Being honest is so hard.
It kind of sucks. (If I’m being honest.)
You know what else is hard?
Life in the 2020’s.
Most of the time, people just don’t want to hear it. That’s why we live with trigger warnings, and impossible communication chasms.
(Not that I haven’t appreciated, or given, trigger warnings in the past.)
It’s why we live in a world with terms like “post-truth” or “alternative facts.”
Man, for all the shit I gave Derrida back in grad school, the dude was spot on.
Jacque, I apologize!
Je regrette!
Lo siento!
You were right about almost everything.
Denial, or cognitive dissonance, is super-popular these days, as a life-coping strategy.
If something is too hard, rather than being honest, and trying to find a solution, just pretend the problem isn’t there.
Climate Change, Climate Schmange!
It’s a hoax!
You don’t want to wear a mask during a pandemic, just say they don’t work.
Or if your preferred Presidential candidate loses, just say he won.
Basically, Trumpism can be boiled down to a simple children’s game: I’m rubber, your glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks onto you!
Don’t like what someone thinks? Say it back to them. Deny it.
(Gaslight the fuck out of them, my dude.)
My Conservative brother, (from whom I am currently estranged,) once told me he learned the concept from his Frat buddies in Boulder.
If you’re ever challenged about something you did, that was really bad, just deny it to the death.
That was the phrase he used.
“Deny it to the Death.”
Doesn’t that sound like the refrain of the hundreds of thousands of people who perished, because they refused the Covid vaccine?
They literally denied it to death.
(Not a metaphor.)
All because “reality,” in the 2020’s, is too hard for almost everyone to take.
Addiction is another human response to unending stress trauma. So what did we do, as a society?
We criminalized it!
The whole world has PTSD, because it was a global pandemic.
Are we really surprised the bonds of polite society have frayed?
That everyday life now feels like a battle in il Colosseo?
Enough intellectual contortions.
Life is fucking hard!
And nobody is going to care about you, unless you cultivate the relationships.
I’m currently working on that part, because I realized I don’t have enough support, for how challenging life is.
It’s another one of those core lessons that’s too easy to forget:
If you want to receive, first you must give.
Sunshine and Olly 
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