There may be many observations in this part that do not resonate with you, but we see the world only through our own eyes. I know there are people out there who don’t see the world as I do, but sadly they aren’t writing this book. So if anyone does not suffer from what follows, I apologize if it seems I’m painting the whole human race with the same pessimistic brush. I have reached these conclusions only because everyone I have ever met has complained that these are the areas of life that drive them crazy. I know from the bottom of my heart, they are what drive me crazy.
Why are we so mean to ourselves? What did we do wrong? Why, if we are the best that evolution has tossed up so far, are we so abusive to ourselves? Each of us has a nagging parent implanted in our heads: “Don’t do that . . . why didn’t you . . . you should have . . . but you didn’t,” on an endless tape. (My mother would say she was telling me what a failure I was only because she loved me.) If most of us ever compared our inner leitmotif, we would sue each other for plagiarism, as our internal themes are so alike.
No other species is as cruel as we are to ourselves. We’d never dream of treating our pets the way we treat ourselves. We whip ourselves to keep moving like we would an old horse, until it falls over exhausted; the hooves made into glue. I have asked so many people if they have ever had a voice in their head that says, “Congratulations you’ve done a wonderful job and may I say how attractive you look today.” The answer is no one. I’m sure they’re out there I just never met them.
Once you get an attack of this self-immolation, you’re on the slippery slope to a very unhappy state. Your brain just churns away, chewing over a problem like a piece of meat that won’t go down. There will never be a solution to “I should have,” so you attack, guess who? You. This is why one in four of us is mentally ill.
It’s not our fault that we’re slave drivers to ourselves because biologically we all have this factory-installed chip that compels us to achieve and move forward. Before we even had words, we had an innate drive in every cell of our body to press on at all costs. (Google “selfish gene.”) This is how one cell becomes two, and two becomes three (I could go on but I haven’t got time). Cells keep advancing to the trillion cells that finally make up us and when language came on-line a mere 75,000 or so years ago we started to translate that compulsion to improve with that inner monologue of “I should have,” “I could have,” “I’m going to screw up.” That old familiar tune.
Each of us internalizes the voices in our heads from our parents, who probably meant well, but these sentiments stay in there for a lifetime. It’s because most parents want to protect their children that you get an abundance of “you shouldn’t have . . . you should have,” otherwise the child might put their finger in a light socket and blow up. These corrective voices helped you survive as a child; later in life they can either drive you mad with their constant corrections and instructions or they can help you successfully navigate obstacles throughout your life, giving you a smoother ride.
There are parents who encourage their children with positive reinforcement and calming encouragement: “That’s right sweetheart, you did so well, why don’t we try it again and you’ll be even better?” These children, later in life, may see a close friend passing by who doesn’t acknowledge them, and their inner voice says, “Oh, too bad, Fiona must be preoccupied and she looks so lovely, I’ll call her later.” Those of us with parents trained by the Attila the Hun school of child rearing would react to this incident with, “Fiona hates my guts, that’s why she’s ignoring me. She found out I’m a moron, which I am.”
We are all looking for happiness (unless of course we’ve already got it, and blessed are those few who have). This is why we have so many self-help books—enough now to cover the equator seventy-eight times. Have you read The Secret? I didn’t read it but I know eighty million copies were sold. I did read page one, which informs you that “the secret” was handed down to us by the ancient Babylonians and clearly it worked for them; that’s why there’s so many running around, you can’t move for all the Babylonians living in London. Next, the author tells you that Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven, and Einstein were inspired by this book. I’m going to use that idea and give myself reviews from dead people. Apparently the next two hundred pages are filled with advice that boils down to, “Think happy thoughts and your dreams will come true, just like Tinker Bell promised.” (I’m sorry to all you fans of The Secret, I’m just very bitter about the eighty million copies sold. You can understand.)
All of this self-help was stolen from Walt Disney; he was the father of the New Age. “Whistle a happy tune; if you believe in fairies, clap your hands.” From this philosophy flowed The Little Mermaid, Snow White, and some early Mickey Mouse. Walt knew the secret of happiness. Too bad he’s on ice; we’ve got to defrost this guy to squeeze out some more wisdom. Walt knew when to make an exit.
Busyness is a method we have devised in order to distract ourselves from the bigger, deeper questions; we have an obsession to keep busy. There is no time to rest and no time to think about what we really should be doing in our limited time on Earth. I’m not criticizing; I’m as driven as the next person. It almost got to the point where I went into labor while doing a TV show. The floor manager gave me “Five-four-three-two,” someone cut the cord and yelled, “Action.”
Gandhi said, “There is more to life than speed.” Unfortunately he didn’t tell us what, he just left us hanging while he pranced around in his diaper.
To compensate for this undercurrent of uselessness, we pretend we’re all terribly important and that we have something to bring to the world. That’s why we have Twitter—so we can check how many followers we’ve got. We can count them; a hundred or a thousand people you’ve never met, telling you what they had for lunch, now knowing you exist. That’s how we see if we matter. We’re like little birds, newly hatched from our eggs going, “Tweet, tweet, tweet,” looking for a little attention, a little love, maybe even a worm—anything will do as long as they notice we’re here.
In reality we’re all as disposable as wax figures. Once you lose your job or beauty or status, which you will eventually, they melt you down and use you to make the next important person. I went to Madame Tussauds and there was Charlie Chaplin next to the loo while Nicole Kidman was melted down and made into 150 candles; an icon one minute, a candle the next. Jerry Hall must be on a birthday cake somewhere.
