12 self-help lessons for cynics

Life philosophy inspired by Michael Lewis, Krista Tippett, Alain de Botton, George Saunders, Robert Wright, Mike Judge, Neil Postman, and more.

This is the Rubesletter from Matt Ruby (comedian, writer, and the creator of Vooza). Sign up to get it in your inbox weekly. And check out my other newsletter too: Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian.

If you’re a cynic, self-help tends to feel like woo woo wackadooisms spewed by grifters in order to manipulate (and profit from) the naive. Still, I occasionally come across mindful words that I jot down – ok, save to Instapaper – for future reference. Below are a bunch of these passages alongside my takeaways.

Note #1: Most of these aren’t from a person explicitly offering life advice – it’s just baked in along the way.

Note #2: I don’t always follow the advice mentioned (see: being a hypocrite), but hey, at least it’s somewhere up there in my vault now.

Note #3: I guess I’d call myself a cynic (others certainly have), but I tend to think cynics are just disappointed romantics. After all, you have to believe there’s a better way to be in order to be disappointed by reality. Also, I’m almost always right and I feel like that should count for something.

🧠 Don’t try to be famous. Instead, do the crazy/hard thing you love that nobody else is willing to do. That’s where your advantage lies.

Inspired by
Mike Judge
Quoted in: Mike Judge’s Secret Art of Satire
by Mike Sacks

I actually thought that [doing animation] would give me an advantage. I thought, O.K., I don’t know many people who would do something this crazy, spend six to eight weeks inking and painting cells and doing these drawings and sitting there with a stopwatch, timing every syllable, doing all this for two minutes of animation. I thought it was crazy. There were probably people sending a lot of scripts out, but you don’t often get—at least back then—just a VHS that’s homemade cartoons.

I drew a crazy-looking character on VHS-tape covers, gave it a crazy name. I think it said, “Inbred Jed’s Homemade Cartoons.” I was hoping somebody would give it a watch just because of how weird it looked. I think that ended up being to my advantage. I still think it’s that way. It’s one thing to pitch a cartoon and show drawings. It’s another to put in enough hours and actually do it. And it also shows that you’ve worked hard and thought about all this. You’re not just trying to become famous easily.

🧠 We undervalue friendship. Find and appreciate those who see the person you wish to be in the world.

Inspired by
It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart
by Jennifer Senior

What, I wanted to know, made [Benjamin Taylor and Philip Roth’s] relationship work? He thought for so long that I assumed the line had gone dead. “Philip made me feel that my best self was my real self,” [Taylor] finally said. “I think that’s what happens when friendships succeed. The person is giving back to you the feelings you wish you could give to yourself. And seeing the person you wish to be in the world.”

…You can go months or even years without speaking to a dear old friend and feel fine about it, blundering along, living your life. But discover that this same friend is dead, and it’s devastating, even though your day-to-day life hasn’t changed one iota. You’re rudely reminded that this is a capricious, disordered cosmos we live in, one that suddenly has a friend-size hole in it, the air now puckered where this person used to be.

🧠 Think of hope as a muscle – and then keep exercising it.

Inspired by
Krista Tippett Wants You to See All the Hidden Signs of Hope

I talk about hope being a muscle. It’s not wishful thinking, and it’s not idealism. It’s not even a belief that everything will turn out OK. It’s an imaginative leap, which is what I’ve seen in people like John Lewis and Jane Goodall. These are people who said: “I refuse to accept that the world has to be this way. I am going to throw my life and my pragmatism and my intelligence at this insistence that it could be different and put that into practice.” That’s a muscular hope.

🧠 You’ve been lied to about romance, soul mates, and marriage. The real secret to long-term love is finding someone “not overly wrong” and then accepting the things you hate about them.

Inspired by
Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
by Alain de Botton

We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us – and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for…

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

🧠 Capitalism will constantly try to financialize every aspect of your life, but the truly finite resource you should value most is time.

Inspired by
Icebreakers with...author Michael Lewis

And so I look around now, and I think we’re getting to a point where it feels like parody. It feels like with cryptocurrency, with NFTs, with memestocks, you have the little people almost performing a satire of what the big people have been doing. It's this arbitrary bestowing of wealth on people for no particular reason. Because, you know, I happened to be given a bitcoin wallet six years ago, or you got into GameStop, or whatever it is. So I do feel like I’ve been watching—not the system ever reform itself—but instead just becoming more and more itself, more and more extreme. And I keep waiting for the moment where people say, “Oh, this whole financialization of our lives and our economy—it's gotten a little out of hand.” It really hasn’t happened. The financial sector has just gotten more and more important, and not just as a percentage of activity in the economy, but also in the imagination of people.

🧠 There’s always a tradeoff. When you wish for something, carefully consider the invisible costs to getting it.

Inspired by
‘An Immense World’ Is a Thrilling Tour of Nonhuman Perception
By Jennifer Szalai

When it comes to sight, there’s a trade-off between sensitivity and resolution; humans tend to have extraordinary visual acuity during the day but have a much harder time seeing at night, while animals with better night vision don’t register the crisp images at a distance that we do. “Senses always come at a cost,” Yong writes. “No animal can sense everything well.” The world inundates us with stimuli. Registering some of it is taxing enough; fully processing the continuous deluge of it would be overwhelming.

🧠 Be nicer. Your biggest regrets will be the times you failed to be kind.

Inspired by
George Saunders's Advice to Graduates

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?

Those who were kindest to you, I bet.

It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.

🧠 Want to be liberated from the tyranny of your feelings? Then stop taking them – and yourself – so seriously.

