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Giving Up Sucks: Blogging

First off let me say that I really don’t like blogging about blogging. It seems like a really cheap and easy way to get people to read your stuff, because obviously people who blog are interested in blogging so would like to read a blog about blogs. Yeah. And I also don’t like writing about “success” or “being successful” because I’m not successful so why should I be spouting shit about success when I know nothing about it? It’s like listening to financial advice from a poor person or dieting tips from someone who’s obese or anorexic. But here we are anyways. I guess what I’m trying to say is that on the path to success (which I think I’m on I guess) there’s about a million difficulties you run into and if that’s causing me so much frustration and anguish I might as well write about them. Other people are probably dealing with some of the same struggles and feelings. This is called Everything Sucks and being successful is probably the hardest thing ever, so it fits I suppose.

This post is about a blog and failure and how I suppose it’s nice to quit sometimes. This obviously don’t feel good which is why it Sucks. I started a blog in February that was about electric cars. I had purchased one about a year ago and since there are tons of misconceptions about the things I thought blogging would be a great way to enlighten the masses about how great they are. I really like my electric car because of a ton of reasons and I wanted to get that information out into the world.

I was enthusiastic about the blog; it had focus, a narrow topic, and seemingly tons of things to write about. I’ve said before Everything Sucks is a mess because it has no real “tight theme” which apparently blogs are supposed to have so I felt excited about finally have a good blog idea. You read articles about how to really blog and they usually suggested those few things. I set to work on it immediately. I made a post every two days, made sure the design looked acceptable, and even made a Facebook page for the blog. Hell, I even advertised for the blog! It took about a week for the page to have over 100 “likes” and I felt good. Things were moving along nicely.

And then I didn’t write as much for it. It wasn’t for lack of motivation either; I just couldn’t think about topics to write about. When it came down to it an electric car is nearly the same as a gas car and there’s only so much writing you can do about how efficient and cheap they are to operate. One of my premises — namely the one about having a ton to write about — was wrong apparently. There wasn’t much to write about.

You end up with two choices. You can either give up, accept failure, and move on or keep trying to make progress. It’s a choice we all make in regards to nearly anything: a difficult job, relationships, careers, and goals. This choice is made more difficult by the often-heard adage about success: it’s all due to persistence. The people who are successful don’t give up at the first sign of difficulty and if you give it you feel like shit. You’re a failure. You’re [insert goal here] is an automatic failure if you stop working on it.

What did I do? I gave up on it. Do I feel like shit? Sort of, just because it was wasted time. But strangely I don’t feel too bad about it. Even though we’re conditioned to feel like failures sometimes it’s best to realize when you don’t have a way forward and try something else. You can keep banging your head into a wall trying to make progress but sometimes that wall isn’t going to give and you need to move on. Accepting this is probably the hardest part.

I think of what Hunter S. Thompson said in a letter to his friend asking for advice:

“We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.”

He gives the perspective of a child who wants to be a firefighter when he grows up. Everyone wants to be something cool like that, either a firefighter or a veterinarian or an astronaut. None of us actually become these things but we don’t feel like we failed out dreams because we eventually outgrow them, or rather see the goals from a different angle, as Thompson puts it. It’s this ever-changing growth in ourselves and our ever-changing perspective on life that forces us to also make ever-changing choices regarding our goals and dreams. It’s simply not set in stone: you have to constantly figure out what it is you need to do.

I guess it’s with that perspective that I gave up on my blog. I had a good run for a few months and for once I hit it hard with tons of motivation and little procrastination: two of my biggest flaws. Eventually I found that there wasn’t much to write about and that maybe my idea wasn’t that good. I felt terrible about this at first because I had wasted so much time on the blog and I obviously felt like a failure for “giving up” but fact is fact. With my ever-changing perspective on the state and future of the blog I was able to realize that my time would be better spent elsewhere. I still learned a bunch of lessons and those won’t disappear either. So don’t feel like you’re a failure because you had to give something up. Obviously try to make progress because persistence does seem to be key, but realize when something has run its course and don’t be afraid to move on to new adventures (like trying to sell goddamn t-shirts)!

Easy Money or Easy Money?

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Everyone wants to earn money and everyone wants to do this in the laziest way possible. I think this is why multi-level marketing schemes like It-Works and whatever else have such success on gullible people. Those who don’t know any better are hypnotized by the possibility of making an easy thousand or even “millions” of dollars by selling some stupid-ass products that doesn’t work and by recruiting others “under them”. Anyone with some sense of logic will know that this just sounds too easy; money that sounds too good to be true probably is. But that’s the holy grail we’re all searching for: Easy Money. Whatever that means…

We think of the popular YouTubers, bloggers, and freelance writers that make a living by doing what amounts to (more or less) a hobby. I see parents playing with their kids on YouTube having millions of views and I think why can’t I do that? Why don’t I do that? Wouldn’t we all like to plop up a blog or a few YouTube videos and earn thousands by just having fun? Of course! You’d be stupid to not want to do this. This is the definition of easy money: getting paid to do something fun and that occurs on your own time. It’s getting paid to do a hobby.