• • •
We run because we don’t want to look inside and see that there might not be anything there and that our search for meaning is a waste of airtime. We stay busy so we don’t have to think about how futile the running is; like dung beetles building a house made of manure, we don’t stop and think, “Hey, where’s this going?”
When I have a day off and wake up, I jolt up from the pillow, panicking that I may have nothing of any importance to do. Maybe this is why I, and people I know like me, have to keep busy compiling an endless to-do list. For us, busyness is our god. We worship it. People ask me if I’m busy and I tell them, “I’m so busy I’ve had two heart attacks.” They congratulate me on this achievement.
We hold those who are on the tightest of schedules in reverence; the busier you are, the higher your status as a human being. For those of us who suffer from this phenomenon, we have sped up to such a frenzy of things “to do,” we make ourselves ill just to avoid having to look inside and see that we might not have any point at all. So who is ultimately the winner? The busy, running people? Or maybe it’s someone who sits on a rock and fishes all day or someone who has the time to feel the breeze on his face? Who is the real winner? (Please dear God, I hope it’s not the guy with the fish.)
• • •
Here are some common answers to the question “Are you busy?”
“I am run off my feet.”
(Let’s picture it, someone somewhere was dashing at such a rate that he or she literally cracked at the ankle and just kept going.)
“I don’t know if I’m coming or going.”
(Someone once opened a door and just stayed there for the next five years trying to figure, “In or out?”)
• • •
If you have used either of these responses, then you probably are an A-list person who is living the life, even though you are too busy to have one.
There are women in my neighborhood in London who have nothing to do for a living and they are booked to the hilt. They do Pilates five times a week so they can make their pelvic floor strong enough to lift the carpet. Dyson could use them as vacuums. Then they’ll shop with their personal shopper (that takes up a few hours), have their hair blow-dried (that’s another hour), lunch (that’s a four-hour filler). Then they have to pick up the kids and do their homework for them, and then it’s time to get ready and go off to attend a charity event. You know what that entails? They go to a really fancy hotel and pay $2,000 a plate to save a tuna.
These Pilates women complain that their husbands work until midnight and they’re left having to get their spawn into a nursery school that only takes kids whose IQs have six digits. I have (in vain) tried to tell them that marriage is a “negotiated deal.” I’ve even made them a little flow-chart so they can get some perspective. I tell them, “If your husband is earning more than $150,000 a year, plus bonuses, you as the wife have no rights. You take care of the house and the kids. You must give him sex whenever and wherever he wants. And you have to stay thin and young till death do you part.
“If your husband is making around $75,000 a year, you still take care of the house and kids but you may bitch about him up to twenty-seven hours a week to your friends. If he does not help on the weekends, you can withhold the sex.
“If he makes below $20,000 a year, you can let the house and kids go to hell.” That’s all for when the husband is making all the money.
If the wife is making all the money, say, she’s earning $150,000 a year, which is equivalent to $575,000 in “Man Money,” she will still have to do everything because evolution has not given men eyes to see details such as a hoofprint on the carpet. But man does have a very important function, and that is to stand there and gaze toward the horizon to make sure there are no wildebeests.
This need to have more is not limited to the wives of football players or head honchos of big organizations. We all, in our own way, never stop wanting, that’s why we need twenty thousand feet of mall; big steaming mounds of galleria won’t be enough to satisfy. The shopping never stops; the label says it all. Our self-esteem drives us to buy a designer handbag that costs the GNP of Croatia, which is why people with nothing will spend their last shekel on Dolce & Gabbana or a $300 pair of Nikes. If you have the tattoo of CC on your handbag, you can get a nod of respect from everyone who passes, even though you’re homeless. I once saw a tramp in Miami pushing all his belongings in a shopping cart he stole from Bloomingdale’s. He was wearing newspaper and had a cap on his head that read, “Born to Shop.”
What we throw on our back is our new means of identity. People who wear Prada usually hang out with other Praderites and the same with all other brands; people seek their own level, their own tribe. Picture it, a whole gaggle of Guccis at the watering hole or outlet mall, as we call it today, eating a carcass.
P.S. Proof of our insanity is that we actually buy UGG boots. Where in the brain do we feel a need to look like an Eskimo, as if they had any fashion sense? They may counter that they wear them for warmth but it still looks like they’re walking in a beaver.
Some people think to reach a state of joy, you need to dress in sheets for a lifetime, have a dot on your head, and sit on top of a mountain. Some wave crystals, eat turf, pray, chant, and dance with the wolves. Contentment might even be possible. . . . I’m sure it’s feasible to sit on a bench and feed a squirrel without getting antsy. But the trouble is, we always want more. We’re the A-list of all species so we go for the Golden Chalice: happiness. It had to be a crazy American who said that we all have the right to pursue happiness. That’s why you hear them demanding a double latte caramel macchiato every morning with their smiling teeth just before they chirp, “Have a nice day.” There are some lucky people who feel they experience happiness when they gaze at a cloud or walk on the beach, but the rest of us get that special tingly buzz only when we’ve bought, won, achieved, hooked, or booked something. Then our own brains give us a hit of dopamine, which makes us feel good. We don’t need substances; we are our own drug dealers.
