The more money I make, the more pissed off I am at rich people.

I want to preface this blog post by saying that I’ve never been truly destitute. I have also never been truly rich. But I am currently approaching the “middle of the road,” and as someone breaking into the middle class from the lower-middle class (by the way, I think the “middle class” is a misnomer—I’m WAAAAAAAAY closer to $0 than I am to $1,000,000,000), I can confidently say one thing:

Fuck rich people.

And by rich people, I mean people who don’t know the price of common grocery items or people who cosplay as service industry workers. Pro tip, rich people: that shit is not cute and endearing—that shit is out of touch and infuriating.

Let me tell you why…

What it’s like being poor

Full disclosure, I also don’t have a whole hell of a lot of experience being poor as an adult. I’ve definitely spent most of my adult life living within my means, or in just ever so slight excess; I’m no stranger to the #treatyoself life. But when I was a child, I definitely remember my immediate family coming into financial hardship so badly that we had to move cities away and in with family that could keep us sheltered. By that measure, I can tell you that I remember what it means to be poor. Here’s a really short list of what being poor looks like:

• Putting in specific, limited volumes of gasoline into your car because you don’t have the budget for gas

• Selling or pawning treasured belongings because you can’t make rent this month

• Keeping track of the dollar amount in your grocery store cart because you can’t afford to buy too much

• Knowing what SNAP is

• Keeping diligent track of which lights or appliances are on in your living place because your electric bill can bankrupt you

• Having your electricity turned off

• Needing a second job

• Not going to the doctor or dentist because you can’t realistically afford it

• Having to leave a grocery cart at the register because all of your cards were declined

Even shittier, being poor is expensive, because the penalty for not having enough money is often a fee. Being poor is often associated with escapism via substance abuse, because what else is there? There are so many barriers to escaping poverty and general poorness that people seldom do it. If you’ve never had the displeasure of experiencing any of the above bullets, count yourself lucky. But a lot of people reading this will have, and they’ll know how fucking miserable it is.

You only have bootstraps if you can afford boots

There’s a mythical anecdote about people who’ve “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” and gotten themselves out of poverty and into the more luxurious parts of our society. While these unicorns aren’t completely fictional, they are a statistical anomaly. More commonly, the cycle of poverty is one of relapse and remission, and the longer one stays in poverty, the more likely one is to stay in it (Transitions into & out of Poverty in the United States, Ann Stevens, UC Davis). Ironically, being poor is extremely expensive.

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

—Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

When you’re poor, you buy obstacles that keep you poor. You buy subpar products, or subpar nutrition, or subpar services. These subpar purchases don’t have the longevity that “premium” products or services have, and consequently, you end up paying more frequently to compensate. When it comes to the relationship of money and problems, less means more.

Money can’t buy you happiness…but it can buy you everything else

When I graduated college in 2017, I was lucky enough to have landed a paid internship, and skilled enough that they kept me on staff after that internship ended. For someone who graduated from art school, this was the golden goose dream. I had previously been working as a morning stocker at a big box retailer, and the pay increase at the time was significant. However, by San Francisco standards, it was still considered a very low-income position. I was fortunate enough to still be living rent-free with my mother at the time, so it was mostly a liquid income as I started to come into emergent adulthood. Over the next few years, jobs, and apartments, I would teeter around that salary, typically staying within $10,000/year of it. It wasn’t until 2021 when I would finally see another significant salary increase of 25%. I kept that salary for around half a year until I jumped agencies for another 33% salary raise. Very quickly, from mid-2021 to early-2022, I was making +60% more than I’d been making for the past 4 years prior.

Let me tell you something: every time I got a raise, the walls felt a little less close—figuratively and literally. In that time, I’d moved out of my mom’s place, into a small apartment with a roommate, into a much bigger apartment with two roommates, and currently, into a reasonably sized apartment with my romantic partner. Net-net, I’ve consistently gained more personal space in wealthier areas with more a more forgiving margin of income. I seldom think about how much groceries are going to cost me anymore. I fill my gas to the brim without thinking about it. I don’t feel guilty making purchases to fuel my hobbies and interests. I am planted firmly in the middle class earning range, according to Bay Area statistics.

But friends, let me tell you this: that +60% salary increase I saw over the last year or so? It really wasn’t that much in the grand scheme of American economics. I find myself extremely comfortable and could probably find myself contented with this salary for the foreseeable future, yet my whole current salary is equal to ~0.0001282% of what Jeff Bezos made in 2020. In relative terms of my salary, that’s about $0.13.

If you could take $0.13 away from me and completely lift someone out of poverty and into the middle class of San Francisco for a year, I would be more than happy to give that to you. Hell, if you wanted to do that for 1,000 people and it only cost me $130, I’d say that I’ve bought shoes more expensive. 10,000, and it costs me $1,300? That’s a shitload of money, but I’d still probably do it because the wellbeing of 10,000 people is well worth 1.3% of my yearly salary. You know what 1.3% of Elon Musk’s revenue from 2019–2020 was? $1,643,200,000.

Let me reiterate: me spending $1,300 is equivalent to Elon Musk spending $1.6 BILLION dollars.

And therein lies why I’m so pissed off with rich people (read: billionaires)…

Only dragons sit on hoards of gold

How is it possible that the richest people in America sit on this vast pile of wealth when they could cumulatively eliminate food insecurity, shelter insecurity, and all types of basic needs for this country’s citizenry? Stet that, the whole world. The comparatively meager salary increase that changed my entire life could be spread around to the nation’s population with headroom to spare. That’s what I mean by “the more money I make, the more pissed off I am at rich people.” Because I don’t even make that much in the grand scheme of it all. Regular people shouldn’t be fighting each other over the crumbs we’re left off the tables of the ultra-rich. If we’re left wanting, we should be pissed off at them.