Anyone who actually tried to be a writer, blogger, or a YouTube superstar knows where this is going already. This idea of “easy money” is a goddamn lie. Yes, if you “make it” by doing these, good job, you’re earning easy money but it came at a steep cost that people seem to forget about. What people tell you, and what people don’t seem to listen to, is that succeeding with those takes something called hard work. While you can earn easy money blogging or doing whatever, you need to invest hundreds if not thousands of hours “gitting gud” before you can earn anything. Yes the money is easy, but it’s only physically easy and not easy in any other form. It takes a ton of cost in terms of hours, effort, and persistence. When you look at it that way this easy money isn’t really easy.

If you’re writing or YouTubing you probably shouldn’t be expecting to get rich or earn money. Because then failure will be obvious as soon as you start because you’re not making anything. You’ll plop up a few videos, get zero views, and give up. Sometimes you even lose money by paying for equipment or website hosting fees or whatever. If you want to make easy money, there’s another idea of easy money but no one likes it, including me. It’s called “getting a job.”

I’m serious. If I wanted easy money that was guaranteed I could stroll on down to McDonald’s, show them my Associate Degree (they’re seriously useless otherwise), and I’d probably have a job within a week. I wouldn’t be making jack shit, but that 8 or 9 dollars per hour is guaranteed. If I work 20 hours I know for a fact I made 180 dollars and all I had to do was show up and do some fairly straightforward work. I don’t know how much easier you can make money. Like I said, it’s jack shit for money, but it’s easy to obtain money.

There’s always a fucking tradeoff though in case you haven’t realized it. At McDick’s you don’t earn shit, the work can be physically demanding, and you’re at the will of your employer but it’s a paycheck. We don’t like to view this as “easy money” because it doesn’t fit the mold from above which was working on your own time doing your own thing earning cash. But working shitty McDolan’s doesn’t have a huge upfront cost in effort. You trade off this “effort requirement” for instant (and paltry) money. It’s almost like a laziness or desperation tax. It comes down to what you want to do though. If you need money quickly, work a shitty job. If you don’t need money and want to put in the tons of effort for that “easy money” then get to work doing whatever it is you want to do.

There are many areas in between this “easy money” and “hard money” too. College sounds like a good idea until you realize it’s a combination of both of these extremes. You get to do a job you sort of like and make a ton of money but guess what? You still have a huge investment in the amount the schooling cost you. This is my point: everything has a tradeoff. Want to invest in stocks? That’s easy money. Except it’s not. It takes time, effort, and risk. Hell, you could even lose money which is a bad thing if your primary goal is to make money. Want to sell drugs? That’s cool, that’s easy money, but you shoulder a bunch of risk on yourself, possibly your family, and could end up in jail for a long time. You could also get murdered. Prostitution might be the easiest way to make money because it doesn’t cost anything to get started and you don’t have to “practice” at it, but — holy shit — there’s an expense called “personal degradation” that is rather costly. You also might get a disease. Most people don’t want to feel like shit by screwing random people for money even if it is “easy money”.

So there’s basically two types of easy money. The most popular idea of “easy money” is doing some cushy job like a hobby and being rich. At the very worst they can be total scams like It-Works and at the very best they takes years and tons of hours of practice, failure, and toil to actually get somewhere. If you can’t tough it out don’t even try it. Then there are “easy money” jobs like working some shit job and getting paid an hourly wage. Here you have to physically work and while the pay is a sure-thing you will probably hate your job and not be fulfilled in life. If you don’t want this easy money or that easy money there are millions of in-betweens that you can try that each have their own drawbacks. There is no easy money, there’s just different levels of bullshit you have to work through depending on your personal ability to weather pain and difficulty. Want debt? Go to college. Want to bust your ass for no return? Be a writer. Want to either be totally rich or totally poor? Trade stock options. Want to have instant money and hate life? Work fast food. Want to risk jail? Sell drugs. Want to sacrifice your personal dignity? Try prostitution. Easy money Sucks because there is no easy money. Everything has some downside and it’s up to you to find it and deal with it on your own terms.

Life Sucks (as a Video Game)

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The author Kurt Vonnegut touched upon the idea that everyone thinks they’re the protagonist of the world they’re in and everyone else are NPCs — the people that only exist to serve the protagonist. Check this out from his novel Breakfast of Champions:

I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.