The problem is, the hit of happiness usually lasts as long as a cigarette, so we have to continually search for the next fix. It’s as though as a species we had no brakes, only breakdowns. Mother Nature’s little joke on us is that the original object of desire isn’t so much fun when we get it, so unless we can up the stakes all the time, we can’t get that burst of internal fireworks we call happiness. Most animals just eat their fill and walk away, but not us—we keep glutting ourselves even though the next bite never tastes as good as the first one.
The Hierarchy of Western Wants (According to Me)
This failure to get what we want leaves us in a state of permanent desire. Magazines understand that they make us salivate for the unobtainable; the chase is better than the kill. People who collect art pay $20 million for some semen on a cracker and then never notice it once it’s on their wall. They’ll be back licking the pages of Sotheby’s catalog for what they crave next. If we’re not wanting, we’re waiting. Waiting for what, we don’t know, but something and it’s going to happen soon. Waiting for our screenplay to be commissioned about a clown who falls in love with a squirrel and then decides to become a car dealer. Waiting for the money to roll in for an idea about inventing soup in a solid form; it’s all about to happen next week, next year, we don’t mind how long, as long as we’re in a suspended state of waiting.
A new phenomenon that arises from our insatiable appetites is the sense of entitlement that is the disease of this age; now everyone thinks they deserve to be a winner. This is why so many deluded people with absolutely no sense of shame have the audacity to try out for X Factor when they have the voice of a toad. Self-help books will tell you that the only thing standing in your way is you.
“You can be beautiful if you think you are,” they say. This is why you see the truly self-deluded paint their nails with tiny diamantes embedded in bloodbath-red extensions, as if no one will notice that they are the size of Tibet. Or you get Sarah Palin thinking she can run a country.
Once we humans have the basics for survival—that is, food, water, and mascara—you would think we should be on our knees, kissing the ground in gratitude for our aliveness, for being able to see through our eyes, hear through our ears, and best of all, eat. Let us have a moment’s silence to thank the Big Bang for making it possible that eventually we could experience the taste of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. But even with all these miracles we still suffer, and it’s all because of our negative thinking. Animals don’t have negative thoughts; they’re out there having the time of their lives, swinging from branches, mating with nearly everyone who comes up behind them. And us? We ruminate on things, worry, regret, resent. Who picked the short straw, do you think? Most awful of all is that we can project to the future and figure out that we will eventually lose our looks and dare I say it . . . die.
See how there’s always a grenade at the bottom of the cookie jar? It’s so like the story of my life—whenever I achieve a little something and am complimented, shortly thereafter I am swiftly kicked in the ass by karma. The more you have (looks, money, fame) the more you suffer when you lose it. There is always a bill to pay. Luckily, they bless a few people with a dollop of unawareness so when they begin to crinkle and melt into oblivion, they’re the last to know and they just keep on kickin’ those “hoofers” on ole Broadway, even though you hear the sound of their arthritic hips cracking in the effort. (This probably sounds judgmental, but I get evolved later in the book so just bear with me now.)
Those of us who aren’t on the brink of starvation or elimination or living in squalor are condemned to a life of worrying about trivia. It all went downhill when we crawled out of the jungle. We just don’t know what to think about next after fulfilling basic needs; so we make over our kitchens. In my neighborhood all the surfaces in this year’s kitchens are buffed silver metal resembling what you’d find in mortuaries. You’re scared to open a drawer in case a toe hangs out with a label dangling from it. Now they are digging down below the kitchens to make more floors until they hit volcanic rock. Some have lap pools they will never lap in. I know someone who is building an underground vineyard.
I have a theory that you can tell how mentally deranged someone is by viewing their bathroom. If they believe they need a chandelier, an Italian marble tub, and a toilet that performs more than three functions (now some of them play Rachmaninoff when you lift the lid and squirt you with lilac perfume after you pee) they are not a well person and have strayed far, far away from sanity. Freud should have come up with a therapy where you interrogate the clients about how they envision the decor of their bathrooms rather than asking about sex. Sex tells you nothing. How you want your lavatory to look is the gateway to the unconscious. A bathroom is a place where there is no room in there for narcissism. It’s where you really see yourself for what you are and get a whiff of reality. On the toilet no one is a star. Remember that and you will go far in life.
Our status used to be based on bloodlines—on whether you were a Princess or a Pea. Now we determine each other’s worth by asking, “What do you do?” If you say, “I do nothing,” people move away from you as if you are a corpse. Our identity is on our business cards, and new titles emerge every year to define increasingly abstract roles. Job descriptions like “consultant” and “thought leader” are ambiguous at best. (If everyone’s a consultant, who is left needing one?) These days motivational speakers are also considered big shots. We confuse bravery with bravado. I’ve seen motivational speakers who are brought in to companies to tell you about rowing across the Atlantic with one arm. How is this helping the company? That person isn’t brave, he’s nuts. And these speakers are starting to get competitive; apparently someone has claimed he climbed Mount Everest using only his nostrils.
• • •
Each of us thinks somewhere inside we have a purpose. Long ago we didn’t have this existentialist angst; we were hunters or gatherers. A hunter hunted, a gatherer gathered (Jewish people pointed instead of doing either). Back then there was no such thing as individuality so you couldn’t distinguish “you” from anyone else unless you wore a hat or had more hair but basically we were all the same: grunting and foraging.
