We are always looking to optimise our situation in some way, aren’t we? That’s our basic orientation – to be looking for that old optimisation. We must feel that it’s very good to be optimising, wouldn’t you say? We must feel that it’s very good indeed to optimise our old situation. That’s what makes us so incredibly predictable, needless to say. Can anyone really think that it’s good to be always orientated towards optimising our situation? I tell you what that makes us – that makes us boring bastards!
Obviously we are not going to feel okay about being boring old bastards – no one WANTS to be a boring old bastard. I mean, there’s nothing positive to say about that situation, is there? You’ve written yourself off right there; you might as well forget about it from this point on. I don’t mean this in a superficial sense, like you’re ‘no longer cool’ or something. I don’t mean it in the sense of ‘you’ve got no kudos because you’re such a sad boring bastard’. Who gives a shit about that? If you did give a shit about that then that would mean that you are fixated like a dumb fool on ‘optimising your situation’ and that’s precisely what makes you into a boring old bastard in the first place. Do you get me?
The reason you are a ‘write-off’ when you turn into a boring bastard isn’t because you aren’t interesting to other people but because you’re not interesting to yourself. Your life is of no real interest to you and you are of no real interest to you either and so something inside you just switches off. Of course it switches off – there’s nothing remotely interesting about you because you’re such a boring little bastard and so that spark inside you – which IS you – just switches off. There’s nothing there for it; you are simply a lost cause and that’s all there is to say on the matter.
I mean, the world is full of boring bastards, right? Just take a look around you. Look into people’s eyes, see if you can spot anything there, see if you can spot that spark of who they really are. Nine times out of ten you can’t, am I right? Nine times out of ten those eyes are just blank, blank like buttons. And ‘nine times out of ten’ is a figure of speech – that’s not a real measure. I don’t know what the real measure would be. I really couldn’t tell you. But I can tell you what the reason for this blankness is and that’s because your life has become so boring that there is no reason for the spark to hang around anymore. Like I say, there’s simply nothing there for it; it’s like you’re stuck in a hostile desert or wasteland. There’s nothing going on there, and I mean nothing.
Although there is one thing going on. There actually is one thing going on but the point here is that it’s a very boring thing! What’s really going on is that we are looking to optimise our situation. We’re ‘looking for the advantage’ and boy are we keen about that! We are so bloody keen about that. It’s like our shifty little button eyes are looking this way and that, looking for the advantage, looking for the advantage, always looking for the advantage. That’s what’s going on and that – as I have said – is what’s making us into boring bastards. We have become mere ‘mechanisms for looking for the advantage’, we have become ‘devices for always troping towards the gain’, and just what the hell is so bloody interesting about that? Can you imagine anything more appallingly dire? Can you think of anything more soul-destroying than this?
People don’t know how boring they are and that’s a fact. That’s exactly what makes them so bloody boring – if they knew what frighteningly boring bastards they were then this would actually make them interesting! That would change the whole dynamic. ‘Wow,’ you would say, ‘here’s a guy who actually knows how boring he is. How interesting is that? Fair play to him! He’s onto a fertile line of enquiry there…’ Boring bastards have no insight into the fact that they are such boring bastards any more than a complete dickhead knows that he is a dickhead – that’s just not the way things work. It’s not the way, it’s not the way, it’s not the way they work.
What we are interested in – the only thing we are interested in – is optimising our situation, but no matter how much we optimise it we’re still going to be frighteningly boring bastards! That’s it in a nutshell really. What a joke, huh? What a fucking joke. That’s the nub of it – we are perpetually engrossed in the thoroughly unpleasant process of disappearing up our own arseholes and I’m afraid that there is no politer way of putting it than this!
