Stressed Smile – Thoughts from March 28 and April 1, 2022

March 28, 2022

I’ve been working on adding exercises and examples to my book. It has added about ten thousand words to it. I look forward to the day when I will have to explain what book I’m working on, but I only have the one right now. I would love to have time to just write. At work and at home, I have a limited time to do it. Actually, when I think about it, it’s how I spend my time at home that is my biggest problem. There are several reasons for this, but they are mainly a lack of enthusiasm for life. (Future note: Ending the paragraph with this sad statement seems to be a regular part of my Thoughts papers at this time. I had many creative thoughts, but few outlets for them.)

I stopped trying to fix the problem with my website because it was just wasting my time. Even when the site was working correctly, it didn’t work exactly like I wanted it to. If I had unlimited funds, I could pay someone to create exactly what I want. As it was, I used mainly plugins to accomplish as close as I could get on my own. I’m not a programmer and don’t want to be. A staff of people is what I need, but I don’t know anyone willing to work for free.

I was reading some of my reality denial statements from my book to a coworker. Actually, I could only read one of them because he challenged every sentence I read. The one I read wasn’t even that controversial. It was about health and how people act like they can’t do anything about their health. It just is what it is and they don’t think they can do anything about it. He actually inspired some statements later on by imitating what I could hear him saying. I knew to stay away from reading those to him. He is a person who has lived his entire life denying realities left and right. He is constantly stressed, angry, and unhappy with other people. As I say in the book, he focuses his anger on everyone but himself. He approaches every interaction with confrontation. He does not have a non-confrontational style of talking if he disagrees with even part of what someone else says.

Convincing people their beliefs are harming them is an uphill battle. You must convince them their beliefs are not real knowledge about the world. If they only have beliefs about the world, they are ignorant of real knowledge. Most people don’t take being called ignorant well. People are very willing to say what they believe without a shred of evidence to back it up. They are proud of their ignorance until they get called out on it. Then they get defensive. People who have specific knowledge of certain subjects get the most defensive about their knowledge of general subjects.

April 1, 2022

I don’t hate or love April Fool’s Day. The day is almost over before I usually notice that it is April First. I don’t watch the news or pay attention to social media, so I don’t see the stories that try to fool you. For years, I used to put out a fake story on Nerd Mouse, but I stopped doing it. I never get the point of fooling others into believing something that is not real. Religions do this every day, making their followers believe much more absurd things. This is a good time to see who gets caught believing foolish things and not listening to them in the future. Also, if you see people enjoying lying to others, you should always avoid them.

I’m seeing more and more people behaving badly and finding out they are religious or have some other form of reality denial. Part of me wants to start pointing these things out. It would be pointless because people who are rich, white, male, and/or religious will not stop doing what they are doing. They tied all of their bad behavior up in their identities. They think what they are doing is a trade secret to their success, but they are only running from realities they don’t want to change. Fear guides their actions and bad behavior. The punishment for their behavior is fighting realities they try to deny. Accepting reality is the only way to start living a happier life.