In those days you didn’t need a manual. You were born, drove an ox around a field, multiplied, and died. No one complained; plagues came and went—smallpox, influenza, you name them, you had them—and everyone had the same attitude: “Shit happens.” Now it’s an outrage: “How dare some virus wipe us out? Does it know who we are? We’re superior beings, the crème de la crème of all that live and breathe; top of the food chain.”
It all went wrong when some deluded optimist wrote the words, “All men are created equal.” This is clearly not the case; some people are losers. He never even lived to see the can of worms he released once he wrote that with his feather. He just signed his autograph and let the chaos begin. (I’m going to name names. It was Thomas Jefferson—another American.)
We were at our happiest when we used to drive our yoke-necklaced oxen around a field because then we were all working together as a big tribe, a team. OK, it was tough, but we had some laughs out there in the blizzard conditions (without UGGs). We needed to form tribes in order to fight off neighboring tribes who tried to steal our oxen. Without an ox you were nothing. After that, the number of people in a tribe diminished because along came the gun and then you didn’t really need a lot of people, just one guy with a good trigger finger. That’s why now we don’t have this sense of teamwork; we’re all alone hunkering in our corners, clutching our weapons.
The only time we do get a sense of belonging to a tribe is when we’re facing a disaster like a hurricane, Godzilla, or a war. In the UK the only time everyone unites is when they’re reminiscing about World War II; when they get fueled up on the Blitzkrieg spirit, they all start blubbering away singing those “We’ll Meet Again” songs they heard on the wireless. Every Christmas, my husband’s parents would dress up as Luftwaffe and RAF pilots and run around the living room going, “We shall fight them on the beaches!” and screaming, “We shall never surrender,” as they smashed into the TV set.
In my opinion, our downfall began when we started to think of ourselves as “individuals.” I read somewhere—don’t ask me where—that hundreds and hundreds of years ago there was no word for I. There was only the word for we. No one was lonely back then. The trouble started when the individual came into the picture. Remember the wheel? Back millions of years ago when we made the wheel? We don’t know who made it. There was no wheel by Chanel. Remember when we all worked together to make fire? We don’t know who lit the first match—he was just some guy and he didn’t need his name in lights. Now agents and managers have to get involved and skim 20 percent off the top for just standing there.
• • •
Simple animals have all the luck. They’re delighted to still work as a team. They’re delighted to be part of a gaggle, or flock, or swarm. Goose in the back row of the flying formation? He’s proud to be there. He’s overjoyed. It’s his job in life. Not us anymore. Our earliest instinct is to bond together and socialize; our very DNA gives us instructions on how to mingle.
You know whom I blame for all this? Freud. If he hadn’t mentioned an ego, we would never have had one. Because of him it’s all about me. Me, I need to be the next Kate Moss. Me, I need to run Apple. Me, I need to be in People, and I’ll do anything to get on television. “You want me to eat my mother-in-law? Toss her on the barbecue.”
So this is the human condition: We’re living longer, getting taller, and are a push of a finger away from every other person on the planet and yet we do not know how to run ourselves. Maybe we’re not supposed to know, and when we’re finished filling the world with parking lots, artisanal muffin shops, and Starbucks, our point on Earth is finished and with one big cataclysmic boom we’ll be gone.
Millions of years of natural selection, and this is what we’ve come to. We want to be the most famous, the richest, the thinnest and the busiest. Darwin would shit in his pants.
I have given you a preview of the good news already: We can change. But here I ought to point out, as we are focusing on the problems of living in modern times, that when you do change, those around you won’t like it. People will not easily let go of their image of you, even though you have thoroughly redecorated your inner self. They want you to stay as they remember you so that they feel they aren’t changing either, that they are still gloriously youthful. This is why we don’t want to see an aging movie star because it makes us think of our own mortality. Sometimes they will cast an “older” woman (in her fifties!) but they’ll make sure she dies of something terminal halfway through. No one wants to see an aging face on the screen, especially in HD. (I once saw myself in HD; I looked like a close-up of an elephant.) We run to doctors to fight off Mr. Gravity for another year but it’s hopeless. We should tell ourselves, “The Christmas tree is dead already, stop trying to decorate it with shiny tinsel, it won’t help.”
We can change.
I’m not leaving myself out of this; I give thanks every day to surgeons who have helped me look this pert long after pertness should have died. I’m sure my insides are like the old Dorian Gray, while my face looks all shiny and new. I once said to Jennifer Saunders wasn’t it amazing that you couldn’t tell I’ve had any work done on my face? She said that I was delusional and that it was obvious. I will never tell anyone how old I am. The year I was born will never pass these lips without cruel and unusual punishment first. Actually, I don’t even remember the year I was born. I set my burglar alarm to remind me. My house has been robbed many times, but when the police come over I can’t remember what I set the alarm at: 1971? 1932? 1995? Could be anything.
So many people want to label you as funny or aggressive or a mess. We are condemned by other people to stagnate in the image they have of us; held ransom by their expectations like a butterfly pinned on cardboard. I’m still asked by taxi drivers, as if this wouldn’t hurt me, why I am no longer on television. In the past, I used to have to choke back the bile as I felt that stab in my heart. I used to answer with “Because I have terminal cancer.” That usually shut them up pretty quick. I stopped doing that because I’ve learned that if you take out your anger on someone, it comes back to you like acid reflux, and you’ve poisoned yourself and feel toxic and nauseated while the taxi driver probably just goes back to his home and wife and has a lovely life.