He then goes on to blame the current state of society on this flawed outlook promoted by stories, writers, and other artists. It’s a decent book, Check it Out!

I don’t think we all have that extremely dark view of society but I do think most of us view ourselves as “the primary hero” while other people are just sort of there. I also think the only people that really get outside of that worldview are probably Buddhist monks or something. This obviously becomes a problem because, well, we’re probably not the main character and are most likely random NPCs ourselves. By thinking you’re the hero and living a pretty average and mundane life you think you’re a total failure. You’re not saving the world so what are you even doing?

Video games are guilty of promoting this worldview and self-image in everyone the same as other forms of entertainment. In games you usually play as a hero and do some hero shit like saving the world or defeating some Evil Power™. This obviously isn’t realistic and considering that, what would a game be like that was as accurate to real life as possible? Many games have mechanics that simulate parts of real life (the Grand Theft Auto series comes to mind) but those occurs on a superficial level. Sure you can drive cars like in real life but the lack of consequences in GTA breaks any real comparison. The Sims do a good job too, especially with the game-breaking existential crisis that inevitably occurs after playing for too long. Real life also has much more due to chance while games put you in charge of nearly everything. So, what would that game look like?

To start, it’d be boring and no one would want to play it. The Life Game would consists of you doing some stupid and boring task for hours and hours while earning hardly any useful in-game cash. Everything you need to buy is also really expensive. Instead of buying the best car ever you can only afford a shitty, 15-year-old vehicle to get you to and from work just so you can continue to make shitty money. Food also takes up the rest of the cash you earn. It’d be hours upon hours of absolute nothingness to just buy food and other essential items.

As the game starts you could randomly die as well. This is mostly dependent upon where you’re born which is totally due to chance. You could spawn in a poor country and die in the first few minutes thanks to malnourishment or disease and there’s nothing you can do to change your fate. Once you start the game that’s what you are given. You could end up in a decent area where healthcare is abundant, but you could also, by chance, end up in a shithole and die within a short timespan.

You could be born into a family that has tons of money, but that would be really rare. Once again you don’t have any choice in all of that because it’s all random. Being rich would also take all the fun out of The Life Game because you can do whatever you want with little to no challenge. At least starting off poor gives you a challenge somewhat. If you’re not starting off in abject poverty that is.

Another fun aspect of The Life Game is that you could randomly die at anytime. You could be in the safest area possible but someone could randomly kill you with a bus or a gun or whatever. Sometimes even airplanes fall onto your house although that is reserved for only the most unluckiest people. The same is true for lightning. But the fact is that anyone could die at anytime with little to no warning. The Life Game doesn’t care about what quest your on or how important you are or how much cash you have and you’ll just randomly die.

The most interesting aspect of The Life Game would be the lack of a main quest. You’d think this might be fun because you can “make your own goals” but after a few hours the gameplay just lacks meaning. It’ll be like Minecraft or The Sims where you have a pretty decent time exploring and learning the game mechanics and creating useless bullshit, but then the lack of a main quest gets to you. Eventually in Minecraft or The Sims you look around the world and realize this is it. Then you quit playing because you’re bored and the game is meaningless. The same happens in Kerbal Space Program after you’ve explored the entire solar system. There simply isn’t anything left to do. The same would happen in The Life Game because there’s no reason or purpose for you to be there. There are side quests to accomplish but those are usually shitty by giving you little reward for completing them or by being too hard to actually accomplish in the first place. You could sell your furniture on Craigslist or get a PhD in astrodynamics for example. Or you could blog about how shitty The Life Game is. But you don’t have to because they’re side quests. There is no world to save, no overarching evil to destroy, and no princess to save. You could just do nothing. So what do you even do in this game?

And one last thing: The Life Game only lets you play once. Some people think that you might get to play multiple times but they don’t know that for sure. If you’re the unlucky soul that dies in the first five minutes of the game, well, too bad but that’s all you get! The ones who make it farther into the game should feel special for doing so well, but since the game is so shitty no one really feels good about it. Hell, some people even quit the game on purpose. That’s how terrible The Life Game is.

If life was a video game is would fucking Suck. There wouldn’t be a main quest and the difficulty curve would be ridiculous but in a really lame and cheap way. You’d just die randomly and without good cause. Sometimes you’d just die as soon as you started the game, once again without cause or reason. Some people spawn in ridiculously privileged ways and others are spawned in ridiculously unfair conditions. You dick around trying to keep yourself busy but since there isn’t a main quest nothing ever seems very pointful. The Life Game Sucks.