Let me put this in a way that’s easier to digest:

• If I paid you $1,000,000 a year for 1,000 years

• You didn’t spend a single dollar

• You would have ONE billion dollars after ONE THOUSAND YEARS

There are people in the world who have hundreds of billions of dollars. What the fuck can you possibly do with that kind of money.

Skip to 2:52 to see the visualization. Most people reading this will make between 0.5–2 grains of rice per year.

How did we get here?

Why do we have money in the first place? Well, it can be traced back to when humans were a tribal species. We evolved to be social creatures, because belonging to a pack in prehistoric times meant you were more likely to contribute to the wellbeing of the pack and survive. It follows, then, that when a tribe would meet another tribe, those two tribes could interact to the benefit of the both (if they didn’t just try to destroy each other and take everything first). This is how bartering came about. “I’ll trade you some meat from my tribe for some clean water from yours.” For tribal species, bartering makes a lot of sense. You never know what other tribes you may come across, so a singular system of representing value doesn’t make much sense. Trade is more of a case-by-case scenario.

However, as we began to settle as a species, and tribes became villages, which became towns, which became full blown societies, the bartering system became less convenient for our non-nomadic ancestors. Eventually, we started representing the value of goods with token items (these could be anything from shiny shells to metal coins). Within a society, a token could represent a food ration you could redeem from the governing authority, for example. This was better for static societies because townsfolk wouldn’t have to try and store food that could rot. They could instead store a representation of the food, which doesn’t have a shelf life. This principle of token items standing as representations of goods could be arbitrary, and trades across societies were definitely disputable. The solution? Societies had to create a standard representation for each token. That way, a governing authority could say “one token is equal to one bread,” or whatever. This is how we got to the gold standard.

In modern society, the value of money became directly linked to the quantity of gold a society had. You have one dollar? It’s worth one unit of gold. You can use this dollar to buy things that are compared to the value of gold at the time, or you can exchange it for the gold itself—which may or may not increase in value over time.

But as we enter a global economy, the representation of a country’s currency becomes more difficult to precisely measure. It’s now measured by a nation’s gross national product, which is to say the total value of all the goods and services that a nation creates and provides to the world. How do we standardize that, you ask?

GOOD. MOTHERFUCKING. QUESTION. The shit has grown overly complicated and damn near arbitrary all over again. What does a dollar represent anymore? Nothing, really. It doesn’t really redeem for a piece of gold, anymore, and gold is sort of a meaningless standard to measure by, now. So money is basically just a bunch of arbitrary numbers decided by the people who have the most of it. It’s dumb and pointless. Money used to represent wealth and scarcity, and was useful when comparing between tribes, but the fact of the matter is, we are a global tribe, now. Money is just holding us back as a species.

Think about it this way: a member of a tribe takes what it needs from the tribe when they need it, and contributes to the tribe when they’re asked to. It’s that simple, but now make it a global scale.

…Okay, I know it’s not that simple, but you get what I mean. We’re probably too far down the gullet of capitalism to just reverse course. Nothing short of a global revolution or species extinction event will get us there. But a man can dream and be pissed off about it until then, can’t he?

Conclusion:

The world’s wealth gap has long since been outrageous, but it is especially outrageous today, when the cumulation of the world’s billionaires could collectively solve for all the world’s basic wants and needs, and then some. Full transparency, I think the system of transactional relationships is a horrifically outdated modality. We have enough global resources to simply take care of the world. Why are we still using this archaic system to represent wealth in the digital age? Perhaps my favorite expression of this, ever, comes from a scene in Star Trek: First Contact…

A completely batshit gun control solution that pleases no one (which makes it objectively perfect)

Growing up as an American, the gun control debate has been as ubiquitous as water (and even moreso, sometimes, seeing as I grew up in drought-stricken California). It’s a conversation that is mired by lobbying, uninformed outrage, and general propaganda on behalf of both sides of the aisle. It’s also a desperate one, since almost everyone agrees that there’s a problem, it’s just that no proposal has ever been satisfactory. Personally, I think it’s because any proposal only goes as far as satisfying one swath of the political spectrum; the others are left disgruntled by this or that. They’re all half measures wherein someone always feels like the other person came out on top, and no one likes to lose when they feel like someone else won. As someone who both identifies as pretty staunchly liberal, but is also fascinated by guns from a hobbyist perspective, I’ve thought about this a lot and have had to reconcile two different parts of my ethos: guns are bad, and guns are interesting.

Then what’s my solution? How do you devise federal legislation that possibly satisfies every ideology across the contiguous United States, knowing full well that even across county lines, the politics surrounding gun legislation are vastly contentious? Well, Aesop’s The Donkey and His Masters tells us “He who tries to please everybody pleases nobody.” So how about we try to please nobody?

Displeasing The Liberals

Alright, the first step in pleasing nobody is to get the Liberals pissed off. Should be pretty easy. Here’s why: I propose that we remove all restrictions on firearms and their paraphernalia, with the exception that RPGs, HMGs, LMGs, and any fully automatic firearms should still NOT be accessible to civilians. Open carry? Legalize it. Concealed carry? Legalize it. What about the sneaky subject of bump stocks? Good question. Legalize ‘em. And here’s the kicker…

…because…

Displeasing the Conservatives

…We should hold every single person and entity legally liable for anything and everything that happens with and because of that gun and its accessories. Up to and including the death penalty (depending on the state).

“Even the seller and manufacturer?”

Even the seller and manufacturer, yes. Especially the gun manufacturer.

“How would the death penalty work for an entire corporation?”

You fucking kill them.

“That is batshit fucking crazy”

I’m a man of my word.

But seriously, the implications are extreme on both sides for a reason. Think about it: if everyone in the chain of purchase was held legally liable for all incidents involving that firearm, gun sellers and manufacturers would be a lot more choosy about who they’re selling these instruments of death to. I bet they do diligent background checks and implement stringent training courses before finalizing the transactions.