I had to change, I didn’t have a choice as my career in television was pulled out like a rug from under me and I was replaced by a younger (but not as funny) version of me. Anyway, I let it go and yes, it’s painful at first when no one looks at you. Fame is very addictive and as our spotlight fades, most people are desperate to cling on and we’ll do anything. “Please do a documentary about my gallbladder operation. I’ll even play a corpse.”
Eventually it’s quite liberating to not be noticed and you rejoin the human race. When you go on the tube and no one recognizes you, it’s a wakeup call; you realize how up your own ass you have been and that now it’s time to come out and smell the bus and subway stations. There’s a downside to becoming a normal person; when you tell the ticket guy at the exit that you forgot to buy a ticket and you think he’ll go, “Ha ha you’re the one from TV,” and let you off, you discover that this time he doesn’t and he tells you to get a ticket or you’ll be arrested.
When I decided to reinvent myself (which we all have to do in life at least five times, because we were meant to be dead by thirty) and I went back to school to learn how to be a therapist, my friends said that the clients would think it was a joke. They would expect TV cameras to be following me into the room and either freak out or start auditioning. I was under the impression that the woman (me) who had that job in television was effectively dead.
The point is, we’re all changing all the time. You once found it hard to tie a shoelace and now you don’t even have to look. The change is so subtle; you think that whatever you feel like right now is how you always felt. Our brain can trick us into thinking that life stands still. In the end this causes the human race the most heartache.
As you get older you don’t see many things as unique anymore. Whatever we experience in the present, we automatically go back through the Filofax in our minds to figure out what it reminds us of. We do this for the sake of survival so, say, we have had a bad experience with a man with a moustache, now we don’t trust anyone with a moustache. And because we see everyone through the filter of who they remind us of, whomever we meet is therefore labeled with that image, frozen in ice for all time. We’re not aware of how biased our memories make us and how they affect our view of the world.
And as we get older, our lenses get more and more narrow and blurry until we only see our own tiny pinpoint view; this limited vision eventually makes bigots of us all. This is why so many marriages fall apart. You meet someone, think that you know him, marry him, and then ten years later you divorce him because he turned out not to be who you thought he was. He never was. I realized many years after I married that I chose my husband because he has the eyebrows of Jeff Bridges. Now, I have to live daily with the disappointment that it’s actually him I’m with and not Jeff. God knows who he thought I was.
It goes further. We then unconsciously create situations that back up our beliefs, just to prove our point of view is right. We all know those women who keep dating the same kind of guy just to keep up their image of themselves as victim and to reinforce the fact that all men are bastards. They give you stories about how he seemed so perfect on the “Serial Killer” website and yet, after leaving a grenade on the pillow, he never called again. Why?
It’s amazing how we will suffer pain and abuse to keep our lives predictable. We’ll let our inner voices brutalize us, rather than live with the possibility that we might be wrong about how we see things. We’ll think, “Well at least it’s a pain that’s familiar.”
• • •
Uncertainty is our biggest fear so we keep up the idea that our vision of the world is reality. We use our minds to construct a picture of the world, judging it, making sure it fits with our past image of things and then anticipating how our past behaviors might affect the future. We never see the world as it really is but only how we choose to see it. And because we’re trapped in our own interpretation, we are prepared to go to war with other people caught in their view of reality—and never the twain shall meet. All this is the sound of people embedded in their own lives, believing their reality is the only reality, thinking the things they think are the only ones that matter; it’s the sound of solipsism. This could be why the world is in such bad shape. It is the nub of all our problems, and until we realize how limited our views are, we’ll never agree on anything. We have to try to see what other people see, through their eyes; only then can we come up with some cohesive resolution. This is my statement on world peace: take it or leave it.
Our little brains are on a daily drip-feed of everything from fashion tips to traffic updates to terrorist attacks. Is there a limit? I’d like to know. I wish there were some kind of service that tells you how much your particular mind can take. What is your capacity? When is there too much information to hold in one head? Why can’t those of us filled to capacity hold up our hand and say, “I can take no more, please don’t tell me anything else?” I can only retain my Visa number. I cannot also remember my password for PayPal and Twitter; my brain floweth over. I had my brain tested a few months ago by a psychologist and he said that I had very little RAM space so I can hold only about three numbers at once and I can’t build an argument because I forget where I started. I have other problems with numbers. I once called my husband from South Africa and told him I’d gotten a house for a steal, for 10,000 rand ($1,000). I was three decimals off: it was 10 million rand ($1,000,000).
How much information are we supposed to be able to take in? I’m sure we’re equipped to know only what’s happening on our street and maybe the local deli—are we really supposed to know if there’s been an infestation of cats in Malawi? If there’s a flood in Poughkeepsie, what am I supposed to do? Fly over there, get in a canoe with a hand pump and start draining? OK, if you show me a photo of a maimed person, I will write you a check immediately, but most of the time, what are we supposed to feel about these global disasters? I would probably like to know if my next-door neighbor gets shot but maybe I’m not so upset if it’s someone three blocks away. How close am I to the bullets? That’s what I want to know. I feel terrible saying this but it’s what I’m thinking.
