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.

_

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.

full bellies

You wouldn't guess that a week like the one I just spent at a cabin on an island by the sea would have me thinking sell-out thoughts, but it has. I have decided, at the tail end of a bunch of navel-gazing, to get some of those little advertising banners put on this website as a way of making money. Why, you might ask, would I give in in this (whorish) manner? I mean - advertising?!?

Granted, something like Google's Adsense is going to try to be target(that's you) specific - so they'll advertise stuff that's in some way related to the content of this site (like art supplies or enviro-friendly-biodegradable-edible-victoria's-secret-panties) - but the fact remains that I'd be giving the Evil Marketers direct access to you, the nice people I've come to know and trust and name my child after (Seriously! It's due in November! Make me an offer! Quick, before the wife reads this!). I really don't want you to buy stuff you don't need, and one of the most insidious ways THEY get you to do just that is to embed their products in stuff you're going to be looking at anyway, like movies and the chests of sexy people. So again, why would I even consider letting them get their fistulous little fisties on this website?

Well, I'll tell ya. The first thing you've got to do when you're planning on selling out is to "justify" convincingly enough that it will get you over the first conscience-bump until the habit/ambivalence factor kicks in. So let's say, for the sake of argument, that I like to eat. Say I'm married to a woman with a belly full of baby, and that they both like to eat as well - as do the black dog and cat demons currently haunting our pad. Let's also say that I have decided to drop out of my Master's program before I've even started, because my reason for going to school was to coast the yellow brick road of Teacherism instead of stumbling the stony, pot-holed path of Artisting - that for which I am, theoretically at least, best equipped. Lets say that because of this, I find myself at a crossroads feeling I can do either the smart thing or the right thing - and that the right thing seems to be to follow my gifts, work hard, and become a professional artist (that is, one who gets paid enough for making art that he doesn't have to do something stupid, like planting trees, to be able to continue to eat).

For the writing part of this "being an artist" thing, I could start sending letters hither and thither to this and that newspaper (dead medium) or magazine (shiny medium) and let them do the morally questionable work of finding the questionable marketing people who would, let's face it, be questionably paying my wage. I could do this, yes, but the fact is that I like being able to write whatever, whenever, and don't want to exist at the whims of some tyrannical editor who makes me re-write eighteen times for being "too inflammatory" or "too religious" or "not religious or inflammatory enough". I don't want to spend all my time running around trying to scare up writing work and worrying because the toilet's sprung a leak and we can't afford a plumber and the kid keeps crawling into the bathroom and splashing around in his fun little brownish wading pool. To top it all off, these clowns would be printing whatever I wrote on real live paper (soooo last century) - shiny, glossy bleached stuff that for the most part would end up in landfills because, let's face it, people are idiots.

Instead, I could cut out the middle man and let the advertisers drop their blood money right into my pockets. I'd save trees, time and stress, and I could stop actually paying money to be able to write on this site. Also, the reciprocal attention people like Google (because Google's a person, too) lavish on you when folks look at your site could mean a snowballing of attention towards the "peripheral" stuff I'd be trying to sell - my paintings.

Then I could pay Jon to spit-and-polish me some kind of "store" whereby I could regularly sell paintings, prints, t-shirts - whatever, which I could therefore feel justified in regularly producing. The upshot of this, in happy Joshland FantasyWorld, is that I could make enough money off creative work that all the people I work to feed could continue to eat and I could, conceivably, save up enough money that we could go back to Peru and volunteer at the orphanage and teach art clinics to poor kids who otherwise would probably be in the street, throwing rocks at people.

The bottom line is this: if Josh sells out just an eensy-weensy bit (and not even to some corporate-run magazine or some fifty-percent-grifting gallery owner), his family doesn't die and the poor kids and orphans get a chance. It seems so pure, and good, and logical.

So why do I still feel dirty?

wherever your feetsies may go

There is good smoke and there is bad smoke:

first the good, thick kind that comes from gnarled old pipes with character and goes drifting inquisitively around, seeping into the rich red-brown, weathered woods of cozy, leaded-windowpaned pubs on cobbled country lanes, and then the nasty, thin kind that leaks out of cigarettes and impregnates the air with the promise of cancer. This distinction is not, strictly speaking, at all logical. Nonetheless, it is true.

In most public places in North America, they are now both illegal. Still, a few locales of the sort in which both good and bad smoke linger with an air of proprietary belonging yet hold out and Charlotte, North Carolina - the yuppie center of one of the major tobacco-producing states - is definitely a place you'd expect to find the latter. True to locale, the "Fox and Hound" in Ballantyne Commons, a clear example of such a "bad smoke" haven, does not (beyond its name) in any way presume to the sort of atmosphere that would encourage restive camaraderie among friends. Banks of televisions blare at top volume from nearly every inch of wall and fluorescent lights radiate coldly from high ceilings of antiseptic drywall. There's not a friendly dirt particle in the place. Nonetheless, sitting there a week ago at a table ringed with some of my oldest friends, I couldn't help feeling that warm, cheesy, spirit-suffusing glow that permeates truly homely (in the best sense of that word) surroundings. It was the tail end of our ten year high school graduation reunion and oh so good to be a little bit at home, transported by the company I was keeping to the place that will probably always tug at an important bit of myself.