“All that would do is increase the black market sale of guns.”

The black market sale of guns is doing just swimmingly on its own. And are you implying that “law abiding citizens” who have nothing but legal intent to do with their guns would suddenly turn to the black market if all regulations on their guns and attachments were made easy and legal to purchase? If the answer is yes, then I would posit to you that such gun buyers should not be buying guns in the first place, and that they were probably already looking at illegal ways to acquire their guns, anyway.

And if a gun store or manufacturer is caught evading the rules, they get felony persecuted. Up to and including the death penalty.

Okay, wise guy, how would it work?

Here’s a scenario for you:

Gun Manufacturer (GM) makes a gun > GM sells gun to Gun Retailer (GR) > GR sells gun to Gun Owner (GO) > GO’s adult offspring steals it and uses it to murder their significant other.

GM and everyone working in it (inclusive of the manufacturing facility and corporate headquarters), GR and everyone involved in the sale (inclusive of the salesperson, the manager-on-duty, and any supervisory staff), and GO are all personally liable for the murder of the offspring’s spouse, to the furthest extent of that state’s law—up to and including the death penalty.

This would create a chain of accountability that would reeeeeeaaaaaaally make every single person involved very cautious and deliberate about to whom they sell and store their guns. After all, the Second Amendment is sacred, right?

Conclusion:
I don’t a see a problem with this solution. If there are so many law-abiding citizens being held hostage by senseless gun regulation, then it shouldn’t be a problem if they’re all held ultimately responsible for whatever happens with that gun. It would encourage better storage of those guns via safes, lock boxes, etc…, and it would even bolster the sales of previously inaccessible firearms and accessories to states where gun legislation is too “extreme.”

…Unless there’s a bigger, more cultural problem surrounding the gun control debate, and really, gun manufacturers are complicit, compassionless, capitalist leeches feeding off the bloated corpse of their fear mongering propaganda and lobbying.

But that’s not it, right? Right.

Subtleties in the language of racism: why you shouldn't call neighborhoods "good" or "bad"

Tell me if this sounds familiar: “Don’t go to [XYZ neighborhood] at night. It’s a bad/rough neighborhood.”

It wouldn’t surprise me if everyone reading this has heard some permutation of this advice in their lifetime. As someone with a hobbyist perspective about linguistics, let me tell you the short version why I’ve stopped calling neighborhoods “good” or “bad,” and have instead elected to make the conscious decision to call them either “richer” or “poorer,” respectively: it’s because the language of racism is also subtle.

Yes, I am implying that calling a neighborhood “bad” is accidentally and incidentally racist. Some of you might have the knee-jerk reaction of rejecting the idea as “too sensitive” or “too woke.” Hear me out: I’m not calling you racist for calling a neighborhood “bad.” But that doesn’t mean you’re not susceptible to learned racist language. Remember that once, not long ago, the “n word” was just a way to describe Black people. Once, not long ago, it was normal to call women “broads.” Once, not long ago, it was considered appropriate to call all people of Asian descent “Orientals.” Just like we know better about those words now, I hope we can learn to be better about the language of today.

“Those are words that describe people, so of course they’re racist. How can calling a high-crime neighborhood “bad” be considered racist? Crime is bad. If the neighborhood is a high-crime neighborhood, it’s a bad neighborhood. That’s not racist.”

I presume the above logic is based on the idea that a “neighborhood” is not a person, and therefore does not have an ethnicity. While that may make sense on the surface, it’s a little more complicated than that when you drill down a bit.

A brief history of American economics and race

We don’t have to go back very far to realize that American economics has historically favored White people. Some counterpoints to this observation will insist that “everyone today has a fair and equal access to everything; it doesn’t matter what your race is.” Speaking strictly on paper, sure, there isn’t as much obviously racist legislation. In the 1950s–1960s, we had the Civil Rights Movement, punctuated by political figures in the Black community such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr…

…And everyone lived happily ever after.

…Just kidding.

I bring up the Civil Rights Movement because it happens to be the talking point that anti race-equity pundits point at and say, “See? We did it. We fixed the problem of legislative racism in America 70 years ago.” And while it’s true that we don’t have segregated water fountains, or “Whites only” pool hours, or “No Coloreds” diners, it’s a little disingenuous to call American politics “fixed.” Think of it this way: if you’re running in a relay race, and the other team happens to put your first runner in shackles from the start, of course your team will be behind the whole time. And that’s Critical Race Theory in America.

The effects of racist legislation have meant that people of color in America were historically prevented or denied access to a lot of the things that White America had from the very beginning, or haven’t you ever wondered why HOA suburbs are overwhelmingly White?

Put simply: White people have had first dibs on all the economic power since the beginning of the country. And if you’ve ever heard the saying “you gotta spend money to make money,” then it’ll make logical sense that if you don’t start with any money, it’s really fucking hard to make any money.

Here’s a question for you: of the top 10 richest people in America, how many do you think are White? Better yet, how far down the list do you think you have to go before you hit a non-White person? Even better, how far down the list until you hit a Black person? I’ll let you click that link and look for yourself. Spoiler alert: he’s definitely not in the top 100 (if you want to know his exact position, check the link after the conclusion).

Follow up question, why do you think that is? I won’t give you my opinion. But you should speculate for yourself.

Economics and crime (aka Mo’ money, less problems)

Now that we’ve discussed race and economics, let’s discuss economics and comfort. In the opening number of the musical Les Misérables, Jean Valjean is shown in chains, working as a slave to pay off a debt for stealing a loaf of bread.

Javert:
Follow to the letter your itinerary
This badge of shame
You shall show until you die
It warns you’re a dangerous man

Valjean:
I stole a loaf of bread!
My sister's child was close to death
And we were starving.