I’m skeptical as to why people are so intrigued by worldwide atrocities. I know people who watch CNN all day, particularly when working out on the StairMaster, buffing their buttocks while those headlines of disaster slap them in the face with an up-to-the-minute report on another maniac with a gun gone crazy. You can see a lip-lubed anchorwoman running over to an injured bus driver shoving the microphone in his face demanding, “How do you feel about the incident?” giving him a little kick to keep him conscious. “How do you feel?” She has the look of a cat before it kills a mouse as she turns to the camera and says, “Well, Jerry, that’s all on the up-to-the-minute report on the tragedy happening down here, back to you.”
In some deep, dark way we all become salacious around a disaster; our mouths water slightly when there’s a real emergency. Hurricanes, typhoons, wars, shootings, epidemics; we’re a little aroused because now we really have something to think about rather than our monotonous lives; something to take the focus away from our to-do list. We have a little break to think, “Well thank God it’s not me.” Then we forget again after a few days and get on with worrying about the pickup at the dry cleaner and buying another light bulb. You can see the look of disappointment on people’s faces when the report comes that the hurricane has dipped from three thousand knots to a light breeze. We all love a disaster; nothing tastes as good. The savage still lurks underneath no matter what we’re wearing.
We have created rockets to the moon, computers that can . . . well, you name it, they can do it. And Starbucks on every corner of the world, but the other part of us, the emotional bit is still in the primordial swamp. Emotionally we are still on all fours, grazing our knuckles on the ground, looking out naively from under our one big eyebrow. Many of us don’t even like to say the E word (emotion) because some of us think it is a glitch in this otherwise perfect human machine. Emotions are to be eradicated as quickly as possible like a blemish or a laugh line.
But it is these lurking emotions that cause us the most trouble, and we haven’t risen above them. We’re still slaves to them when they rear their ugly heads.
We used to hold in high esteem those who got the highest grades at school, and they went on to be hugely successful. (Times have changed. There’s not some little guy at the top selling soap powder anymore, now most people need an MBA from Harvard just to put on their pants.) We’ve learned that the brightest might be the very ones who screw us the hardest. They know the math; they feel they can rob the bank. We used to trust these guys; we thought they were like Superman. To relax on weekends they go helicopter skiing in Alaska—no long run for them, they have to leap from a plane. To unwind, I chew a chicken bone in front of the television, they jump off a cliff.
Want my advice? If you’re checking out whom you want to do business with, ask what they do to relax on the weekends. If they say helicopter skiing, walk away; they are mentally not right. The most cognitively brilliant people usually have had to sacrifice their emotional selves. They live in a fog of facts, rarely creating a new one, just regurgitating everything they’ve ever learned and we’re supposed to think that’s smart. That’s a walking Wikipedia, not a human being. This also might mean they’re not top of the class on the morals front. They feel nothing so they can squeeze you dry without a wisp of remorse.
This is my weak area. Even if in terms of success, I’m cooking with gas, if I suddenly see someone with more, I get that kick in the stomach, that stab in my heart that means I want him dead. I am the first to step forward and admit, I want what the next guy has. No matter what it is, I want it. Sometimes I get the lust for things I don’t even want. I’m so ashamed of this but in the throes of envy, if I accidentally pick up a gossip rag and see Lord and Lady Pomkelson Pompel Pomp sipping champers, with their smiling teeth yapping at some opening of something (I would shoot myself if I were actually there), I can’t help feeling that old gutter-rat sense of envy bubbling below the surface. If you ever hear me say, “I’m so happy you got that job I always wanted,” believe me, I not only want you dead but your whole family wiped out. I used to tear out pages of Hello! magazine going, “Die, die, die.”
I’m always checking how many tweets other people have compared to me, to make myself crazy. I look at Stephen Fry’s Twitter when I’m feeling particularly suicidal. He always inspires me when I need my envy stoking up. It’s like that spot on your gums that hurts when you stick a pin in it but you can’t stop doing it.
If only humans had a cookbook to see what our ingredients are. We could look up “envy” and see that we all have it; it comes with the human package. It’s just one of those things that kept us alive when we roamed the ancient savanna. It’s part of the survival-of-the-fittest kit, so that if one Homo erectus had an attractive pointed stone, we all wanted it and so we made our own pointed stone or, even better, smashed in his skull with a stick and stole his. It is in our biology, this reptilian feeling of wanting what the next guy has. We can see it in the hubris of Greek drama. In every one of those plots, if someone got too big for their boots, divine justice would drop by and make them poke out their own eyes and then accidentally screw their own mother.
Your emotionally underdeveloped area may be anger, a very common ailment in the human psyche. It’s left over from when we were basic grunt, kill, and mate apes. This is how it manifests itself now; you see yourself as a perfectly civilized person, law-abiding, popular with friends, and a respected citizen. Then something in you flips and triggers some alien rage that turns you from Jekyll to Hyde in a second: could be a traffic warden, could be your secretary who forgot to give you a message, could be your husband/wife who got lost again because he/she can’t read a roadmap. Suddenly you’re unrecognizable: lips back, teeth bared, a terrifying bark emitting from your throat as you verbally bully your victim to dust. You want to hammer them but the fear of prison holds you back by a thread. Usually after the incident you get the backwash: the poison you shot out comes right back at you and you suffer the hangover of shame and guilt until they drain from your system or you ask God to forgive you.
