StevenFranssen.com

Tag: psychology

  • On Sharing The TV Remote

    Are you with someone who is mean-spirited?

    The majority of spousal conflict goes something along the lines of:

    -Bob has Preference A.

    -Jane has Preference B.

    -Both take it personally to some degree and squabble.

    Let’s do an example:

    -Bob wants to watch King Of Queens (an old-time Franssen favorite).

    -Jane wants to watch Gay’s Anatomy (objectively shitty show).

    -Both find one another’s choices repulsive (we don’t accept anti-Kevin James slander in this house!)

    What to do?

    First of all, if you’ve made it so far into marriage that your wife still thinks Gay’s Anatomy or Sabrina Carpenter or whatever the heck is entertaining and useful to her, you’ve made a major mistake. You have failed to educate your wife in good taste. You have failed to show her the meanness inherent in some programming and less abundant in other programming.

    The thing about this is that enlightening your wife requires some measure of artistic and emotional sensitivity and vulnerability on your part. If you are not a person going through meaningful suffering or a climb to the top (in terms of self-actualization), how can you expect her to invest in any art or entertainment that has even a few vestigial elements of these themes?

    If you are not real, how can you expect your spouse to want to even attempt to become real.

    By the way, I’m not here defending King of Queens as high art, just comparing it relative to Gay’s Anatomy.

    If you genuinely don’t enjoy “adult contemporary” or anything particularly contemplative or nuanced and provocative, don’t be surprised when your spouse tries to drag you into the gutter – and perhaps enlists her “support network” in the effort.

    There’s a kind of mean bigotry that most people are engaged in these days. And if you are with someone who is mean-spirited, moved by the salacious, or prone to ghetto sentiments, why aren’t you taking responsibility for this?

    One of the cardinal sins of a man in dating is that he “takes it easy” in the early going, so as to not “scare off” the woman, and then her subsidized retardation blows up in the man’s face and suddenly he’s in a prison cell of in-laws, inanity TV bull-pucky, and her “community”. She takes you for a lummox!

    If you can’t respect the dignity of your #1 person enough to take a firm stand when they go unconscious and disassociate, you are signaling to your unconscious that you don’t take philosophy seriously. Watch your apathy grow. Watch yourself turn to mysticism, hideous and self-effacing, to cover up the crime – the crime of apathy.

    There’s more I want to say but I’m knee-deep in writing and recording music over here plus it’s someone’s special day.

    Did you enjoy this? Donate to get me cough up more.

    Sending you love and relaxation from my A Man Without A Face artist’s retreat on the Maine coastline 😉

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  • The Cult of Forgetting

    Does time heal all wounds?

    To be timeless…

    There’s a clever trick that society plays on us.

    It’s called, “Why can’t you move on? I have!”

    The truth is that people don’t move on from their wrongs. They simply plow them under and move forward. But whatever you plow under will eventually spring up.

    In this way, people’s personalities become ugly, hardened, and embittered.

    This is why they have no problem asking you, rhetorically, why you can’t move on.

    That’s why they can stomach playing such a shitty trick on a person they’ve wronged.

    There’s a massive uptick in “nostalgia posting” on the timeline.

    As everything goes to utter hell and back, the worst demons among us unleashed, there is a growing contingent of people who long for when times were better.

    This phenomena is captured by this meme:

    These guys, at the time, had it so bad. Life was rough!

    But in hindsight, there’s an innocence they had that has since been spoiled.

    This is not unlike bad parenting’s effects on a person.

    Once upon a time, you were an untroubled, un-cudgeled, un-browbeaten individual who had a plucky enthusiasm and a zest for life. You have some go-off energy.

    This was ground out of you by unhappy, mean parents.

    Little by little, the light went out. The twinkle was snuffed out.

    And you’re not allowed to remember.

    The world is set up to grind you down. The world will remove from you your ability to empathize with previous mood and hormonal states where you were much brighter, more innocent, and alive.

    And if you spend any amount of time trying to remember or recapture these previous states, you will be treated as a kook.

    Abusive parents will edge away from you like you’ve done something wrong.

    An ax-murderer, establishmentarian society will call you sentimental, “conservative”, feckless, weak, cowardly, feminine, etc.

    All manner of abuse must be heaped on you to keep you from questioning why things went so wrong – or how they could be improved.

    Instead you’re supposed live in a highly reactive state of yowling at the latest outrage.

    Forever on a hamster wheel of escalation.

    Society heaps its greatest accolades on those who best help us forget.

    Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.