Having grown up in Peru together, see, we were gathered to celebrate not just a shared educational experience, but to remember as well our truly blessed formative years - the life we once shared that, although imperfect, formed us into the oddball crew we had come to be. For the past ten years we'd been adapting ourselves in a hodge-podge variety of ways to a culture that at one time or another we had each doubted could ever be fully our own. It was good to return, if only for a while, to what once was, and to see how different we'd all become as we went about the business of staying pretty much the same.

Micheal, for instance, the deranged chap about whom I've written periodically on this site, was still the resident nutbar - complete with a rusty late-eighties minivan sporting a sign that said "For Sale: $25,250.00 FIRM (or will trade for lawnmower)", tattoos labeling his feet so he wouldn't get confused, and that famous mischievous Michael grin. Still, ten years and a stint in the U.S. military seemed to have calmed and centered him (a bit) - adulthood had brought with it the self-assurance that all those blissful Peruvian years under the benevolent dictatorship of his stern parents never could have. And Michael, who'd hated reading anything but "Calvin & Hobbes", had moved on to more sopissticated philosophical humorous satire and was reading Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" (an odd choice for a military man, yes, but more proof that the more things change, the more they then stay the same).

Ben, who had spent so much time in the favelas of Brazil working with street kids, seemed (at least at the Fox and Hound) to have changed the most. He was absent-mindedly running a finger around the frosted-glass holder in the ornate metal frame in the middle of the table when his finger got a bit too close to the flame and he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of pain. Seth and I shot glances at each other. This was Ben, after all, the guy who'd practically aced the SAT's and ACT's - the fellow who'd spent his childhood reading all the way through the Encyclopedias - for fun! Clearly, too much time spent helping people - away from the life of the mind - had somewhat addled his noodle.

Of course, Seth and I did what any good old friends would do in that situation - we mocked him mercilessly. I started off loudly decrying the downfall of our once-most astute academic and then Seth chipped in with a deepened voice and began to say, ponderously, "Ouch. Fire hurt Ben. Ben no like fire. Fire hot." I joined in with more faux-impersonation and then Paul hopped on the funwagon for a while as Ben smiled the tolerant smile of one who has learned nothing from the stepped-on of the world, if not humility.

Eventually, we ran out of material. The last giggle subsided and then Ben quietly broke the silence. "Hey, guys. Check this out... I want to show you something." With this he slowly upended the candle holder and out slid... a small, black plastic cylinder, out of which bubbled a flickering, glass-encased "flame".

A pause.

Then, oh then, did the fit really hit the shan. We laughed. We giggled. We squeaked, slapped each other on the backs and reveled in the trouncing we had just received. Ben, apparently, had forgotten that it is unsportsmanlike to engage in a battle of wits with unarmed opponents. "Well", he said, "I realized it was not real, but that you guys didn't know that, so I thought..." and he shrugged.

Ah, Ben. Good ole Ben. And not just Ben - Life, too. Life is full of crazy surprises, not the least of which are the ones so crazy in their unsurprisingness. It was good to be there, choking on the arsenic-laced smoke of North Carolina with friends. Good to see that people grow, flourish, have kids, develop and stay basically the same.

Herodotus, or some such other dead Greek dude, said that how you finish is determined by how you start. While I still maintain the hope that drastic change is indeed possible, it is good to know that a strand still ties me to my past, and that even though I am less the confused, lost, insecure, hormonal teenager who left Peru ten years back, I am still me and, most likely, will continue right on being so.

bzeep deep beep pssssssssssst

We interrupt this program to bring you a few words from our sponsor - or rather, the company that would be our sponsor if we had that sort of marketing clout.

That's right, folks, we're talking about the all new "Seventh Generation" cleaning products. They're non-toxic, biodegradable, and hypo-allergenic. Did you ever wonder - when you put all that nasty, toxic, deep-cleaning stuff in the machine, the dishwasher, the sink, or down the drain - what exactly happened to it? You didn't? Well, I'm here to tell you, my friend, that it did not magically transport itself in vapor form through a wormhole to the alternate universe where exists Hell for All Terrorists Who Are Not Native English Speakers (and who deserve it). No, no, my friends, that stuff stays RIGHT HERE.

Which is why I'm endorsing Seventh Generation products, so named for a Law of the Iroquois Confederacy, which stated that "In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations" (or something similar to that, only not in English). This means that instead of always taking the easier, cheaper route, we should probably consider whether or not that route leads down into a pond of toxic sludge.

Wait, wait, you say! Did you say, "cheaper"? So that means this Seventh Generation stuff costs more money than what I'm already using? What kind of a sales pitch is that? Well, it would depend if by "cheaper" you meant, "costs less money". If, however, you expanded the term to include the cost to the environment of pumping literally tons of carcinogenic, life-destroying products into the soil and water, then you might begin to see this Seventh Generation stuff as not such a bad deal. When you consider that if every household in the U.S. replaced just one bottle of 25oz petroleum-based dishwashing liquid with Seventh Generation's 25oz vegetable-based product, they'd be saving 81,000 barrels of oil - or enough to heat and cool 4,600 standard, oversized U.S. homes for an entire year! Not bad, eh?

How do I sign up, you ask? How do I go out and do my part to shoulder a tiny bit of ecological responsibility and become just a bit better steward of this beautiful planet? Here's the amazing part - this stuff is available in many grocery stores IN YOUR AREA! So look around! Join the movement!

And now, back to our show...