Don’t be too hard on yourself; we are born with deception too. If we want something, we have the innate skill to manipulate the situation in our favor. We can hijack someone’s shot at getting the job, partner, money, you name it. We have the ability to outfox. We know how to smile but underneath we are plotting to overthrow them; talking behind their back, pretending to be happy for them, and then hacking their phones. We are still animals under the skin; shifty and devious for survival’s sake. Evolution has even provided facial expressions to throw people off the trail so that we can succeed with our deception.
Before we had words, we spread the news using our facial expressions, and to this day no matter where you are on the planet, even if you’re born blind, by ten months you’ll know how to pull up both sides of your mouth and smile; a real one, not that thing airline stewardesses do when they give everyone “bye bye bye bye bye” like they have a bad stutter. Nature in its brilliance made sure the first expression a baby learns is a smile because if it didn’t smile we would have ditched that screaming glob of fat (who can’t even go to the loo by itself). To this day people will tolerate and even love you if you smile. People in showbiz have this pummeled into them, singing to themselves, “Smile though your heart is breaking, smile even though you’re faking . . . smile and the world smiles with you.”
Whether you live in Bora Bora or Duluth, the facial expression for anger remains the same. It can be recognized by a drawing back of the lips and showing teeth, which demonstrates to others that you could eat them if pushed. The exposed teeth were to show how sharp they were. How white they were was irrelevant. The growling was dropped once we learned to swear. We show disgust by flaring our nostrils and putting our mouths in an “ick” shape to show others around us that, let’s say, the fish is off. Fear is easy to spot: the openmouthed screaming and bulging eyes gives a big clue for those nearby to run. Surprise is an intake of breath with an open mouth, warning others that something is not as it should be. It could be something bad or good; it’s sort of the human version of a warning light.
Laughter begins as a half scream from the shocked response of seeing something unexpected—a man slipping on a banana. You’re about to express alarm but when you realize the danger has passed, that he’s still alive, your lips draw up and your eyes crinkle to show others that there is no emergency. Humor comes from shock followed by relief, expressed by a barking noise. It indicates that this is a joke, not an actual catastrophe and the bark is so ludicrous, so infectious, that others around you also bark and clap their hands, all joining in the celebration that the pie in the face was not serious. Everyone is so relieved they bark some more.
We’re born with the forty-seven facial muscles that create our expressions. All of our emotional states are viscerally connected to our facial muscles so that we can read each other loud and clear, underneath language. Watch a silent movie and get back to me.
We developed facial expressions not just to read each other but also to deceive each other. For example, if you found food and you didn’t want anyone to get it, you could fake a look of disgust then everyone leaves and you get the meat. Those who were best at deception survived, and the suckers fell by the wayside. This remains the same today. The schadenfreude face is one of the ugliest of all expressions. It means, I’m-so-happy-sorry-but-mostly-I’m-happy-you’ve-been-demoted-or-even-better-fired. If you watch a face it will tell you everything. For instance, you cannot fake a smile. There is a muscle under the eye called the periocular that will not become active if you aren’t genuinely smiling. The mouth is easy to upturn but if you don’t find something funny, that periocular muscle just doesn’t move; your eyes are dead as a trout’s.
Learning to read faces should be compulsory in school so you’ll be able to decipher what people are really thinking. Imagine if we all could spot right off the bat when politicians are lying, they’d all be out of work in a week. Someone should have walked out of Bernie Madoff’s office and screamed, warning others (with his mouth wide open and fear in the eyes and then flared his nostrils to show disgust). Then all those people wouldn’t have lost $50 billion. If we were taught how to read faces, we could have spotted those sociopathic mortgage lenders and noticed they had the eyes of lizards.
I wish we could express jealousy like kids do. If someone gets something you want, you just hit them over the head and snatch it back. That’s why children are so un-neurotic. They are doing what we only dream of.
First step on the road to wisdom is to face ourselves honestly. People used to call it baring your soul; I call it looking in the mirror and cutting the bullshit. Here’s how I read the situation. You may see it a totally different way but I’m the one writing this book so it’s pretty much going to be my opinion.
The bully isn’t out there. It’s in here, in our minds.
Because of this faulty plumbing, we’re anxious, angry, fearful, stressed, and depressed, and we try to put the blame on what’s going on in the world. We blame it on climate change, the Muslims, the Jews, the banks, whoever the enemy is at the time. They change every half an hour. Sometimes they have a beard, then they’re wearing a dishtowel on their head, then in a bedsheet, I can’t keep up. We blame whoever happens to be president or prime minister. The names change, they come and go; we hate them all. We love them in the beginning, then turn on them and say, “It’s all their fault we’re in a mess.” But I say to you, we put them in there, we voted for them. The problem lies in us. We are always in conflict, and so that is how we see the world. The bully isn’t out there. It’s in here, in our minds. Inside ourselves there is always war and problems that will never go away until we declare a truce in our own heads. That’s my speech on world peace. Over and out. Bob Geldof says, “We are the world.” We are. He didn’t mean it in a nasty way, but I do. It’s all our fault; no one else is in the driver’s seat, just us. Many people want to change the world; they don’t want to change themselves. Wisdom isn’t something they ever write about in Vogue or can sell at Saks Fifth Avenue. I wish it were; it would be so convenient while shopping for shoes. We used to have people we could ask these more existential questions. Where are they now? Out of work, like everyone else.