Javert:
You will starve again
Unless you learn the meaning of the law

Valjean:
Or the meaning of those 19 years
A slave of the law

If you’ve never been destitute, I’m sure you’ve never thought about stealing a meal to survive. When you go to the grocery store, do you haphazardly place whatever items you want in your cart without thinking about it much? Do you play the “guess the total” game when you approach the checkout line? Do you think about how many calories are in a box of plain spaghetti, and do the math on the spot to see if you can realistically hit 1500 calories in a day if you sit still and try to expend as little energy as possible while still being able to afford rent? Do you have a rent statement?

The closer you push someone towards the lower end of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the closer you push them towards desperation and a “do anything” type of will to survive.

“Just get a job! There are so many places hiring right now; it’s not that hard to survive.”

Sure, but when the only job that’ll hire you pays $10 an hour, after taxes, your take home pay is less than $400 a week. What happens when your rent is twice that, plus utilities? Not to mention the price of gas to fuel your car, which has a registration, insurance fee, and the cost of maintenance. And even if you eliminate the car, there’s the cost of everything else. The fact of the matter is that in America, escaping the cycle of poverty is fucking next to impossible. And just like generational wealth gets handed down, so does generational poverty. If it takes one person two jobs just to sustain themselves, while another person had the privilege of going to college while on their parents’ dime, that’s inherently not fair. I’m not saying the college grad needs to feel bad about themselves, but they should never claim it’s “easy” to do anything.

Whew, sorry, that got a little ranty. The point is that if you’re wealthy, odds are you’re comfortable. And if you’re poor, odds are it’s much harder to be comfortable. And when it’s a choice between stealing or starving, you bet your ass you’d steal to survive.

Economics and drugs

Picture this: you have no TV. No internet. You’re too hungry to have energy to play a sport. You’re cold because you’re living out of a car with an expired registration and no gas. You’re struggling to get a job because you don’t have a mailing address and you haven’t showered in a week. You’re fucking miserable. All you have is some scavenged leftovers and a few dollars you found in an old jacket pocket.

Then someone comes along with a way to make that misery just…go away.

Poverty is the biggest gateway to street drugs. And once you’re addicted to street drugs, your margins for getting out of poverty get extremely slim. And that’s pretty much all I have to say about that. It’s that simple, but it’s excruciatingly complicated at the same time. There’s a reason you don’t see a lot of heroin or crack in HOA suburbs, and it’s because they don’t need them to feel good or comfortable.

Economics, crime, drugs, and race

I want to take a moment to note that nowhere in the last two sections of this blog posting did I mention race. But if you happened to picture any specific demographic of person when I used any of the words above, there’s probably a reason for that. When I say “marginalized people,” what type of person do you think of? When I say “ghetto,” what type of person do you think of? Maybe you’re seeing a pattern by now. Here’s the one I see:

Rich = comfortable = less street drugs and street crime
Poor = uncomfortable = more street drugs and street crime

Note that I said “street drugs and street crime.” I’m aware that rich people do boutique drugs and engage in corporate crime (which—importantly—are both expensive). Also note that I still haven’t mentioned any race or ethnicity. But now I will:

Neighborhoods in metropolitan America are characteristically segregated by race/ethnicity. Not by modern legislation, mind you. But by the legacy of racist legislation that kept people of color marginalized into the slums and ghettos of America. This is why rich areas are mostly white, while poor areas are more ethnically diverse.

Back to square one

So a poor, high-crime, high-(street)-drug-use neighborhood is more likely to be populated by black and brown folks, while a rich, low-crime, low-(street)-drug-use neighborhood is more likely to be populated by White folks. That’s just a description of reality. But what’s the common denominator? Are Black and brown folks in these poor neighborhoods worse than their rich, White counterparts?

Are Black/brown folks bad and are White folks good?

That, my friends, is racist.

Conclusion:
If you truly believe that White folks and their neighborhoods aren’t better than people of color and their neighborhoods, then consider making the conscious decision to change your language around descriptions of those places. Honestly, even if you don’t think this idea has any merit, calling neighborhoods “richer” and “poorer” is frankly more accurate and paints a more nuanced, historically informed picture. Because being poor isn’t bad. But poverty incentivizes bad things. After all, money (and lack thereof, in many cases) is the root of all evil.

It just happens that generally, White people have more money than POC do.

Btw, as of this writing Robert F. Smith—an investor—is the first Black person to show up on the Forbes Top 400 Richest People list, sitting comfortably at position #141. The first non-white person is Jensen Huang (sitting at position #34), the CEO and president of Nvidia.

5 Tips for achieving positive self-esteem

Full disclosure: this is just the opinionated rambling of a straight, cis-gendered, Asian male—fairly high up on the privilege totem pole. I am not academically educated in the subject matter, nor am I certified as a life coach or anything. All I know is that I rate myself as having a pretty high measure of self-esteem, and these are the tips I’ve gathered along the way to get me there. Starting with perhaps the least obvious, but most intuitive:

1) Self-esteem, like most things, is a skill.

Like riding a bike, self-esteem is something you have to practice. I imagine there are few people who are born with the innate ability to ride a bike. Similarly, we have to learn how to keep ourselves in high self-esteem. If you feel more comfortable, start small: tell yourself—out loud—that you were proud of something you did. Maybe you sent an email you’ve been dreading. Maybe you made your bed after not having done that for weeks. Maybe you did your laundry when it felt like an insurmountably daunting task just yesterday. It might sound silly, and you might sardonically congratulate yourself by saying, “Wow, you did something all normal functioning humans can do. Good job.” But I urge you to fight that reflex and genuinely congratulate yourself with sincerity: “I did good.”

