Can We Please Stop Self-improving

It was way better when we were all shit.

I read with trepidation the latest number of self-help; self-improvement blogs, books, articles, and listicles published, and I wonder if we can get any better.

But more importantly, how short our attention span is.

In reality, if you’ve read one self-help guide, you’ve read them all.

And yet we keep buying them hoping for some new revolutionary method. I cannot help thinking, we are all searching for a self-help method that fully aligns with what we are doing anyway. And then we can say … “this I can get behind …”.

But while we self-help ourselves into oblivion, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, apparently. Every marker is down. But we are, as individuals, improving all the way to the sun and back.

Well apart from Icarus …

So when is someone going to put it together that there is not much point in humans improving, if the place we reside, while we improve, is going to shit.

That’s like drinking great coffee out of a badly chipped, dirty mug.

We can now shag for 8 hours straight in 8 new-and-improved never seen before, positions; We can all cook a beef Wellington from scratch; Our skincare regime has us glowing as though we’ve waded through a nuclear reactor spill; We grow as much hair as we can above the neckline and we shave everything else off, to a ‘plum-like’ texture, below the neckline.

I wonder what the net effect of 8 billion people’s pubes flushing down the sewer systems is doing for the indigenous sea mollusks of Papua New Guinea. We are building hair swamps capable of competing with the best mangrove swamps around. I see into the future a Great Hairy Reef.

Before we know it we will have decimated the world’s dung beetle population because they got a human pube fur ball, stuck in their little throats, which will cause the ecosystem to collapse 93 years earlier.

Fuck, 8 billion people is a lot to support. Isn’t it?

I supported 6 for a time, with a few staff members scattered around the place, and that stressed me out. Mrs. Planet must need a lot of medication.

And in our rush to improve, we have scientists that cannot solve the common cold, but they can tell us to. the. year., when the lights on the planet are going to go out. Or when the ice shelf will only be 18 meters thick instead of 36. Is it just me or do you shout bullshit about all of that?

They don’t really know.

I am not in denial — we have issues. No question. But if you are told daily that you are a stupid piece of shit … in record time you will begin to smell some shit. Instead of a dry January, or shagathon March, can we not just have a year where we all ‘hand on heart’ promise to do more for the planet, or as much as we can for the planet, and then say nothing more about it for a year.

Fingers on lips.

No statistics, no prophets of doom, no comments. And no GRETA. Let’s just work harder to be better, (fuck perfect), instead of reading about our imperfections, daily. It doesn’t fill us with hope, or future promise. And if we can agree on this, I promise we will all, this coming Monday, begin “operation pick your feet up and do better.”

Scouts honour.

I am so sick and tired of being told —

We can all be wealthy, green, planet aware, eat zero miles food, “grow” a 6-pack, medicate ourselves back to health, organically, and get everywhere without using petrol and the combustion engine.

And yet.

Clearly, we cannot. If London harvested and ate all its food requirements within zero miles, only … there would be zero vegetation within 8 seconds of its beginning. Unless of course, we went cannibal, then it would so work.

I bags Haystack Boris. He has got to taste like a suckling pig, doesn’t he?

(Fun fact: he gave an MBE to his hairstylist, in his PM Honours list. Imagine what they would have got if they could style hair. A Princedom perhaps?)

Covid taught us one thing … staying home 24/7 is shit. And that appears to be what the activists want. Well, that and a global attempt at an interpretive dance in ethnic jesus sandals about whale mating in the Bering Strait.

Before we all improved, the world was a better place. Statistics show that for the first time ever, we are worse off than 4 decades ago. And that is after we have bought 18.6 million self-help books per year.

Perhaps the answer is to NOT buy self-help books.

Let’s do that.

So can we please stop improving? We are currently saving the rainforest, fish, dolphins, elephants, the rhino, fat kids, anorexic kids, kids with ingrown eyelashes, communists, Jihadists, mental health sufferers, Aids victims, starving people in (pick a country), climate sufferers, island nations with water rising, island people with no water, bees, foxes, butterflies, etc. …and I ask myself, save them from WHO? From what?

It’s from us. The so-called NEW IMPROVED. (yes, like the cottage pie recipe).

And it’s from self-help gurus.

Oh, and Greta.

Honestly, I cannot believe nobody has replaced Karen with Greta yet.

Let’s focus on being shit again … the world was a better place. Let’s make less. Let’s do less. Let’s be more lazy. Let’s allow the garden to grow … and let the insects back into our lives. Not mosquito though. They should all infest Greta’s hairy armpits.

Fuck I hate mowing grass. It is a thankless task. No sooner have you cleared out the trimming catcher, (Actually the wife’s job … she’s in charge of recycling — I’m her big project), than the grass where you started mowing 2 hours ago, shouts out … peekaboo. I’ve fucken heard them … don’t dare tell me it’s not true.

Please stop the grass choir in my head. If I hear “The green, green grass of home”, one more time, I’m taking a shotgun to the nearest garden centre I can find. I will blast the shit out of every succulent in there. The bullrushes and reeds have got to go. They started it.

If we, as individuals are improving so much, how come the collective is so fucked up. Science tells me, if you improve the breeding stock, you improve the herd.

Personally, I am pulling my weight. I fight perfection daily. I laugh in the face of self-improvement. I wallow in being shit.

I strive to be “Mr. Average”.

Currently, according to my wife, I’m fucking useless … so I’ve got a ways to go to be “seriously shit” … but I am working hard at it.

And it’s all because she’s the one reading “10 Ways to improve your home”.

Stop writing this shit.

I don’t want to improve my home. I like it the way it is. I hate scented candles and “smellies” by GLADE and UNILEVER coming from every wall socket in the house. It smells like an Estée Lauder truck and an Old Spice truck collided on the motorway. Hideous.

Who the fuck needs sandalwood in the home. Sandals smell of dogshit, and toe jam, … and they belong deep in the bloody woods.

If my wife walked past a “bergamot” she wouldn’t even know, nobody knows what a bergamot is … and that’s her best smell, apparently. Here smell this … “faaarrrrtttt” … that’s a smell.

What does GLADE know that I don’t about what smells great? I like the smell of shit … because then I know I’ve shat myself. And … there is no place to plug in my phone charger anymore. Fuck off with that shit.

My goals are the ability to see my dick without a mirror. And to kill the grass. That’s it. I’ll happily give my 6-pack abs and 30-inch waist to you. Take my portion. I’ll have your fried chicken portion with sides. I’m happy to support your improvement mission.

Fuck off with 10 000 steps. Who came up with that number … it seems a surprisingly perfect round number to me. If they’d said 11 237 steps … yeah, then maybe.

I still marvel that an elevator can drop 40 floors and land flush with the foyer floor. And for that reason, I’ll use the elevator thank you very much. You can shove your 10 000 steps up your waxed and trimmed ass. Mr. Schindler is my hero.

Leave me to wallow in abject averagosity. I’m happy. But can you please stop trying to improve? It’s very stressful for me.