Beyond emotional infancy: self-help, suffused with Pink Floyd

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The tendency to grow comfortably numb, wondering if there really
is anybody out there, becomes an unconscious habit. Like the way things were in the 1970s.






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Isolation from others begets alienation from a sense of who you are,
in part because who you are depends on being able to interpenetrate
social space. If you can't inhabit that space, if you can't, so to
speak, get outside the wall, you spend your whole life waiting for
the worms. And the worms are death, which you shouldn't wait for.
You can't preempt death, is the thing: you can't preempt, grow used
to, or become accustomed to your own death. You can't experience
that great gig in the sky either.



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Getting out of your own way means knowing how to avoid pulling
your own strings. Let your strings dangle, let your diamonds
shine - don't dig that hole. Get a good job with good pay, you're okay.


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Some think hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
Tell that to Henry David Thoreau. He knew something about quiet
desperation - he saw it in those around him, and he tried to overcome
it by going to the woods and writing a long book that was destined
to become cut up into pithy apothegms for greeting card companies.
It goes to show you that when America broke loose of the chains of
English anomie, other constraints stood waiting to be self-imposed.
Thoreau had an axe, evidently, which he borrowed from a neighbor
and returned even sharper for the use of it. Sharpen that axe.
Breathe. Breathe in the air.