How not to change your life in three easy steps

I quite like self-help guides and articles on improving yourself and your life. But sometimes I get a bit fed up with the serious, well-intentioned tone. So here is my mini-anti-guide called

How not to change your life in three easy steps

1. Let yourself be paralyzed by frustration and fear of failure, or let fear make you do things that are against your own best interests. Or have completely unrealistic hopes and aspirations ... the effect is different, but the end result is the same.

2. Live in denial. Delude yourself that your life is just hunky-dory, and that there is no need to do anything to change it. If you are no good at denial, there are other options, such as overeating, binge shopping, overworking, over-exercising, designer drugs or more traditional ones. Nothing chases away the existentialist blues better than a good stiff drink. And don't be overly alarmed when habituation sets in, and you need more each time to achieve the same effect: it is worth it.

3. If you are physically attractive and good at faking intelligence, arrogance, scepticism and/or cynicism are good attitudes, preferably in public; if you are not, consider crawling into your cave, and cocooning in resignation and/or total apathy. Couches have a right to potatoes.

4*. Always blame others when things go wrong. And keep on blaming others until you end up anger and bitterness set up house in your life permanently.

*I know it says three easy steps, but things are always more complicated than they sound. Get used to it.

***

"We all have some emptiness in our lives, an emptiness that some fill with art, some with God, some with learning. I have always filled the emptiness with drugs." - Bruce Sterling, Involution Ocean.