Sharing my shirt

Having traveled the world is no guarantee of anything. I know people who have been everywhere and they don’t have one interesting story to tell, about where they’ve been.

Drugs will give you an initial high that is magical, that eventually turns to rubbish. You can go through that experience of coming back from the dead, and still not feel like changing the world, or even helping your fellow humans. Just because you’ve been stoned, and regret it, doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly there to provide redemption. You can easily say, “I enjoyed my high, and now I regret my low.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean you want to share your shit with other people.

The same thing applies to making money and losing money. You make money – you feel great. You lose money – you feel terrible. But it doesn’t mean that you want to share the news. It doesn’t mean you want to teach everyone how to hang on to their cash, so that they’ve still got it when the going gets tough. It’s the same with being a parent: you have a whole lot of fantastic weekends, over the school holidays, and suddenly the children rebel and don’t want to be a part of the family. The whole parenting experience becomes a big downer. That’s when it’s time to switch off. There’s nothing worse than a desperate dad trying to be an un-desperate hipster.

So being a parent is sometimes like being on bad drugs. The high wears off and you have to face reality. The next step, like a scene from Fight Club, is group therapy around a tea urn with bad biscuits. This is not the life you wanted. The life you wanted was the freedom to be disgusting in your own lounge while nobody was watching.

Streaming means you can fall unconscious in front of the television, without missing anything. You can live again the next night, and the next night, and the next… Falling asleep in front of the television is not a sign of success or failure.

People from both sides of the economic divide can have a boring personality disorder. You can even get boring dogs from both rich and poor families.