How to Be Miserable and Cruel

Reliable methods for avoiding emotion and making everything suck for everyone.

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

Happiness, friendship, peace, satisfaction — these and other positive emotions make life enjoyable, fulfilling, and worth living. But they come at a cost: they require giving up negative emotions — like anger, bitterness, and sorrow — that make life difficult, meaningless, and full of suffering. And nobody wants to do that. So here are tried and tested ways to become (and remain) miserable for the rest of your life.

1. Deny responsibility, justify your flaws, and blame others for your suffering. This will enable you to avoid negative consequences, thereby transferring your pain and problems to innocent others.
2. Ignore or become offended by attempts from others to correct your ways. This is especially effective when you’ve heard others’ suggestions before and multiple people have made them.
3. Avoid resolving childhood trauma; opt instead to pass it on.
4. Manipulate others (and yourself) into believing that they (not you) are the problem. Because if you’re the problem, then you can solve it. But if everyone else is the problem, then you can’t, so you don’t have to.
5. Avoid giving people the benefit of the doubt; instead, make negative assumptions about them (and yourself) and their motives.
6. Treat the people closest to you worse than you treat anyone else, including yourself. Also, make no attempts to reconcile with them, and ignore or reject their honest attempts to reconcile with you.
7. Believe that your thoughts and feelings indicate objective truths, and that your knowledge about situations is absolute, such that your interpretations are always right and your responses are never wrong.
8. Focus on the most negative aspects of human nature and thereupon build your philosophy of people; indeed, believe that people are the worst they can be and then use outliers and exceptions as evidence of your belief.
9. Project your insecurities onto everyone you know — make them racist, sexist, incompetent, selfish, and cruel. This way, you’ll never have to confront the evil within yourself, as you’ll only ever see it without.
10. If something bothers you, don’t try to figure out why; just put up with it until you become resentful, or simply ignore it until the next time it bothers you and then ignore it again and again until you become resentful.
11. Mark certain topics, ideas, and words as off limits, and regard anyone who entertains them as antagonistic. Also, respond emotionally to rational arguments.
12. Hold people to expectations that you fail to meet yourself and then excuse your failure as circumstantial while regarding theirs as moral or characterological. Also, hold people to expectations that you haven’t communicated and then punish people for failing to meet them.
13. Ignore patterns of thinking and behaving that consistently cause you to suffer. For example, if you’re overweight, just keep eating food and buying bigger clothes.
14. Use the failures of others to continue in and justify your own. After all, had others not failed, you wouldn’t have either; and since others didn’t succeed, you can’t.
15. Attribute your negative emotions to — and excuse your bad behaviors because of — external factors, such as stress or fatigue, instead of to internal factors, such as incompetence or insecurity.
16. Believe that you’re better than your circumstances so you’ll never have to know that you’re not. Also believe that you’re not responsible for your circumstances so you’ll never have to change them.
17. Remain oblivious to your condition so you’ll never have to be responsible for it; if you never know that you’re arrogant, spiteful, or manipulative, then you’ll never have to evolve and can thus remain unaware of your effect.
18. Construe the world in terms of power and then attribute your fear, weakness, and incompetence to oppression; assume that you’re a victim and that everyone else is a perpetrator.
19. Lie — to everyone, everywhere, all the time. And when others see through your lies or call you out for your lying, continue to lie by insisting you’re telling the truth.
20. Dismiss this article as personally irrelevant and then send it to someone who “needs to hear it.”