For a while I thought it was fine that it was jealousy that was fuelling me. That I needed the desperate urge to do as well as I perceived those around me were doing. I thought it was okay that it was the fire under my ass that got me up in the morning and got me going. (I seem to be implying that this time and thought has passed. That I am now free of the need to impress others and, much more importantly, myself. That is not the case. Obviously.)

What I already know is that jealously may be a fuel, but all the good that could come from it is burned up in the resulting inferno. What I need to be told is that to feel any kind of success, to feel any kind of achievement, it has to be done on my own terms. And I do need to be told that time and time again. It is so tempting and easy to only motivate yourself in opposition to the world around you, to do things because they’re not what other people are doing. We all want to be rebels. We all want to be different. Punk didn’t die; it just put on less distracting clothes.

I need to practise to make everything come from within. This is not about being steadfast or irrational or alone; it’s about trusting myself to not have to live a reactive existence. There are vastly better ways of doing things than simply seeing where something is not and saying “No”. I love and treasure my ideas, so why don’t I trust them? Why do I always have to look to the outside world for something for my ideas to fight and be better than? Why must I always forget that the distorted lens of perception muddies any real sense or truth about what anyone else is trying to do and why they are trying to do it?

First, I am going to use the term ‘Nice Guy’ not because I’m only talking about those of you who choose to gender identify as male, but because the phenomenon I’m talking is most often labelled in those terms. Girls can be Nice Guys too. Just so you know.

So, we know you are alone. Well, at least, you feel it, right? Deep down in your soul, you fear dying alone. It’s just so hard to meet people. It’s so hard to to find someone with whom you can have that click that you can only presume also happens outside of movies and your phantasmic day-mares of togetherness. You can’t figure out why this only seems to be a problem for you. Everyone around you seems to have it pretty easy when it comes to finding people to rub up against, but for you it just doesn’t happen that much. When it does, you regret it because it doesn’t feel right but you try and ride it out but that always ends in scrunched up heart-hurting. Why you? I mean, it’s not like there is anything wrong with you. You are, after all, a Nice Guy. But, you sigh, you know what they say about Nice Guys?

I do. I do know what they say about Nice Guys. What they say about Nice Guys is that the reason that no one talks to them or wants to be their friend is because their idea of social interaction is once every month going to a party they don’t like anyone at and standing in the hallway complaining to themselves about how Glee is the death of all music, or sitting in the corner glaring angrily at the people who aren’t talking to them because they’re being angrily glared at.

Your sense of entitlement has grown so great that you think that you have to do no work for people to like you. You know that is ridiculous and what you need to be told is that if you are too busy complaining about how you are a Nice Guy you are wasting a lot of time that could be spent being, y’know, a nice person. The kind of person that people actually want to know.

People do not want to know Nice Guys because they (you) are smug, diffident, and haughty, they are far too caught up in their own ideas of their own angelicness to be anything close to worth while to interact with. People don’t date or bone Nice Guys because they are emotionally juvenile and are to good conversation what a burnt match is to a burning car on the lawn of their self-loathing. They take anything other than total adoration and compliance as rejection and often prove themselves to so emotionally inept that ruin all attempts at anything beyond friendship by being overly-entitled creeps.

This failure of their own to be able to step up emotionally to any kind of proper interaction can often result in being banished to what they term the ‘Friend Zone’. Now, the only thing that needs to be said and understood about the concept of the Friend Zone is that is exactly the kind of rape cultural thinking—how dare women consider not wanting to lick your stick?!—that makes you, if you ascribe to it and I’m pretty sure that if you consider yourself a Nice Guy you will, entirely unprepared on any level to interact with anyone in any real way yet.

You know that feeling of real jealousy you feel when you see couples on the street? Why do they get what you can’t have just because you are cursed with Niceness? That feeling is the problem, not the people daring to hold hands that aren’t yours. Get rid of it. Seriously. You’re an adult now, time to grow up.

I am very well aware that beginning anything with the phrase ‘there are two kinds of people in the world’ is to readers what chewing tin foil is to teeth. It is the kind of lexicographic crime so heinous that I am sure you are tearing apart this very magazine right now or, if you are reading this online, you have just hurled your computer so hard through your wall that it is mere minutes away from completing its circle of the Earth to bop you on the enraged noggin. I know this, I know it’s shit and I’m sorry, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are the people who think they are hilarious but aren’t, and there are the people who think they are profound but aren’t.

Your problem is that you are both. And you are both because everyone is both. Just because there are two kinds of people in the world, that doesn’t stop everyone being either and both of them. It is your sense of humour that I want to talk about this week. See this collision of your twin beliefs in both your own hilarity and profundity have resulted in you being horrifically boring and deeply unamusing.

You already know that you live your life in quotation marks, you exist at a self-enforced remove from everyone and everything around you. How this and your being both kinds of people manifests most obviously is in your bland over-reliance on irony and sarcasm. You know what’d make something funny? Stating the opposite of it. Want to be edgy? Express a view that you know is not only incorrect but also is deeply offensive.

If you’ve been keeping up with this column so far you will already be thoroughly aware of your own lack of specialness. You are an individual insofar as you are not biologically conjoined to any other fully autonomous being. Beyond that, you and me and anyone else who has ever feebly gasped the stagnant air of this dying world, are basically the same. You know this. You know that we have many more things in common than things that separate us. That is how empathy works.