The thing that’s hard to break away from (and the thing that probably takes the most time to do) is the imposter syndrome of self-esteem. You may feel like you don’t “deserve” congratulations or praise. And that might be because you were never externally validated for doing things in your past. Or maybe you were always expected to “do better,” no matter how proud of yourself you happened to be in the moment. The problem with not getting enough external validation as a young person is that we develop into grown ups without the verbal tools to know how to self-validate. And if this sounds like you—if B+ was never a good enough grade for your parents—then you’ll need to learn how to be proud of yourself. Remember: we all deserve to feel proud of ourselves.

2) If small self-congratulations don’t feel right, self-aggrandize.

So, maybe you’re not the type who feels good about genuinely congratulating yourself for something “normal people should be able to do” (your words, not mine). That can be a pretty hard hump to get over. If that’s the case, then try dialing it up to 11 and use self-aggrandizing language with yourself. I picked up this trait by accident, but I’ve noticed that it’s a really helpful one for increasing one’s self-esteem in a silly, but fun, way. Here’s an example:

You’re walking up some stairs with some friends, and as you come to the last step, you stumble and fall to the ground. You might feel a bit embarrassed in the moment. But then you say, “I am truly the most graceful person on the planet,” as you get up and dust yourself off.

That’s self-aggrandization. Whenever you fumble something, use humor to say the opposite of how you feel and go even further. It usually gets a laugh from your friends, and that can be a huge alleviator on all the social stress of looking silly. When you get the hang of saying something like “I’m truly the most careful person alive,” after spilling a soda at the dinner table, try self-aggrandizing with positive things, too. Here’s another example:

You’ve just finished learning how to cook a new dish. You plate it, eat it, and it was actually pretty damn good. You say out loud, “Eat your heart out, Gordon Ramsay.”

Self-aggrandization is a great pathway to positive self-esteem because you and people around you know you’re kidding, but you’re also practicing saying something nice about yourself. Which is better than the alternative, and leads us to the next tip…

3) Don’t say anything about yourself that you wouldn’t want people to agree with.

Self-deprecation is the opposite of self-aggrandization. And it’s what most people find themselves leaning into, unfortunately. See if any of these things sound like you:

I’m sorry I’m late; I’m the worst.

Sorry for forgetting your birthday; I’m literally trash.

God, why did I wear this outfit? It’s so extra.

Does my makeup look stupid?

I wish I was prettier.

I’m such an idiot.

The thing about self-deprecation is that it can often start as a defense mechanism: we’ll say the bad things first because, well, everyone’s already thinking it, right? So if I say it first, they can’t say it, and then it won’t hurt me as bad. We think that “acknowledging our flaws” makes us “humble,” or that it “gives us permission” to be flawed, or that it shows we’re aware and contrite about something. But the truth is that self-deprecation just hurts us. People who care about you will never say things to hurt you on purpose. And above all others, we should want to care about ourselves the most. So don’t say bad things about yourself.

If you need a different kind of motivation, consider that self-deprecation not only makes us get used to hating ourselves; it also makes those around us uncomfortable. When you self-deprecate, you often socially force others to externally validate you, which can get exhausting if done too much. You’ll sometimes hear people lament that “So-and-so is always fishing for compliments,” and you don’t want people to view you that way. This is why self-validation is such an important skill to learn.

4) Practice gratitude.

This one is actually pretty vogue in the social landscape lately, and I’m actually quite thankful for it (see what I did there?). Conceptually, gratitude is a no-brainer. But it’s a skill that can be difficult to master, probably for evolutionary reasons. I think Heath Ledger’s Joker said it the best in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (albeit in a more macabre way than I’m saying):

“Nobody panics when things go according to plan.”
—Joker, The Dark Knight

Humans generally expect things to go right. It’s our default. And because of that, we tend to take things for granted. But when something bad happens, it consumes us.

“You’re such a self-pitying masochist that I could say 10 nice things and 1 mean thing, and you would only hear the 1 mean thing.”

—Princess Carolyn, Bojack Horseman

Kinda related: you should definitely watch Bojack Horseman if you haven’t already. Anyway, when you practice gratitude, you start to see things for how good they are rather than how good they aren’t. It’s deceptively simple, but it goes something like this: list 5 unique things you’re thankful for a day. Eventually, you’ll be able to do it in real time. And if you need help keeping track of it, try this gratitude journal from Munich-based educational YouTube channel, Kurzgesagt (I am not sponsored by them in any way. I’m just a really big fan).

How does this help with your self-esteem? Well, by being grateful about things at large, you’ll also naturally end up listing things about yourself. Maybe you’re grateful that you have a roof over your head, which means you’re grateful that you have a job that’s sustaining you, which means you have a skill that you’ve learned, which means you’re probably good at something. There’s a lot to be thankful about you being you. You just have to teach yourself how to be good at recognizing it.

5) Be patient and forgive yourself.

Seldom few people get this right from the get-go. And the older we are when we start this stuff, the harder it becomes to internalize and make habitual. So it’s okay if you slip up sometimes. If one day, you’re feeling extra low and you can’t seem to stop beating yourself up, it’s not going to help if you then also beat yourself up for beating yourself up. Let yourself feel bad sometimes. Tell yourself that it’s okay. Forgive yourself for being mean to yourself. Low self-esteem is a bitch and a half to get over. But when you feel like you’ve gotten through it, get back to telling yourself how fucking awesome you are.

Conclusion:

If you want to track towards positive self-esteem in the way I did, try these five things:

1. Practice it a lot, and start small

2. Self-aggrandize both your mistakes and successes

3. Don’t self-deprecate

4. Practice being grateful

5. Forgive yourself

Positive self-esteem is a learning game, and different people start out with different measures of self-esteem. Also, you may need more help than some random kid’s blog post on the Internet. So if you’ve been struggling with feelings of self-loathing for a while, it might be a good idea to consult a professional like your doctor. It could be a sign of clinical depression. Your brain, just like your kidneys, is a vital organ—arguably the most vital organ—in your body. And just like you’d take care of your kidneys in the case of a hepatic event, you should also check in on your brain if you feel like your brain chemistry isn’t normal. Good luck, and I love you ❤️

Video Games and Literature—A Comparison

So I’ve had this opinion for a long time, and I’ve even written essays in high school/done presentations in college about this topic, but I wanted to immortalize it here, as well:

Video games have the potential to equal the intellectual capacity and value of classic literature.

