The Daily Blog Open Mic – Saturday – 9th January 2021

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Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Space Cadet Survival Kit 2021

    People who haven’t experienced the sudden loss of identity and beliefs that rapid change causes, will soon be finding out what it’s like to live in NZ as one of the discarded. Here is a psychological survival kit based on my experiences that might help you traverse the barren lands faster, or more easily. It isn’t all-encompassing, and not for people who either want to rule the world or who can just say fuck it, and do whatever no matter what. It’s for people who were minding their own business and getting by, and then the shit hit the fan, leaving them with no choice. It isn’t a medicine, or a vaccine you take beforehand. It’s a map, so you don’t feel like you’re totally alone out there. It won’t make sense unless you are already in the shit. It doesn’t matter why it doesn’t use logic or reason.

    1) It ain’t coming back, whatever it was. Accept it. The sooner you accept it, the less painful it will be, and it will be as much as you can stand no matter who you are. Someone has already done it harder than you, and someone is squealing louder than you who isn’t doing it as hard as you. You will be passed over for them. That’s life and has nothing to do with anything because your own train wreck will be proceeding too spectacularly for you to consider fairness. Your friends and family will ditch you. You’ll lose your job, your career, and any imagined future. This will cause grief, and there’s no way around that. You’ll have to feel it because human emotions respond to external challenges. No matter how angry and resentful you get, do not let the pain and the grief become part of your identity or you’ll get caught in a destructive cycle. Do not identify with it for longer than necessary. Once you get the presence of mind to say enough, then say enough. Other people have had a hand in your predicament and are responsible for their part, and you didn’t deserve the extreme situation you now find yourself experiencing. No doubt about it. Nothing happens in a vacuum. But no one who cares can help much right now, and people who don’t care will only spit and shout from the side-lines.

    2) Take stock of what matters to you, whatever it is: your family, partner, your pet, children who are your dependents; any smaller or portable resources that might be useful to improve yours and others quality of life. Focus on your relationships. Running straight into the face of real relationship is a big ask if you’ve been living a culture, and it will take up almost all your time. Dump everything else. Dump any “values” that haunt you in the middle of the night when you take a piss. If you think you’re a builder right now, you aren’t. If you think you’re a hunter, or a bus driver, a hard working honest kiwi battler, number one mum or dad, or a doctor, nurse, ice cream man, or sportsperson, you aren’t. Whatever you are, you aren’t. You aren’t what you do or how you do it. You aren’t your beliefs. Possessions can’t improve your worth or detract from it. Just sit on your toilet and say to yourself, fine, I’m nothing, I’m just fuckin’ nothing. Dump your heritage and what it implies, dump your dreams, hopes, and aspirations. Take a big dump. If your ancestors are worth their vapour, they’ll be right here in the present no matter what you do. They have no interest in you reliving their lives and mistakes – they want to see something new, and you’re it. If they do want you to relive their mistakes then that’s more of a curse situation, so see your local shaman about that.

    3) Forget desperation, it will lead you wrong and tell you to make decisions you aren’t ready to make. Anything you actually have to do will be apparent in the moment. The more resources you have, the greater the risk of you deluding yourself. Let unstable people, activities and things, leave of their own accord. You will walk around telling yourself they don’t fucken know, man, they weren’t there, they don’t know shit! Yep that’s true, and what’s more they’ll ask you to disrespect yourself and be the kind of person they can use as a shit can. Don’t do it. Get angry, and don’t do it. Then let it go. Sometime, much sooner than later, you’ll hear news about how they got theirs, and it will validate your decision to trust yourself. Resist the urge to prove yourself to be anything. That’s the kind of ego that’ll get you into every kind of imaginable trouble. The social currency of appearing to be something is also a thing, but you’ll probably have to let it go, unless your attitude towards it is light-hearted fun. It probably won’t be long before you don’t want to be it anyway. You’re already good enough, either as total potential, or a potential collection of transferable skills. Erect sensible and effective boundaries against idiots with big mouths telling you who and what you are and what you must do for them. Avoid them when it’s too dangerous to openly oppose them, tell them to fuck off when it’s safe to do so. Restrict your exposure to any version of pop culture/entertainment that reinforces a dark violent hopeless world of aspiring megalomaniacs and rags-to-riches heroes.

    4) Find a reliable way to laugh if you like laughing; find a place to read books if you like solitude and thought; find a safe place where you can escape in a way that suits your taste, in less catastrophic moments.

    5) Take it easy on yourself when you get hooked back in to shit you know is unstable. Try to remember why and how you got hooked, and figure out if it’s a rerun of old bad shit, or a temporary window allowing you to cover something you missed. Stay aware of possible exit points, and take whichever returns the greater peace of mind.

    6) You might get to the point where everything seems to be running over the top of you no matter what, and to make matters worse your personality seems to have reverted to what it was when you were 10 years old, back before you started being a bad ass. And you’ll wonder how you will ever fit back into society, if things ever come right, now that you’re a child. How do you keep up when your fastest isn’t nearly fast enough to even begin? Congratulations. You’ve just rediscovered the point where you stopped being a functional human. The advances your personality will take while correcting past distortions won’t take as long as actually reliving childhood, adolescence, early adulthood etc, and you aren’t actually a child, you are just feeling a greater range of things again.

    7) Be careful with over applying perseverance. Unless you are the born-to-endure type, and you know that for sure (and they are really rare people) don’t get yourself into situations that just constantly grind you down into exhaustion so that you can neither advance or escape for your own good. There is no such thing as a loser, or a failure, (in the conclusive sense) it’s just people with big mouths who have no clue about life outside their tiny culture.

    8) Before the crisis ends, you might get the chance to consider your death. No need to consider how you will go, but consider being dead as in not here anymore. If you had 5, 10, 30 or 50 years left, consider how you would like to approach that period alive on Earth. Don’t consider what you’d like to do or achieve, but how you’d like to approach it. What will be your attitude towards life? What’s your real capacity for the things you ask of yourself?

    9) You might think to yourself, “I’ve accumulated a lot of useless knowledge no one can use. I can’t even use it anymore.” That’s good. Just tuck it away for later. Maybe we’ll get together one day and have a laugh about that time we did some really dumb shit and how embarrassing it is to think of it again.

    10) There is no end. While you’re keeping your head together and becoming a human, opportunities to do stuff and unexpected events will come and go, and you’ll enjoy some of it, and you’ll get older and hopefully a little bit wiser. No one knows where you’re going or how it will end. Good luck, Space Cadet.

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