5 Disconcerting Revelations That I Discovered at Age 41 and Would Never Have Imagined at Age 20

Weird life lessons for a better life.

Dentures

As a child, I discovered that my grandfather’s teeth slept in a glass of water next to the bedside table at night. That discovery frightened me: it meant that someday my teeth would fall out too.

It didn’t get any better, and I discovered that life was ending as my grandfather and I grew up.

Nothing is worse for a child than that first moment you are aware of your finitude. The day you discover that the party it’s over; that sooner or later, everyone dies.

Now that I am 41 years old and my grandfather is dead, I feel tenderness for dentures.

There is something truly hypnotic about the perfect smile of some older people. Their gleaming white dentures make me feel secure.

It’s like a symbol of sanity, signifying that it gets better even if everything rots throughout life, just before the end.

A reminder that you can lose even your teeth to vice and bad decisions and still always have a chance to wear a beautiful smile.

Horror Movies

The movie in question was “The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires”. And I was scared shitless.

I stopped watching scary movies for many years until I grew up, I started dating a video store clerk, and in the end, I became a horror movie fanatic.

The point is, I recently asked myself why we like horror movies so much if, as kids, they scare us so much that we can’t sleep.

And the disturbing conclusion I came to is that we like horror movies for the same reason we want to watch the news; to make sure we are safe. We like to be in front of something terrible (even if it’s a fictional movie) and feel that we have survived the experience.

The Myth of the Winner

The logical denial of reality is one of the most significant revelations I have experienced this year. I say “logical” because denying fact has a practical purpose: to survive.

Let me give you an example,

Everyone wants to be a winner at any price, like a guy who follows me on Twitter and puts in his bio, “Verified account before Elon’s Blue.”

Sad having to make clear to everyone that you’re famous.

But the guy needs it to survive. To not accept that his world is falling apart. Maybe he only has the brief fame of what he was left, and that’s why he LOGICALLY denies reality.

When you have everything to succeed, you fail

I was always the young up-and-comer, and I never got shit.

Maybe it was all the flattery that f*cked me up.

When you get flattered, admired, and applauded for something you have every chance of achieving, it takes away your desire to achieve, and you fail. Because what you were looking for was acceptance. And if they give it to you from the beginning, why the f*ck try to win and risk losing all that affection.

Lesson: run away from compliments. Be humble, and work like you’re the underdog. The guy no one bets a dime on. If you do that, you’ll achieve everything you set your mind to.

Dreams reverse goals

This is the most disturbing thing I’ve learned lately. And that is that everything becomes its opposite. Let me explain.

When I started writing, I did it to feel less lonely, to meet interesting people, to have readers, etc. Now that I write professionally, it’s the other way around: I meet people to tell their stories.

Commercializing your passions tends to rob you of a little piece of your soul. And no one admits it, but I’m too old for self-deception even though it has its LOGIC.

AG

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