Censorship: Never Think ‘It Will Never Happen to Me’

Last night I had a nightmare. I was grappling with a junkie. For some strange reason (in dreams, cars don’t move, candy is tasteless, and we make stupid decisions), I thought it would be a brilliant idea to give the drug addict a flying kick, and I did. Boy did I! — oh my God, I really did! I mean, for real, I flew out of bed, punted the light bulb out of the bedside table lamp, cut my foot on the window, and banged my nose on a bed leg. It’s hard to feel more idiotic and wretched than I felt right then, only just come to my senses, and still dreary, confused, and in great pain. It’s hard, but I somehow managed it: a second later, the alarm clock went off. I knew then that an awful day was dawning. 

It’s amazing. There are days when I don’t even need to open social media to get in a bad mood and bury my optimism alive. I often start the day absolutely certain that something bad is going to happen. Thank God — and this is literal — this doesn’t stop me from being happy; as a child, I was taught that sadness is Satan’s weapon. I am often melancholy, but I run from sadness. In that sense, I am a lot like Hunter Biden, but without testing positive in roadside drug tests.

In The Art of Being Happy, the metaphysical pessimist Schopenhauer explains that “an evil that has befallen us does not torment us so much as the thought of the circumstances that might have prevented it.” And almost always, the circumstances that could have prevented it have something to do with the fact that we had always ruled out the possibility that this evil could ever actually occur.