It’s easy to be a hypocrite.

I don’t think anyone really means to carry such a trait, but it’s kind of like how the best villains in any storyline don’t think they’re actually bad…they rationalize their behavior and say it’s for the good of everyone, or really themselves. Think of Thanos. Thanos wasn’t going to kill all the Avengers, he just wanted to wipe out half of the universe so that overpopulation wouldn’t be such a problem. Perhaps he didn’t take it upon himself to kill some infinite amount of lives because they were leeches or in the way, but hey… what was your solution? Well… being a hypocrite isn’t much different.

We can talk about slapping the donut out of a fat kid’s hands so that he’ll learn to lose weight but then when WE want a dessert we’re loaded with reasons why it’s okay. “I’ll hit the gym a little extra tomorrow,” or “I worked out extra long today,” or “What’s one extra cookie going to do to me?” or “IT’S KETO!” or “IT’S PALEO!” or “IT’S ORGANIC” or “IT’S FAT FREE! or pick some other marketing tool, that’s why it’s on the box – so you can rationalize stuffing an extra dessert down your gullet.

We can talk about using the resource of discipline as the way to manage ourselves. We talk about how to be more productive and healthy than most when we get our 8 hours of sleep, have a morning routine of breathing exercises and yoga, a cold shower, journaling, and fasting. But then come to our evening routines we eat too late, have alcohol too close to bedtime, get nothing done, and fall asleep on the couch, wake up at 4 to get into bed for 3 hours and fuck up our REM cycles. The morning version of yourself is super on top of their shit while the PM version of yourself is like a 5 year old pain in the ass, self-destructive to a fault. Think of a werewolf that instead of eating people it just decides to binge eat snacks and junk-food entertainment. Then when the human wakes up in the morning, he’s confused, tired, and covered in stray fur and what he HOPES is dried saliva.

How can we keep our disciplined selves and productive selves consistent throughout the entire day. Is there some breaking point that we’re using that “Fuck it” switch too much? Is there another midday series of habits we need to do to keep ourselves realigned? Or do we just need to be a big boy and make sure to have self-control when we’re at our weakest, most tired moments? Maybe we just need a bedtime that’s a hard shutoff. Does Amazon sell EMP’s to shut off the electronics in the house past a certain point? Nope. I guess I could see that being a problem in the long run.

We encourage people to be their best version of themselves frequently, but yet we can’t give that same attention to ourselves sometimes. It’s easy to point the finger and figure out someone else’s problems as we don’t see their whole picture. The little fat kid that can’t stop eating donuts has bigger issues than just an attachment to Boston Creams, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Boston’s cream is just the tip…of the iceberg… heh.

But that poor chubby little kid stuffing his face doesn’t do it for the addiction to sugar, it’s because that sugar fills some hole (heh) that he’s missing in his life. He’s hurt by someone or something, missing love, missing friends, the list could go on. But the simple solution is to tell the chonker to drop the pastries and get more active. Thanks, Capt. Obvious.

There’s problems we all have that lead to other problems. They manifest themselves into something else, which triggers something else, which snowballs into something else, and then the something else mates with the other something and then you have multiple parental somethings with a side helping of everything.

Confusing, I know, but this is how this shit adds up. Before you know it, you’re really overwhelmed with different shades of anxiety all because you couldn’t rip the band aid off about a conversation you didn’t want to have or a task you didn’t feel like doing. Now you’re overeating, overdrinking, overthis-ing, overthat-ing, and then paralyzed in a series of poor behavior. Like the 13 year old that just figured out how to masturbate, you’re doing it too often and without purpose. It’s like a placeholder for when you actually get laid, which in turn, comes from being intimate (we hope) with a partner, and because of a feeling of love towards them. Over-whatever-ing is just the placeholder. For what? No clue, that’s YOUR job to figure out.

In the meantime, while we do all that difficult work of figuring out why we have these holes that need filling (HA), let’s learn to be more introspective about ourselves. Everyone is going through a battle we know nothing about. We are all enduring the human experience doing the best we possibly can at the moment. Some are set up for success from the get-go. Some just learned to work their balls off to get there. Some had to fail over and over and over again just to get remotely close. Some will never get there regardless of what they try. That’s the game of life, but we can never give up. But while we continue to thrive, strive, struggle, and survive…let’s leave the poor fat kid and his donut be. Don’t you remember how awesome a friend a donut could be? Lend a hand, lend some helpful advice. The oversized, pear shaped, fat boy only has one vice.