The World's Common Tater

I wasn’t planning to write today, but then my post on lessons I was trying to learn came up in my memories. I read it again and decided I would look to see if I made progress in the 5 years since I wrote it.

1. I Don’t Care – This was about learning to care less about the little things that were annoying but didn’t matter in the long run. The only reason I’ve made any progress here is that I have basically isolated myself from the world. When I do encounter the world, I still tend to get way too annoyed by little things that don’t matter. I feel like this is the beginning of a string of failures in this post.

2. Ignore the Assholes – OK. This one I would call a success. I vowed to spend as little time as possible with people like this and only deal with them when I have to. One of the benefits of a life in isolation is limited exposure to the assholes of the world. Leaving my job was a big part of this. The place tends to promote the assholes of the world. An organization run by assholes was a terrible place to be. Now there is no one outside my family I have to spend time with if I don’t want to. Now, I’m the only asshole I deal with regularly A success!

3. Don’t Drive Angry – I would have had more success with this if others had vowed to stop driving stupidly. You would think being mostly off schedule would be easier. If I’m not worried about being late, driving should be calmer. It is not. It’s hard to be calm when people continue to stare at their phones while driving or have no clue about traffic rules. How do we still not know how to use a four-way stop or a roundabout? I call this a failure of others, not me.

4. Put the Phone Down – A big failure. It’s just too easy to grab my phone and scroll mindlessly through Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, etc. I think isolation has made this worse. When you rarely talk to other humans, this random scrolling is your window to the outside world. I need to fix this. I need to exchange screen time for reading time. My reading time has dropped over the past two years.

5. Laugh More – I’m still the funniest person I know, but that doesn’t mean I laugh a lot. Another hazard of isolation. Unless I find a funny book, TV show, or movie there is little opportunity to laugh. My siblings send me funny things via text. I sent them the below. I might type LOL, but I’m not really LOLing.

So, I failed at learning most of these lessons. Back to work.