That is not to say that they are interchangeable with each other, nor is it to say that one is inherently superior to the other. Look, I love books, too. Hell, I love books so much that I became a professional writer. But I often see bookworms scoff at at video gamers as if they were nothing but button-mashing Neanderthals chugging neon green soft drinks and munching on triangle-shaped, nacho-cheese-dusted tortilla chips. I think that characterization does a disservice to the art form—and yes, video games are an inarguable form of art; it’s literally a major at the art school from which I have a BFA.

Tell me to my face that this isn’t art.

Anyway, let’s compare apples to apples, shall we? Unless you’re a serious fan of typesetting, novels aren’t really visual art forms (excluding book covers, which can be absolutely breathtaking). Their artistic value comes from the narratives captured within their many pages, often inclusive of different themes, motifs, and symbols—welcome back to high school English class, everyone. Now, I believe that the intellectual value of video games exceeds strictly the realm of compelling narrative, but for comparison’s sake, we’re only going to talk about story for right now, capiche? Great.

If we’re going to talk about classic literature, it’s probably only fitting that we start with the iconic benchmark by which basically all hero stories are told—Homer’s The Odyssey. This epic poem chronicles the adventure of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, as he journeys home following the events of Homer’s previous epic poem, The Iliad.

The Odyssey follows (and is perhaps responsible for popularizing) the format of the hero’s journey, in which a protagonist goes through trials and tribulations to achieve a specific goal, encountering archetypes of allies, mentors, and antagonists along the way. Many action/adventure pieces follow some permutation of this format; it’s a tried and true outline for creating a compelling and satisfying story. Since most video games involve some measure of action/adventure element, it’s important to understand this canon.

One of my favorite installments in my all-time favorite franchise.

I know I talk about The Legend of Zelda games a lot, but it’s only because they’re always so damn good. This time, we’re going to observe LoZ:WW from the perspective of the hero’s journey.

We have a protagonist (named Link), who starts off just a young kid living on an island when his sister is kidnapped by a giant bird. That’s Link’s call to adventure. He goes on an epic journey, meeting a talking boat inhabited by the spirit of the King of Hyrule—his supernatural aid/mentor—gets royally fucked up (by threshold guardians) while trying to save his sister because he’s too weak, goes through trials and tribulations to get stronger, gets fucked up some more as his ally gets captured by the ultimate antagonist, Ganon, (the abyss), has to get even stronger by assembling the pieces of the Triforce of courage (his transformation), he saves his sister (atonement), then he has to fight Ganon again with the help of the newly empowered princess Zelda and her Light Bow (gift from the goddess), defeating him and restoring peace to all the land—whereupon it is implied that he and his newly assembled friends get to go on endless adventures to come (the return).

All along the way, LoZ: WW envelopes you in a charming world full of eclectic but relatable characters with sub plots that are all extremely satisfying to resolve. The game tells an emotionally compelling story while challenging you to think and react in creative ways to progress the narrative. I’ve played through and beaten LoZ: WW at least three different times in my life, and each playthrough is equally as satisfying as the previous one—similar to how people have read through The Odyssey numerous times and found satisfaction in its story.

You may be thinking, “but Alex, the hero’s journey is the low-hanging fruit of narrative structure. What about books like To Kill A Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye that deal with humanistic themes, like the loss of innocence? Or Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World that deal with control/censorship in a modern world?" What about complex stories about morality and the human condition apart from going out on an epic adventure?”

Great question, my friend!

Red Faction: Guerilla not only had some of the funnest gameplay mechanics in recent memory, but it really makes you rethink your socio-political preconceptions.

In 2009, developer Volition, Inc. (which is now Deep Silver Volition, LLC) released Red Faction: Guerilla under the publisher THQ. The game is a 3rd person POV shooter game with a revolutionary mechanic at the time—fully destructible environments.

From RF:G’s wiki:

Red Faction: Guerrilla takes place in the year 2126. The Earth Defense Force (EDF), the allies in the original Red Faction, have become the main antagonist of RF:G. Although initially supportive of the Martian miners, Earth's natural resources have run scarce, and as a result, its world economy has collapsed from rampant speculation of commodities and lack of production. Under pressure by Earth's corporations and leaders to acquire the resources of Mars at any cost and at a pace to meet Earth's high demand, the EDF has forced Martian society into a permanent state of unfree labour. The newly reformed "Red Faction" arises to revolt against the EDF, drive them off the planet, and begin fairer negotiations with Earth.

You play as Alec Mason, who finds himself shoved into the midst of a rebellion after witnessing the murder of his brother at the hands of the planet’s governing body, the EDF. In the game, you fight for the greater good of the Martian residents at the hands of tyranny. Red Faction: Guerilla is far from subtle about its implications—from its on-the-nose title, to the content of its narrative, to its constructivist-inspired art style—the message is obvious: you are literally playing as a communist.

Red Faction: Guerilla’s logo is heavily inspired by constructivist art from Russian propaganda from the early 1900s.

It’s never explicitly stated that you’re a communist. But you’re fighting for the equal distribution of wealth and prosperity in the game—it really doesn’t have to be explicitly stated. And that’s the gorgeous part of it: once you realize what’s going on—that you’re playing the protagonist in a communist rebellion—it really challenges the American propaganda that’s been drilled into our heads since the first Great War. You empathize with Alex Mason and the Red Faction. You want to topple the established governing body with your own two hands and battle-worn sledgehammer. “Down with the EDF!” you might find yourself rallying throughout the course of the game. If you rooted for the Red Faction, you rooted for communism, plain and simple. How’s that for compelling and intellectual narrative?

