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.

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"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.

The same old same old

I spend a lot of timing thinking about the process of habituation, and there are several things that bother me about it. One is the lag time between the stimulus and the reaction, which is usually longer than I would prefer. When my wife and kids go off for a week or so, it usually takes me about three to four days to get used to their absence, for example. Then, just when I am beginning to enjoy my solitude, they come back, and I need another 3-4 days to get used to that. Or take the Luxembourg weather. It usually takes expats from more benign climates 20-30 years to get used to it. By which time they usually retire, and go back to where they came from.

And the second is the fact that, with time, organisms react less even though the strength of the stimulus remains the same (desensitization). Of course, it would be impossible to survive without this, because you would simply be overwhelmed by stimuli. And the process of habituation is also an important survival mechanism, because it allows us to adapt, and adaptability is one of the main criteria for survival at individual, group and species level.

But there are situations where it is better not to adapt. It is all very well for me to get desensitized to the problems I have with my my music software, and just accept the fact that it will usually take 2-4 times to create a final version of a recording. (I have tried to fix it, but without success. Now, I just take a deep breath and try again each time the problem occurs.). But it is not a good idea to get so used to working with dangerous chemicals that you forget the risks (a known problem in laboratories). And on a grander scale, it is not so good to get used to "just accept" injustice, abuse, needless suffering and so on.

Of course, there is another, opposite, risk, namely when the same stimulus evokes ever bigger reactions (over-reactions). For the human race, that is probably just as bad as desensitizing, and for the individual it is definitely worse. What would be best is to stayed somewhere in the middle: aware of the problems, and committed to do something about it, but not overly involved emotionally.

Sounds very Zen, I hope. Now if I could only find that balance in my own life ...