Why you need to be told this over and over again, is because ignorance to the commonality of our experiences has so many negative implications. The rejection of your narrative-as-universal, doesn’t just have the already discussed negative side effect of making you look like a dick, talk like a dick, and shoot sticky white love-piss out of your head like a dick.† It also can also negatively affect not only how people see you but the terms on which you will seek help. We refuse to talk about or share our problems because we think they would mark us out as freakish or wrong or other.

But your biggest problem when it comes down to it, when we are discussing your childish insistence on your own glowing separation from others, is a combination of the two already discussed. You see, you think it is your problems, your issues, your neuroses that make you special. And by ‘special’ you mean better. You think that you are a perfect alchemy of brain-kicks that has resulted in the one person who can really see how things really are.

Bullshit.
Bullshit bullshit bullshit.

You don’t share your real problems not because you don’t want to be a burden to someone else, but because you think that any true revelation of self will expose your secret. There is a reason you don’t like sharing no matter how hard you try, and it’s because, really, you are too good for all of this. And by ‘too good’ you really mean ‘really scared that if anyone helps you everything will be a problem and you will be fixed and then you won’t be you’. You don’t want to be fixed because, you think that will make you not who you are. It will make you—gasp, scare chord—normal. You do it to other people, you know that. A hammer makes everything a nail, a calculator makes everything an equation, and empathy makes everyone a twisted knot of neuroses just waiting to be unravelled. So no doubt people will do it to you, and then what?

You have listened to enough music, read enough poetry, and spoken to enough hair- pullingly pretentious wankers to know that people, these days, don’t listen. They just wait to talk, and when they talk it’s just noises, man, not ideas. Communication is no longer the sharing and development of concepts, just the spitting of vocal cud by sheeple. Apparently.

As frustratingly obtuse and usually willfully ignorant as the people who express such broad strokes nihilisticisms (usually couched in swathes of equally ill thought out magical thinking) can be, they are kinda right. Which is annoying. But not as annoying as all the times that you realise that the greatest cliche of all is that cliches are cliches because there is some element of truth to them. You already know that we live in a world that values style before content, but what you need to be told is that the impetus is on you to change that.

The act of creation and sharing is amazing. It is one of those things that probably separates us from the animals. I know there is probably some animal behaviour specialist out there scoffing into their rum and raisin smug muffin (smuffin) at that statement but, well y’know, I’d like to see an elephant write Ulysses. So there. We have already discussed in this column how as we feel the cold tightness of our mortality we turn to our ideas for our immortality. But people seem to be forgetting the idea part of that.

Our generation is obsessed with the making of things, with creative expression. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest. All our hobbies are no longer based around enjoying the narratives of others but finding and refining the lenses through which we view our own. We write our lives into existence. That is, without doubt, a good and worthwhile thing. However that post-modern renarrativisation of our lives is not the same as the grotesque, vapid, porridge gray lip flap of empty nothingnesses that often sits very much along side it.

You are a fraud.
You do not know what you are doing.
People look at you like you’ve got it at least
a little sorted so often that occasionally you can even trick yourself into believing it to be true. But it’s not. A mixture of luck and lies has landed you in your shoes and soon someone is going to figure out that you have no right to anything in your life. Everything will crumble when you are found out.

So. Let’s talk about your self-esteem. You already know that you’re a pretty alright person, things are actually starting to look up for you. Things certainly have been worse. You just need to be reminded that life isn’t always going to look up. Life is disappointing and that fact never hurts any less with each harsh reminder. And you are reminded, will be reminded, often. For every peak there is a trough. Like all cyclical ways of being, our conscious experience of existence isn’t linear in anything but the most tangible of terms. There will be ups. There will be downs. You know that.

This isn’t a column about how you should just buck up and carry on. It often strikes me that if you’re in the kind of situation that coerces a “Just harden
up” from an on-looker, then exactly the opposite is usually the truth. This is about accepting those moments of despair
and hardship when they come. It’s about acknowledging those thoughts and letting them pass. It’s about not beating yourself up for beating yourself up. It’s also worth pointing out that this is not a column about proper clinical depression. If shit is really bad, if your self-doubt is getting in the way of living your life, seek help. Seriously.

Life would be so much easier if you would just tattoo across your brain the fact that most human experience is much more universal than anyone is willing to let on. Just as most ideas have already been had by most people, the human brain’s incredible latitude of feeling means that all the complex emotions you are so acutely aware of, ashamed of, are, I guarantee you, not solely limited to your warm little mind-cave.

But that does not change that the most malevolent fact about your self-doubt is that it separates you from others. In those lows, when you hate yourself and everything you have produced, you are also the only person to ever make a mistake. The only person to ever be as disappointing as you are right now is you right now.

When we are happy we are together. When we are sad we are alone. Well, we feel we are alone. I have spent quite a few words in this column telling you to trust yourself, so it is very advisedly that I have to tell you that the one the time you should never trust yourself is when you think you are alone. You are not the only person to have ever doubted themselves. Everyone does.

We’ve already established that your opinions are key parts of you. They are as sacred to you as your biology and brain sparks. So, of course, you want to share them. Of course you want to express yourself. We all want immortality and we all realise that in the face of the overwhelming certainty of death that our only real chance for that is through our ideas. We don’t want to change the world. Not that much. We just want to leave an impression on it. The easiest way to do that is to spread the ideas in your head, right? That’s why you push your new beliefs so hard on others. If someone could just listen to you on this one thing then maybe they will carry it on and spread it. That’s all well and good, and more power to you but you still need to learn to pick your battles.