A STORY ABOUT NOT NOTHING

Seinfeld Taught Me One Important Lesson in Life

It changed my life for the better

If you’re a Seinfeld sitcom fan, you not only know that most underrated lesson but have also applied it in your life at least once, even without you knowing. In fact, everyone must have. Being an ardent fan of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, it’s essential that I share this with people who don’t know that lesson and also with people who have overlooked it.

The game-changer happens in one of the funniest episodes of Seinfeld called The Opposite (Season 5, Episode 22).

The ever-funny yet hopeless George Costanza says,“Every decision I’ve ever made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have in every aspect of life, be it something to wear, or something to eat, it’s all been wrong.”

Jerry who’s the master of observational comedy observes him carefully and responds, “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.”

George follows his sage advice — yada yada yada — and he ends up as an executive for the New York Yankees. George is funny and gleeful for the first time in his life.

It’s not just a sitcom to me

It was one of those days in 2020 when I struggled with depression. I had hit an all-time low. To let it all out, I had been writing my sob stories on Medium, which helped nobody, including myself, not that many read them, which was paradoxically even more depressing.

I went to a beach to find serenity in the evening. I was desperate to turn my fortunes around. As the sand was my seat, I let the waves hit my feet. For some reason, The Opposite episode I had earlier watched sprang to my mind.

“Yeah, right, do the opposite. Bullocks!”

“Maybe I should do the opposite. What do I have to lose?”

“But how do I do the opposite?”

“I should stop lamenting my existence and start laughing. I should write comedy, not sob stories. I should learn comedy. I should stop hating this life and start loving this life. I should start truly living.”

Finding Comedy

The first proper comedy I wrote here after employing all the comedy elements I had urgently learned luckily turned out to be one of the biggest hits on the platform, in terms of the impact it created.

It was ironic that a struggling person’s comedy premise was trending number one for more than a month under Comedy. It was poetic. It was absurd. It was hilarious. It was real and it was spectacular. How can you not love comedy?

I learned to find comedy in every little thing since then. Not only in writing but also in life. Jerry and Larry themselves see the absurdity in the general occurrences of every day for a living and turn it into a comedy.

“The fact is — almost everything is funny. You just have to have a way of looking at it.” — Jerry Seinfeld

As my learning went deep, after 27 days of intense research, I wrote about self-deprecating humor, which took off as well.

No matter what I do, I can’t stop learning comedy. I can’t stop writing comedy. The best part is — when you’re always thinking about comedy, you have literally no time to be sad, even when you have to be.

Life is absurd

One of the biggest coincidences I encountered in my life was this: Around the same time, to get through my darkest days, I had been studying absurdism philosophy, which I fell in love with. Albert Camus, the founder of absurdism made sense to me like nobody ever did:

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

As I became a rebel, my learning from absurdism further supported The Opposite philosophy. Everything came together. I felt like Neo from The Matrix who had this awakening — I have to be happy at all costs.

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” — Albert Camus

I later learned that Jason Alexander who played George Costanza said many friends told him that the episode inspired them to live their lives differently. It wasn’t just me then.

Do The Opposite

Sometimes our profound realizations about our life will hit home. Sometimes we all have to accept our failures and misfortunes to see if we can turn them around.

Do The Opposite doesn’t necessarily mean we should do the exact opposite of what we’re doing now. Sometimes, it means we should take more chances. We should leave our comfort zone and enter our growth zone. We have to have a willingness to change. We have to be the best version of ourselves. Otherwise, what’s the point?

It’s funny how we’re a product of our own decisions. It is scary. We’re all prolific in creating our own problems. Maybe you’ve been doing your best but still running into brick walls.

If you’re constantly worried about results, maybe you should start focusing more on your process and maybe the result will take care of itself.

If you care too much about what other people think, stop caring. If you never listened to other people’s opinions, start listening.

If you’re chasing a man or a woman desperately, stop chasing. See what happens. Start living your life.

George Costanza always lied to women. In The Opposite episode, after deciding to do the opposite, he chooses to be honest with a woman for once and says arguably the most famous pickup line of all time:

“My name is George. I’m unemployed, and I live with my parents.”

Remember — it worked!

All my love, Jerry Seinfeld.

A special thanks to the sweetest and the funniest person Christine Stevens for her unwavering encouragement here, especially when I needed the most.

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