“Does the loser-self get a raw deal?”, I ask myself. I’m kind of mulling that question over – turning it over and over in my mind. Looking at it from every angle. Looking at it from most angles, anyway. That wasn’t my original question actually – my original question was “What would help the self to get by in the world, given that the world is such a tough place to be in?” I was thinking about that question a lot. I was sitting in the living room of my flat whilst absent-mindedly drinking a mug of instant miso soup and I was musing upon what would make things better for the self given that life is so hard, as M Scott Peck says at the beginning of his famous bestselling book. That’s the bottom line as Scott Peck so rightly points out, and there’s simply no getting around it as he also points out. Is it greatness, I wondered? Is greatness what the self needs in order to cope better with the existential crisis of being here in the world? Is that the key quality? Is it better to be great? Does greatness make the essential existential challenge that we all face on a daily basis any easier to deal with? It occurred to me that it probably was the key  – if not pivotal – element. Greatness definitely helps – everything is always better when you’re great. Or at least I imagine that it is – one would expect it to be. When you’re great life must be a breeze. But then on the other hand when you’re a loser-self then it’s the opposite. I picture the loser-self as a type of deflated football that keeps getting kicked around the place. Kicked from pillar to post. In this case (i.e. the loser-self scenario) everything is constantly too much for you and every little problem is going to get you down big time. That’s what life’s like when you’re a loser-type self, I reflected wisely – as if it isn’t bad enough being a loser-type self in the first place you then have to put up with all the shit that comes with it. You have to put up with everything going wrong for you – as it inevitably does when you are a loser – and then you also have to put up with your abject inability to cope with everything going wrong for you. You have to cope with the way everything is going to knock you down and throw you off balance and generally flummox you, demoralize, depress and disappoint you – only you won’t be able cope with that because you’re no good at coping and so then you’re just going to be down on yourself and give yourself a hard time and recriminate against yourself over and over again for being such a loser. Because you’re not great. And no one else going to have any sympathy for you either because they’ll just think you deserve all the shit that’s happened to you for being a loser-self because that is by definition what you have coming to you. As a loser. You get abused for being such a victim in other words and by definition that makes you more of a victim. So there’s nothing you can do – you just have to suck it up and put up with all that shit only you can’t because you’re just not able to. You just can’t cope because you’re too demoralized and down-trodden. Because life is just too hard, too relentless, too unforgiving. So wouldn’t you call that unfair? Wouldn’t you agree that the loser-self gets an all-round bad deal? Or is the general unfairness of the deal it gets part and parcel of being a loser-self in the first place? These questions aren’t easy to answer, are they?