Inspired by
Robert Wright
Quoted in: Why Buddhism is true
By Sean Illing

Well, one implicit assumption of mindfulness meditation is that it makes sense to be suspicious of our feelings. In a certain sense, in a way, that’s a big part of Buddhism, that all of the things going on in your head are not necessarily to be taken very seriously. Again, evolutionary psychology I think drives that point home and explains why a lot of these feelings are not to be trusted.

Meditation is a discipline that helps you not take them seriously and that liberates you from the tyranny of feelings. It’s a technique for taking things ranging from anxiety to remorse to actual physical pain and they’re taking a perspective on them that somewhat releases you from their grip.

🧠 Enjoy meals. Eating out is the most dominant form of entertainment. If you only do it in your car or in front of a TV, you’re depriving yourself of one of life’s great joys.

Inspired by
Hal Prince
Quoted in: Stephen Sondheim’s Lasting Wisdom
by D. T. Max

It stems from a remark Hal Prince made in a cab once. We were out at night, coming back from the theatre or something, and he was looking around Park Avenue on the way to the Upper East Side, and he said, “You know what the dominant form of entertainment is? Eating out.” [Laughs.] Because all the restaurants were lit up—it was about ten-thirty in the evening, and that’s what people were doing. They weren’t going to the theatre. They were eating! And I thought, Gee, what an interesting idea.

🧠 In a culture gone mad, acting sane will make you seem like the crazy one.

Inspired by
Johann Hari
Quoted in: A Denial-Of-Service Attack On Our Minds
by Andrew Sullivan

[Hari’s] new book diagnoses most of us as sane and the culture we live in as mad. The core thesis is this: Create a throw-away consumerist civilization, break families into ever smaller units, add a tech revolution, online addiction, economic precariousness, breakneck social change, endless work, and the collapse of religion and meaning, and yes, people will go a bit nuts. They’ll become depressed; they’ll seek out escapes through opiates or meth; they’ll disappear down rabbit holes of online fanaticism; they’ll seek meaning through work or fame; they’ll tear each other down with glee; they’ll lose the skills for family, friendship, constancy, discipline and love.

🧠 Expectations are entitlement in disguise. Find the clinging in your mind and then learn how to let it go.

Inspired by
Mark Epstein
Quoted in: What Unites Buddhism and Psychotherapy? One Therapist Has the Answer.
By Oliver Burkeman

The mantra of the Buddhism-inclined therapist, he writes, is to “find the clinging” — to detect where a patient is holding tightly to certain stories or feelings on which they’ve come to believe their happiness depends (or, alternatively, those they seek at all costs to keep at bay — since aversion, for a Buddhist, is just an inverted kind of clinging). The point isn’t to stop feeling or thinking them, but to change one’s relationship to them. The “ultimate Buddhist therapeutic maneuver,” he explains, is “not to ignore the emotion but to leave it alone, allowing it to appear in its own way, appreciating it for what it seems to be without getting taken in by it.” Talking with one patient, a stepmother bitter about her stepchildren’s lack of appreciation, he makes the fine distinction that her expectations are “valid” but “not realistic.” It’s perfectly OK to have expectations; just don’t make your happiness dependent on their ever being fulfilled.

🧠 We spend most of our time focusing on meaningless things. Try to exchange ideas instead of images.

Inspired by
Neil Postman
Quoted in: On the Internet, We’re Always Famous
by Chris Hayes

It seems distant now, but once upon a time the Internet was going to save us from the menace of TV. Since the late fifties, TV has had a special role, both as the country’s dominant medium, in audience and influence, and as a bête noire for a certain strain of American intellectuals, who view it as the root of all evil. In “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” from 1985, Neil Postman argues that, for its first hundred and fifty years, the U.S. was a culture of readers and writers, and that the print medium—in the form of pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and written speeches and sermons—structured not only public discourse but also modes of thought and the institutions of democracy itself. According to Postman, TV destroyed all that, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was, in a very literal sense, meaningless. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he writes. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”

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Quickies

🎯 Watching Friends (or old rom coms) now is astounding because people could just walk around airports willy-nilly and it was no prob. "Do you have a ticket?" "No, but I just realized I'm IN LOVE." "Right this way then..."

🎯 InstaHard, BodEase, Diet Force and oils, tinctures and supplements. Snake oil salesman used to ride into town on a horse drawn carriage. Now they ride in on a podcast.

🎯 Shoutout to victimhood. It's NEVER been this popular. Started from the bottom now we're...even further down and it's NOT FAIR!!!!

🎯 18-34 year olds: "Culture is targeted at us because we're cool, relevant, and move society forward!"
Advertising: "Actually, you're a bunch of suckers who have the magic combo we crave: disposable income and undecided consumer preferences!"
18-34 year olds: "OK Boomer!"

Vooza @voozahq

It's not that work from home is bad. What's bad is never leaving home and thinking screens are reality leading to an entire society winding up feeling lonely, sad, and disconnected. We need bouncers at home who scream, "You don't have to go to the office but you can't stay here."

🎯 One big issue I have with the psychedelic community is how much it listens to music that sucks. What if I like both shrooms and song structure? The only thing giving me a bad trip is this ponytail playlist chock full of noodly jam bands and synthed out muzak.

🎯 Polio's comeback has The Plague's longtime agent making some calls.

Up ahead for paid subscribers: Alex Jones, student loans, 70's decor, Google/Apple controlling your life, Willie Nelson, Tom Wolfe, and how to sing in tune. If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider subscribing.