Anti-advice

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

One clever adult girl had the opportunity to give herself, a fourteen-year-old fool, clever advice. She thought, thought, and gave. - Do not eat so much sweet, but then look what she looks like. She listened to the eldest, stopped eating sweets and was oops - she became thin and not a single pimple. Here, of course, the boys in droves, notes in physics, questionnaires on algebra, in the movies from lessons, kisses in a romantic entrance, books on the side, soft-boiled exams, they did not take them to the university, and in general, they are looking - they are already over 30, but all are not that she was a fool, but it was better before.

Bad, he thinks, it turned out to be a piece of advice, I will give another one. 16 years old.

- Part with this - do not kill yourself like that, in three years it will be the most funny.

The sixteen-year-old also obeyed. We parted with this beautiful thing - and she's not a scene, not a tear, not a broken cup, not a beautiful hysteria, not a sad picture, not a snotty rhyme - nothing. She walks calm like a boa constrictor, she already smiles in advance. Three years passed, and it really became funny. Although not the same as the first time. And I didn’t write a single poem at all. Never. Even that ingenious, without which well, it is not at all clear what to show the descendants. Hang up, re-council.

In general, so! Until 20, no partying with romantic goofs, you graduate from university, find yourself a normal reliable man and marry him (I repeat, to him!).

She grumbled, but what to do, since there is such an important aunt. Finished, found, left. Normal. Reliable. Practically exemplary. Where did she get ten adultery, five prolonged depressions and a small fortune paid to the psychotherapist with such happiness at the age of thirty - it is absolutely not clear. Bad, bad advice. Ok, okay. There is no need to get into subtle matters. You just take it at 22 and don’t jump with a parachute, don’t break both your legs and don’t wallow in a cast all summer. Profit? Profit.

I got rid of the parachute, didn't jump, didn't break anything. Only the next day he goes along the crossroads - and here is a figak and a drunk driver. And that's all. In general, it turned out badly.

Bradbury has a short story "And Thunder Rocked", known to the general public from the movie "The Butterfly Effect." Everything is clear with the film, but in the story the chronotraveller accidentally steps on a Mesozoic butterfly, and when he returns to his time, instead of a cozy developed capitalism, he discovers a dictatorship, fascism and legalized spelling errors. Every action, the wise Bradbury opens our eyes, is the cause of consequences. If you unroll the chain of these consequences for a sufficient time length, it turns out that anything can lead to absolutely anything. And according to Murphy's law, most often to some nasty thing. Giving retrospective advice to yourself is like walking butterflies. Each step is fraught with absolutely unpredictable changes. No, perhaps such a combination of chances is possible, in which you step on a butterfly, and in the end everyone will be better except for the butterfly. It remains to understand where he is, this result. And what it is is better.

Why are we giving ourselves the right advice? To straighten the road to happiness. Straighten, or even cut off altogether. But happiness is not a destination - in fact, it is the road. And it doesn't really depend on the surrounding landscape. If this is a shoddy road, then it will be a shoddy road on the Cote d'Azur. And the ride on it will not be a ride, but a torment, and not to beauties, it would be more likely to turn off or be over. A good road is a good road everywhere, what is there to explain. And this shining point Here and Now, in which you simultaneously build your road and drive along it - this is the feeling of happiness. And the surrounding picture does not solve anything here. Can please, make happy - no. And the less you stare around, the faster you will understand it.

But the main set-up is in the desire to correct something retroactively - not in the invitation to change the awl for soap. And the fact that behind him stands the most terrible thing that ever entered a human head: the thought “You can do better!”. The same poisonous crap that ruined humanity's life worse than all his Hitlers put together. Naive humanity considers her to be a motivator for personal growth, a guarantee of success in life and, in general, an engine of progress, while she is quite the opposite. All she does is just pull me out of my natural state of happiness here and now. It deprives me of everything that I have, and which is enough for me to be content like Buddha or his elephant.

"You can do better!" - this is what makes sorrows bitter and joys pale. Children are unhappy, and psychotherapists are rich. The climate is nasty, and the country is not the same. The salary is small, and the apartment is cramped. The pearls are small and the ass is thick. This is a vile mutabor that turns a beloved angel with gentle ears and steel abs into an unpleasant shit with a heavy character and empty pockets. And I myself will modestly keep silent about what - I don't even want to say what. Here it would also be important to add that pride, from which “you can do better” grows, pride in the spiritual tradition is not just the most serious sin, but in general all of them are the cause (which, in fact, the story with Lucifer is about), but so already normal.

It doesn't matter who you think about, but especially about yourself "You can do better!" is the only mistake you can make in life. There are no other mistakes in life at all. Quite like a genre. Everything else is just a change of landscapes on the sides. They may like them more or less, but what they come across - does not depend at all on me. So relax and have fun. Even the most wacky places have their own charm, if you drive on them exactly. And even the most beautiful oases on the horizon will kill the pendant if you go straight to them.

A few pages away, girls are giving advice to themselves at fourteen. Usually I happily climb into editorial flash mobs to find out the vox populi. I even participated in the drafting of the epoch-making document "What your man should be able to do", which bypassed the entire Runet and raised a five-meter wave of gender-var. But not now. Whatever it is, it's not me.

Although … Could you, at 14, put on some less idiotic makeup?.. No? I thought so.