance reaches its greatest expression as a part of the significance of the whole, which is all the other Selves: past, present and future. Significance can only be defined in relationships - the most significant being those in which the experience of others is enhanced by the quality of your interactions with them. If you die to yourself, making the well-being and contentment of others more important, the inevitable result will be significant events and actions. Do NOT let this happen to you. Stay vigilant, be selfish, accomplish nothing.


Footnotes:

*I call them easy because the alternative to them is, perhaps obviously, much harder. There will, however, be enormous pressure at different times from family, peers, authority figures, and the general crushing weight of history to abandon these practices. Meddling people will use all sorts of means to drive you from your goal. Stay the course!

**You do not actually have a soul. Having a soul would imply spiritual reality and eternal responsibility for temporal (in)actions. This is obviously a myth***.

***A myth is a female moth.

****You might be worried that all this religion-hopping is unhealthy - I mean, aren't religious people usually the ones trying to get people to do significant things? Well, yes - and no. While religions, at their best, do tend to provoke meaningful life and actions, most religions are very adaptive when they are trying to "win". Take for instance Christianity, which in our North American society has often adopted as a way of life Hedonistic Consumer Conformity - one of the key principles of Secular Humanism (ostensibly it's greatest antagonist)! This has enabled it in many ways to thrive and merge seamlessly in a culture that, on several key accounts, is actually diametrically opposed to the teachings of Christ. Go figure. The point is, because of the syncretizing nature of the accommodation required for cultural assimilation, all religions will have aspects that are both helpful and harmful to your cause. Feel free to pick and choose. The important thing is to choose insignificantly.