“Life is meaningless, God is dead.” Oh please, I’m depressed enough. Imagine if Sartre did stand-up, the whole room would slash their wrists. Most of us don’t have old Shaman grandmothers sitting on their haunches, breasts pointing to the floor, handing down their knowledge. My grandmother couldn’t even tell me where she left her teeth, let alone the meaning of life.
We spend a whole lifetime hunting for some wisdom. In childhood, it’s “happy days”—our biggest challenge is hitting the potty; after that, the shit hits the fan. By the time you reach your twenties you’re fueled with the stress that you have to end up as someone special. Clearly some give up and just take root on their sofas but most young folks feel they have to turn on the turbo and go for the gold. In your thirties you’re fighting to keep what you’ve got and by your fifties you know it’s going to get taken away. And this is where the road divides and you turn into either wine or vinegar.
If you live long enough, a miracle might happen. If you make it to eighty-three and a half, just when you look like a walking Lucian Freud painting, you might become wise. But it has to be that late in the day: You cannot be a babe and wise, it’s against the laws of nature. But if you make it to eighty-three and a half and you don’t get overwhelmed by fear that makes you withdraw into your past, boring everyone senseless, and if your mind stays flexible and curious and you ask people questions and truly listen to their answers, and if you let all your narcissism, resentment, regret, and envy drain out of you, and you finally realize that the world will be fine without you, then you’re wise.
Perhaps I’ve come across as too negative in the book so far. I assume that what I’m writing about is our general malaise; what all people feel deep inside. I might be wrong, I’ve gotten things wrong before and I’ll admit I’m not an expert on what normal people feel if they indeed exist. So I apologize if you’re sitting there going, “What the hell is she on about? We don’t think about any of these things. We live a happy and healthy life. Let’s give this book to Uncle Psycho.”
I didn’t mean to insult any of you. On the contrary, I am a great admirer of people who believe they are normal; I am fascinated by them. I’ve always thought, Is it possible to feel the way Tony Robbins looks? Confident, positive, flowing with love for himself with his big wall-to-wall teeth and large genitalia. (I am guessing about this but he has a very large nose and I connect the two.) What makes him so sure he’s right? Does he really believe the script that is pouring out of his mouth? Is that normal?
I obsessively eavesdrop in public places (bars, trains, buses, restaurants) with my ear almost in the fruit salad in my search for who might be normal. I listen in to a conversation in a bar where a seemingly normal group of good old boys, teammates who work together, making valves for garbage disposals, are all out to celebrate the up-and-coming plumbing awards for which they have gathered. They seem so content with their lot; a happy pack at the watering hole, clinking glasses, toasting one another for the fact that they’re up to win “Plumbing Team of the Year,” fantasizing their names are being called out, hitting the air with their fists as they hear in their heads the music playing “You’re the Best,” then each one of them makes a little slurry speech about how they couldn’t have done it without their team, posing for an imaginary photo, giving each other slaps on the back. Is that normal?
I’ve listened in on a girl at the next table in a restaurant, panting with excitement as she asks her friend to be her maid of honor at her wedding and the friend bursting into tears and rhapsodizing on about how she’ll be the best maid of honor that ever lived and can’t wait to help choose the napkin color. . . . Is that normal?
I sit in a hotel lobby and listen in to two cigars with fat men on the ends yabbing about the price of housing, throwing out percentages of the increase or decrease of the market with complete confidence about how right they are. How does anyone accurately know how much a house price is going to rise or fall, and who cares? Is that normal?
At dinner parties, I hear people locked in debate about how to resolve the crisis in the Middle East like they’re experts. “Here’s what I would tell the Taliban.” The president couldn’t figure it out with his advisers but these “if you ask me” people presume to know. They base their extensive knowledge on the same newspaper everyone else reads; yet they have the answer. Where does that confidence come from? Around the world everyone is an expert. There must be at this very second sixty-four billion experts having coffee and giving their opinions on climate change, nuclear disarmament, obesity, and the war on drugs.
I sat next to a man telling me what the Flemish were thinking during World War II. I was dripping in sweat thinking, “Should I know that information? Will he think I’m an idiot when he finds out I know nothing about the topic and is there going to be a quiz?” I don’t even know where Flemmark is. I have to sit there, dying inside with self-loathing, while the Flem expert whips out more information I didn’t ask for.
This exhibiting of memorized fact is how we unconsciously determine who the alpha is at the dinner table. Lecturing on Flemland to people who have no idea is the same as the chief gorilla beating his chest to show who’s boss. This Flem guy somehow senses that I know nothing, and I’m sinking in a mound of self-hatred, so he feels triumphant—he’s won that round until he meets a bigger expert on Flem matters, at which point he will immediately attempt to change the subject.
People find their scrap of knowledge and unquestioningly live their lives gathering their little pile of research then boring people senseless with the details.
To be honest, the main reason I listen in is to find someone, someday who might come out with an Earth-shattering revelation and I will scream, “Aha! Bingo! That is the answer to why we exist.” It hasn’t happened yet but I’m always on the lookout. My suspicion is that we’re all wondering what normal feels like; all believing the next guy knows but not us. This may just be the way I think so forgive me if you don’t agree. I do know that we all want to be happy and we spend a great deal of our lives hunting for the key. No matter how powerful or successful we get, we still can’t figure out how to deal with a mind that keeps us up at night, driving us to exhaustion. This isn’t just for those who are considered mad, it’s for all of us. I wish we could just come out and say how we really feel; I know I’d be so relieved.