Advice From a Cynical Graduate of Awkwardness

If you find that you are the butt of most of the jokes in your social circle, it is because you have been deemed inferior by the unspoken social ghost of everyone and no one. It is very likely due to some social awkwardness or difficulty communicating on your part- this is a plague that affects most interesting people. You must take direct and immediate countermeasures or your status as coal for the groups’ steam engine of humor will become definite. You are a muse as well as a pin cushion to them - you inadvertently serve to encourage the others to “improve” lest they too descend into the gloom of your hideous, leprous peonage. Unfortunately, the way things work here isn’t very fair or reasonable: no one will ever tell you what you did wrong clearly. Instead, there will be a silence, or an eye roll, or a chuckle, or a whisper. They want you to make mistakes. Your indiscretions will either be punished right away or subsumed into an ether which will eventually regurgitate a punishment upon you. You are expected to figure out what you did wrong on your own, and they won’t even tell you that. They’ll pretend that you should’ve “just known” what they happen to have already learned. You must fail in order to learn- it isn’t your fault, but you will be treated as though it is your fault. What’s more, the failures of others will not often be displayed and the higher-ups are often granted amnesty for their mistakes because they are prettier or wealthier than you and the sycophants that surround them wish to preserve their access to this abundance.

To rise in the ranks of this imposed hierarchy you must acquaint yourself with a nebulous concept called “cool.” You already know about it and have known about it for a long time. What you do not know is that they’re hoarding it. Because you are such a worm, it is important that the “cool” be kept from you or it would allow you power enough to climb out of the soil. The cool gives ammunition: the element of surprise. No one knows where it comes from, but it probably comes from what the coolest people think is cool, and “cool” people don’t always have good taste. There is a video on the internet somewhere called “Two Girls One Cup” in which two women decide to eat each other’s waste out of waffle ice cream cones. It was once very “cool” to have seen this video. It was not necessarily cool to do what was depicted in the video, but cool to have seen the video and especially cool to show someone else the video and laugh at their disgusted reaction to the video. It represented “The Most Disgusting Thing in the World” and was deemed laudable for this because it was viewed as a challenge to overcome. If you find something that you think is cool, you must consider how likely it is that others will think it’s cool. If it isn’t, it isn’t. When I was a young cadet, I thought that Charlie Chaplin was cool. He wasn’t. Good books are no longer cool, nor is good music, nor good movies, nor interesting ideas. If you have not seen the new pornographic music video or shit-crusted TikTok trend, the more uppity lieutenants and corporals will click their tongues in judgment upon you when they find knowledge of the knowledge you should have known to have known. They do this to climb the rungs of the social hierarchy themselves.

Rest assured that you can climb out of the uncool pit of fiery damnation and you do not need to step on the heads of others to do so. I am not here to tell you how to do that, but to reassure you just in case your efforts fail that the rewards of being “cool” melt away like exposed ice cubes. Whatever the higher-ups have acquired through anamnesis (reacquired knowledge that is endowed both to the lucky and to those with willpower) gives them an advantage now at a comparatively young age but it will also drain them of their ability to recall past wisdom and learn new wisdom as, over the course of their many victories they will become accustomed to pleasure and the fulfilment of desire, which is the cause of suffering. Pleasure will stultify and weaken their ability to understand the nature of this world, but you, burdened by the suffering they will take pleasure in inflicting upon you, will remain stalwart and upright in the face of life’s harsh grey wind, grow tall over the anthill you emerged from, and one day your shadow will reach the moon.