Important Breaking News from CNN: Woman Recounts Her Several Minor Brush-Offs of Dates Who Voted Trump as If They're High Drama

Ugh.

Couple of points:

If a woman says that being a Trump-voter is a deal-breaker, dude, don't attempt to date her. So many reasons. So many reasons.

Putting aside the obvious ones -- like, she's a hyperpolitical c*** who will fight with you over every minor thing to prove she's empowered -- the odds of any two people being a match are pretty low, and if the other person has already set up what she terms a "deal-breaker" condition and you break that, then the odds go from just north of zero to considerably south of zero.

What the hell, dude? You want to make boring chit-chat with a stranger you probably don't like and pick up the cost of her meal for the pleasure of it?

If you're thinking "better a bad date than no date," wrong. A bad date is the worst.

Avoid.

I can't say I feel super-sympathetic to her dates, to be honest. One concealed his party affiliation to make it to a coffee with her, and neither dealt with rejection well.

I mean, they didn't deal with it poorly enough to get an article written about it, but this is the ride you bought a ticket for when you tried to date a hyperpartisan feminist vulture. This is all on you, bruvs. She told you what she was upfront, and you went a-courtin' anyhow.

Here's something I've been thinking about lately, which I'm sure has been discussed before.

The human brain craves struggle and stress. Well, crave is the wrong word -- it expects struggle and stress. It expects competition, and risk, and sometimes loss, and sometimes triumph.

It may not crave stress and struggle per se, but it is in fact engineered to be on the lookout for stress and struggle, and then put its problem-solving algorithms to work in overcoming that stress and struggle.

While the brain doesn't crave stress and struggle per se, it does in fact notice its absence when it's missing. It doesn't miss struggle and stress per see -- but it does notice that something important is missing when it doesn't encounter them.

Here's an analogy: You could get along fine without having to make a bowel movement (if your biology were modified such that you digest every atom of food you consume).

But while you wouldn't miss not having bowel movements, you would notice: "Wow, this very basic and very elemental part of human existence is no longer part of my life. That's very weird, and I don't know how I feel about it."

You might even just sit on the toilet on occasion to just mimic the process you once considered to be day-to-day normal and inevitable.

This was a weird thing I felt when I fasted for five days. I didn't have to poop because, well, I wasn't eating. But still, it felt weird not to poop, and you gotta know I googled "Am I dying if I don't poop when fasting" on Google a few times.

Point is, the human brain is engineered to expect struggle and stress. It is also engineered to feel strong emotions about struggle and stress, and to feel depression and a lack of worthiness when failing, but also to feel the euphoria of victory.

Fortunately -- and also unfortunately -- many people do not face much stress or struggle in their lives. They certainly don't have to hunt every morning, unsure if they'll be eating that night. They face no large predators, they are menaced by no strangely-feathered tribesmen from across the forbidden hills.

This would be a good thing -- sort of like no longer having to excrete waste would be a good thing -- except the brain realizes that something's missing.

No stress, no struggle -- that's good. That means no unsatisfied hunger, no days of desperate want.

But it also means no triumph.

People's brains sense that something is missing.

And many people's brains decide, unfortunately, to fill that gap by inventing silly, stupid dramas in their lives.

Their brains feel the absence of something fundamentally human and vital, and so being inventing fake make-pretend versions of it -- like me sitting on the toilet even though I didn't have to poop.

They play-act struggle, like I play-acted pooping.

Sure, this woman writing this stupid article doesn't have the high emotion of having to find her way back to her village in the pitchblack of a moonless night, listening for the sounds of jackals in the scrub.

That's a good thing.

But she senses the emptiness of a life without challenge and a life without purpose and a life without movement, whether forwards (hopefully) or backwards (sadly -- but at least you know what it is to feel loss).

And so she's set her mind -- unconsciously, I'm sure; she doesn't seem like a deep thinker to me -- to inventing Pretend Struggles to fill her lazy, boring, empty, meaningless challenge-free life with.

A woman who takes great pride in writing about her insignificant bad dates (90% of all dates are bad dates -- spoiler alert) is obviously not a woman with a great deal of true challenge or forward-moving progress in her life.

A woman who's spent the morning achieving at her start-up side-hustle business already has enough sense of stress and struggle in her life -- she feels the sting of failure and the rush of triumph whenever she makes or loses a sale.

She has enough stress -- and the positive version of stress, eustress, excitement, anticipation, the feeling of being in the game and playing with stakes that matter -- that she doesn't have to ridiculize herself by pretending that each faint squeak of a semi-fart in her life is some Grand Adventure fit to be memorialized and shared with the public.

People with lives of actual interest and consequences do not have to blow trivial incidents into battles of good and evil unseen since The Two Towers.

A lot of people simply do not have much purpose, or much to do, or much to look forward to tomorrow.

Idle hands are the devil's playthings -- and an idle mind is the devil's drafting table.

Get busy, lady, or just get bent. Either way, you'd be checking some box on some checklist, you'd be doing the rest of us a big favor by actually doing something of genuine consequence instead of stinking up the place with your sad, cold-sweat Walter Mitty tales of triumph.

posted by Ace at 07:04 PM

| Access Comments