“Video games are the shit; come at me, bro!”

Conclusion:
Video games and literature have equal potential when it comes to narrative intellectuality. Sure, there are brain-dead games that don’t really serve a higher intellectual purpose, but there are also books that fall in the same category (see: Goat Simulator and the Main Chick vs. Side Bitch Series, respectively). This blog post didn’t even attempt to cover the puzzle-solving element or resource-management skills that video games can help develop. But that’s a blog post for another time. For now, all I hope you do (if you don’t, already) is pick up a story-based video game and indulge in its narrative. If you feel so compelled, try to extrapolate the greater implications of that narrative to see if the writers, developers, and artists of that game are trying to make some sort of commentary on the nature of the human condition. If you want any suggestions, feel free to drop me a line—I’d be more than happy to add onto your gaming backlog.

A really cool couple’s tattoo idea I saw on the Internet a long time ago.

Why [The American public Education System] is Fucked...

[Quick preface: this is a blanket statement that addresses the system as a whole. I have had plenty of individual teachers who went above and beyond to educate me in the most spectacular and inspiring way possible. It is because of them that I am the curious and ever-learning individual that I am, and I am forever grateful to have been graced by their instruction].

Solve: x^2 + 3x – 4 = 0
Some of us look at this and say, "give me a pen," while some of us look at it and say, "oh yeah, that thing." But there's another group of people. It's a group that I'll bet most people fall into.
They're the group that says, "what the fuck is this?" Or something like that. The point is, there are herds of people who don't know, or can't remember a single thing about how to solve this equation (the answer for which is x= -4, 1, by the way). Here's the kicker: it's not hard. 

Yeah, that's right. Math isn't hard. If you can solve for 10 + 12 = x, then you can solve for x up above. The reason why math seems so hard for people is because math is a subject that requires diligent and consistent learning. This is something that just doesn't click for many people. Would you like to know why? It's because math is easy. 

Let's start from square one: elementary mathematics. 1 + 1 = x. Check. Most of us probably don't even have to think about that one. 
Okay, 10 + 10 = x. Check. It's a step up from the previous problem, but it's still pretty rudimentary and intuitive to understand.
Fine. 153 + 64 = x. Wow, alright. So maybe some of us that aren't half-calculator need to think about this one for a few seconds...
seven... carry the one... okay, x = 217. 
Good! That was a bit of a challenge. You understand addition. You must understand subtraction, right?
1 - 1.
10 - 10.
153 - 64.
Okay, great. Remember, there's a such thing as "negative numbers," too.

Let's graduate.
5 x 5 = x. 
10 x 3 = x.
43 x 18 = x. 
Well. Some of those took us a little while, but that's okay. Multiples aren't easy to just intuit. 
Now divide:
10 / 2 = x. 
40 / 5 = x. 
83 / 26 = x.
Remainders? Okay, so that's a new concept, right? It's fine; that's like dealing with money: 1 dollar divided by 7 quarters is 1 with a remainder of .75. Manageable. 

Let's graduate again. Allow me to introduce the Order of Operations: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.
Do these things in this order at each point in each equation. Ready? Go.
(5 - 10) + 6(20 - 2) - (18 / 2) = x.

Did you get 94? Did you even bother to do the equation? 
If you answered "yes" to the former question: good job! It probably didn't come as quick as "1 + 1," did it? But I'll bet you used the concept of "x + x" at some point in time. 
If you answered "no" to the latter question: you have found the root of the problem with America's education system. 
For those of us who looked at the question, thought: yeah, I can do that, so why would I bother to actually do it? Welcome to what I like to call "academic complacency." Sure. We have the basic skills to solve for x there. Do we want to put in the effort to solve something we know we can solve? Probably not. So we won't do it. Maybe in grade school, you looked in the back of your book to get the answers for the homework (they were always there in math books) and just decided to copy them onto your worksheet, instead of actually solving the problem and doing the work (by the way, this is the reason math teachers ask kids to show their work in math assignments). 

This is where the fuck up begins to rear its ugly head. 

Let's graduate again. Solve for x:
x2 - 16 = 0. 

Fuck. For some of us, this is probably easy to just understand that x = 8. For others, we get it now that it's mentioned. But how about:
(x2 - 8) + 2(5^2) - 1x = 50. Solve for x.

The answer is 8. Did you follow? At this point, most of us who can solve it will probably need a calculator, or at least a scratch paper to keep track of all the variables. For those of us who can't, it's because you stopped doing the work at (5 - 10) + 6(20 - 2) - (18 / 2) = x. 
You got complacent at just knowing how to do the problem in the last step that the next step was pretty much a foreign language to you. "When the hell did the alphabet find its way into mathematical equations?" you might ask.

So, the American school system pushes us along again—maybe passing us with a C or D+, just to get us into the next grade so the school can still get its funding from the government. Whatever. We're kids. We don't care about learning. I mean, ACTUALLY learning. We just care about getting that grade so it can push us along to the next class, where we can stay with all of our friends. 

From here on, it's a spiral of continued confusion and unanswered problems. Pre-algebra. Geometry. Algebra. Algebra 2. All of the sudden, we're getting words like "hypotenuse," and "cosine," and "Pythagorus." And we're left in the dust. But the funny thing is: math still isn't hard. 
The beautiful thing about math is that it's like a puzzle: there's ALWAYS a solution. It might be convoluted and make you jump through a hundred hoops to get to the solution, but the solution is there. Always. But if you don't remember how to jump in the first place (or never even bothered to learn from the start), how can you be expected to be coordinated enough to jump through a hoop?

That's math. That's most subjects in Academia—but it's especially apparent in math. Think of never learning how to form a sentence, and then being asked to write a 20-page essay about the entire works of William Shakespeare, cited in MLA format, with a cover page, and a works cited page at the end. 
That's insane.

