Pop Psych B**ls**t

You know I am very angry if I am using profanity.  It's not my style.

Particularly in the wake of what happened in Boston, I have thought it important to adjust my attitude a little and try (this is as big a battle as trying to make my life more interesting) to just stop the whining for a moment and be grateful for the things I have.

Then I see this

and feel that I am right back where I started.

This image and the stupid simplistic idea that this is something everyone can do is as toxic as all those pictures of skinny women in beautiful clothes and the articles about the latest diet saying anyone can have a perfect body if they only try hard enough (or the perfect job, the perfect mate, the best behaved children, you name it).

Much of life is about choosing the lesser of two evils, or doing what seems best at a given time, and then before you know it you are well over 50 and a lot of dies have been cast.

So I bought myself (in a very small way) the freedom to "do it later".  That is not what I was thinking at the time, what I was thinking at the time was that I had seen a lot of very poor people who had made bad employment choices (or made none) and I didn't really want to be living the way they were living in old age.  

All I have to do is look at my partner.  Or my voice teacher.  He would be up a creek if his wife didn't have a good job with benefits.

I feel as if this idiotic piece of crap has undone about 10 hours of talking in therapy trying to make peace with my life as it is.  Not that I can't make it better, but I can't undo 35 years of deadly dull work  (which yielded me health insurance for life and two 401ks) and re-live them going to various graduate schools, participating in artistic internships, pursuing a dream. What I bought myself is that I know I will never starve, be homeless, or have so little money that I have to choose between buying medicine and seeing an occasional movie.

In less than 4 years when I can collect my full retirement amount from Social Security if I add that to my income I can have a comfortable life, and when I'm 80 I can stop working and annuitize the money in my 401ks - and travel anywhere I want to. My mother was healthy as a horse more or less until she was 93.

A lot of the people who post these idiocies are in their 30s or 40s.  The jury is still out about what they will choose as the clock ticks.