How to Ruin Your Life in 2024
A 3-Step Path to Acute Discontent and Despair
“man muss immer umkehren.”
— Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
"Invert, always invert." 
In the coming few weeks, you’ll begin reading about how to reset your life, lose a few pounds, and fulfill all your wildest dreams.
Personally, I have a graveyard of gear sitting in my house, reflective of my common commitment to treat goals like I do my runs: great start, good rhythm, pain in the calves, walking, deep breaths, epic-mind-battles-you-lazy-bum, quick jog, more walking, half-jog-half-walk-half-sulk, almost there, run ends. Then the best part: overwhelming disappointment and shame.
Needless to say, I’m not going to tell you how to fix your life in 2024.
Instead, let me tell you how you can develop acute discontent and deep despair, from someone who would know.
There are thousands of ways to ruin your life, but none more powerful than your media consumption. It has a power unlike any other, and any attempt to consolidate or curate it down just plunges you even deeper into the cold depths of your dark echo chamber. Just listen to those reverberations of your feeds.
"Our online news feeds aggregate all of the world's pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness," says Tristan Harris.
Those fantastic feeds are a perfect way to teach us the secrets to a life of discontent and despair.
Here are three key steps I might suggest.
Embrace Unrestrained Consumption
Consuming without boundaries is a sure way to bleary-eyed bitterness. Misery follows the one whose day starts immediately with the blue glow of a phone and ends the same way.
"Technology doesn't just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are," American sociologist Sherry Turkle has shared. If you want to change into bitter and broken – social media in particular is the ticket.
Unrestrained consumption is your fast-track ticket to bitterness and brokenness. Don’t embrace anything resembling ruthless curation. Instead, let the algorithm guide you through your day. The key phrase here: listlessly scroll. Videos that the algorithm serves up to you should never be questioned. If you’re finding yourself sending videos back and forth with your significant other, and minutes begin turning into hours — you’re well on your way to anxiety and overwhelm.
At all costs, avoid pain. More videos, more content, more of anything other than dealing with that little echo of pain – that’s where you’ll really start to brew the bitterness and delight in the despair.
Feed the Negative
Read the comments. Even better, jump into the comments. If you find yourself frustrated, tired, or upset (better yet, when you are all three), this is the perfect time to fire off your best zingers and tirades.
Stick to short form thoughts, and avoid nuance and anything longer than 140 characters whenever possible. This approach will intensify your negative emotions and create a cycle of discontent and despair. Exposing yourself to anger-inducing or extreme content will lead to increased feelings of unhappiness and frustration.
Here are 8 Ways You Can Feed the Negative in Your Mind:
Increase your consumption as much as possible
Consume content you hate
Passively consume your content
Kill any boundaries you have
Criticize others, feed your ego
Never block, never mute
Avoid meditation or mindfulness
Take everything extremely seriously
If we’re going to increase the anxiety level that ages 18-25 feels to 100% (see below), we’ll have to go all in on these principles.
Isolate Yourself and Embrace Comparison
Avoid in-person interactions or deeper, meaningful conversations. Think only of yourself. Spending as much time as possible in your own head, looking at or reading about what others are doing or have done feeds your envy.
You’ll quickly find yourself in the dungeon of despair. Continuing to sulk and soak in more lifestyle videos of “How a Mom of Five Boys Lives Like a CEO” or watching carefully curated and edited clips of how to “Hustle Your Way to Six Figures” will ensure you throw the keys to the dungeon door as far away as possible. If you feel body-image issues or stress levels increasing about your job or financial situation — you’re well on your way increasing that discontent and despair.
Never let up these behaviors: listlessly scroll, engage the negative, and isolate and embrace comparison. Keep your phone charged and the notifications on – always on.
One day, if you do it right, you’ll feel it in the deepest recesses of your soul and the crevices of your mind.
Cold and isolated, wallowing in each moment of negative content. You’ll stand, crinkling and bent-over. Perhaps as a bitter old man or neurotic old woman, your eyes will be cast down with cynicism and your face wrinkled with disgust.
A slight bow of your head, a swipe, and the gentle glow lighting up your face — your life may be frayed, but you’ll know you did the willful work to get it all — the despair, the discontent, and destruction join you as you sit alone.
You will have finally learned the secret to living life with acute discontent and deep despair.
A nod of the head, a digital prayer,
A gesture, a world reborn and aware
The light and the glow, blue, seen benign,
A calling, a line, an hour of time. A day into weeks, coffered and bold,
A new altar of old, bought and we're sold.Acknowledgements: Incredible thanks to my generous friends
, from , writing at , , and the push for poetry and art (of which I have much work to do) from from .
love this inversion format. something ive been wanting to play around with more. good stuff!
...you can do no wrong if you only do wrong or the rainbow lives at the shit end of a sewer...appreciate the ribbing of man's modernities ...i chuckled most at "How a Mom of Five Boys Lives Like a CEO"...both versions of that life seem painful...also a good reminder not to scowl...let the wind write the way...great read doog...