But that's effectively what happens. Without the desire to actively learn, kids will just go through the motions and get the mark to pass the class until they eventually don't. American public education stops being about the desire to learn when we exit kindergarten. True learning is being taught the virtue of curiosity. It's about exploring. A lot of times, it's about being creative—and we all know that the public school system is structurally designed so that it discourages creativity. You can't wear this. You can't do this. You can't play with that. Stop doodling in class. This is how your notes should look. This is how you answer this; no you can't answer it that way—it has to be written like this.
It's mechanical. It's automated. It's boring. And at the end of its mass-production come out shiny machinated drones who have little to no desire to learn anything new. That's why kids fail. Because education is more concerned with GPA than it is about being fascinated with the subjects you're being taught. When did "what did you learn at school today, Johnny?" become "why do you have a B- in math this semester?!"

Well, it's because Johnny lost interest in learning. It's because Johnny never learned how to use a semi-colon. It's because Johnny forgot PEMDAS.

So how can Johnny possibly understand WHY x = -4, 1.

Perspectives.

Wikipedia - Jeffrey Dahmer

Sierra DeMulder - Dahmer

Many times, I believe that we are looking for the wrong side of the coin.

I've talked about this before, because I think it needs to be talked about. 

We need to stop deifying and putting bad people on a pedestal. 

As a society, we have a terrible knack for focusing too greatly on the bastards and sick fucks of the world. A perfect example that happened recently comes from the Boston Marathon tragedy. 

When you read that sentence, did you think of the sick fuck responsible for the tragedy? Probably. I won't mention him/her because I refuse to out of contempt for his/her motives and subsequent actions. I won't say if he/she is a male/female, because I don't think he/she even deserves to be acknowledged in another form of media -- not even in reference to his/her gender. In fact, around the time of the tragedy, I made it my best effort to never learn the name of that individual (of course, sensationalist news media permeates every facet of our culture, so it was just a matter of time before I unwillingly learned it). But let me ask you something: can you name the people who were killed or injured during the attack? How about just one person? Unless you were directly affected by it, I'm banking on the fact that most of you will say "no."

The above links are two stories that are easy to find online. The first one is a Wikipedia article. The second is a slam poem. I know what you're thinking; "Jeffrey Dahmer? Didn't you JUST posit that no one should even bother to learn the names of bad people?" Yes, I did. But this point needs to be made. I chose Jeffrey Dahmer because his reputation is already (disgustingly) far-reaching and infamous; his presence is engrained in our culture permanently, so it is only out of necessity and the inconvenient convenience of his infamy that I will permit myself to talk about him.

As I said, the two links are stories. Wikipedia is statistical, factual, and non-sensationalist, which is why I am using it to illustrate this point. Wikipedia is essentially the least of all the inadvertent evils when it comes to contributing to the notoriety of terrible people. While it still gives you a name, and puts a face to that name, it doesn't sensationalize the person or give him celebrity attention and acknowledgement. News media today has that problem. Once a tragedy occurs, the first question media asks is "who?" And not "who are the victims?" but rather, "who is in charge of the tragedy?"

Why is that? Why is it that Wikipedia will not sensationalize something, but news media will? I'll tell you why: news media has become entertainment news media. In order for a news network to be successful, it needs to have viewers, because those viewers become subject to commercials aired on that channel, and that's how the news network makes its money. Essentially, they need to make the news as interesting as possible to the common viewer so that they will stick with that specific network. What is most interesting to the common viewer? Drama. You see it in our entertainment industry's success -- what are the most successful shows on TV? Breaking Bad. The Walking Dead. "Reality" TV.

Drama.

News networks have caught onto that. Consequently, they now take a formulaic approach to reporting tragedy: find out what happened. Add drama. Screw the consequences.

Time and time again, when a mass tragedy occurs -- such as Columbine or Virginia Tech -- there is always a sensationalist report on the party/parties responsible. And time and time again, you know what happens? There are follow-up copycats who see the deification of the terrorists, and seek the same verification and attention for their own sick manifestos: someone, somewhere commits the same atrocity in a different location because they want to be seen, too. 

What don't we see? Victims. At least not in focus. Victims are mentioned in passing, usually chocked up to a statistic: "72 people were injured today, and four are in critical condition."
Does that sound familiar? Wikipedia at least gives you cold, unbiased statistics on both ends. Rarely, if ever, will Wikipedia use sensational, connotative words. They will not identify Jeffrey Dahmer as "evil, malicious, monstrous," or any permutation of the word "bad." Wikipedia will give you the facts. It's interesting in its uninterestingness. If news media were more like that, maybe we'd have less copycats in the world, ipso facto less people dying. 

So now I bring you to Sierra DeMulder's slam poem "Dahmer."
What makes her different? She is still talking about Jeffrey Dahmer, right? So that makes her bad? No. Because the point of her story is to make you think about one of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims: his mother. 

"Did you put your own heart in the freezer next to the thought of me?"

Sierra DeMulder uses a story that focuses on Jeffrey Dahmer to remind us as a society that we focus on Jeffrey Dahmer. Not on his victims. You see, massive tragedy not only affects people directly involved with the tragedy, but fallout comes from all parts of a society. And we so easily forget that as we get caught up in the infamy of the guilty. What makes Sierra DeMulder's poem so interesting is that it uses a sensationalist platform (poetry) to illustrate the other side of the sensationalism that news media presents. And if there is ever a thing to make sensational, it's the uttermost sadness of those affected by tragedy, because it is they, not the bad guys, who need our support. 

I'll leave you all with one last story. We've seen Wikipedia's data-centric approach to reporting a tragedy, and we've seen a poet's empathetic approach to making us feel for the victims.
Let's take a look at a news station reporting a tragedy in the only appropriate fashion. If the news media of our society was more like this, the world would be a much less scary place.