• Humpty Dumpty Elegy #1 | 👨⚖️DOOM👎 •
My friend Wednesday introduced me to Humpty Dumpty a few years back. He was hoping we could rehabilitate him into humanity. I've given up.
Humpty Dumpty went to highschool with us. Was held back a grade. Diagnosed with autism + a handful of other things. Sequestered off from the other students to the point where Wednesday said he had quasi-feral qualities. I don't remember seeing him anywhere. A fun sense of humor, and similar interests in entertainment, behind crippling anxiety. A virgin, and a bitterly resentful incel, but hey, more grist for the mental illness mill. A little help and patience oughta go a very long way.
I knew better than to pick friends based on some heroic attempt to re-invent them. That's hubris. But Hump and Wens had been discussing the idea for a while. All I was signing up for, was a new Discord friend. One with a caveat: 'He may at times be a bit baffling, awkward, and straight up unpleasant. But we can help him. We've all had similar struggles to him in our own ways, and we've overcome them. He's asking; he's vulnerable.'
I'll go further into why I find Humpty Dumpty so hopeless, as this series continues. But suffice it to say that he's not autistic; few if any of his problems are out of his control, and he's just a narcissist using pity for attention.
Over the years I listened to story after story from Mr. Dumpty. Sympathizing and empathizing with him as a protagonist. Trying to find parallels in his story that align with mine, as well as with friends in our group, and the things that've helped us so much.
The whole discord has showered him with advice, primarily based on our experiences: Job skills, establishing boundaries, communicating, ruminating, introspection tips, analogies, family dynamics, inspiring fucking allegories and historical legends, whole nine. Anything that ever nourished one of our god damn souls.
It all comes back at us with an assured, almost amused, "Naah, that won't work either."
"Yeah but it worked for me and two-three other dudes here." We'd insist.
"Hmmmm, I know, but autism/OCD/trauma/anxiety/horny/nihilism, so... ya know..."
"The dudes we're talking about have some or all of those issues and it still worked reliably. You have to try something before you say it can't help you."
"Yes, but none of you are as crazy as meee."
"You can't even hold a candle to Wednesday, dude, you know this. Why do you keep saying that?"
On and on it goes. A shell game of pity, advice, and excuses. For years now. Time wasted, and an uncharismatic sociopath stays the center of attention, indefinitely. To the alienation of other friends, who feel way less patience towards him. Whom we see less and less of, as time goes by.
My grand strategy was to vomit books all over him. It's all I've got to give. I'm a Machiavellian Gladwellian maven. In the tenth grade, Wednesday and I took a psychology class, and it's the only phase of mine that never ended. I've been reading books on psychology for eleven years. Just straight gargling them, loudly. And Wednesday is on his way to becoming a bonafide therapist. The idea of healing the mentally ill means a tremendous amount to Wednesday and I. We were conned by the better angels of our nature.
However, once I stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt, it all unraveled in my head, in a day.
So this series is all the books I deeply hoped would slowly change Humpty Dumpty's life, like they did mine. I put a lot of time and thought into which books would make the greatest impact on a troubled young adult's life.
Finally, I felt like I really committed to something bigger than myself, and intrinsically valuable, only to be mocked. This list will be here as a resource for Humpty Dumpty to browse. And my debt will be squared. My goal is still constructive. I've just lost the soft touch of a friend. Now he's a foil for us to learn from.
He's got all the time in the world, so long as he doesn't kill himself, or someone else. Although since the latter is far more likely, here are all the books he'll have time to read in prison:
• #1 You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney •
If I freeze diarrhea solid, is it still diarrhea? Just trying to hold your attention, lets keep moving. I already know the answer, don’t worry about it.
I recently told Humpty I planned to give him my copy of this, when we meet face-to-face. Said this is the book that started my journey up from rock bottom. That it changed my life, and for the first time, made me feel like my feet were planted firmly on the ground. This one light read means so much to me.
I said, "While I can't force you to read a word, I can force you to take it home with you."
He gleefully laughed and said "I'll just hold onto it till I see you again, and give it back, unread"
He died to me that day. The whole project ended there. Nobody else would have offended me by that comment. Because nobody else has ever begged me for guidance.
His take on the story, after the fact, is that he said he won't read it because he plans to get it on audiobook. He's been saying he'll get his Audible account started for as long as I've known him.
He spends his time replaying games upwards of six times for achievements, and watching speed runs on twitch.
My non-autistic narcissist step dad watched Looney Toons and spaghetti westerns every day. It's called being boring. Hump literally complains to us about how boring his entertainment is. But he can't pencil in one second for a best-seller or two.
I gave this to a local book box. It's in curious hands, once again.
46 digestible little psychological decryption keys. This felt like a bestiary, mixed with a book of spell-countering-spells. Wednesday read it in highschool too. We both see this as a must-read.
Granted, for readers with a solid understanding of psychology and critical thinking, you may prefer to spend your money on Thinking Fast and Slow or The Laws Of Human Nature.
Obviously, the book isn’t condescending or demeaning, as the name might suggest. It’s deeply empowering. That gap between how smart we think we are, and how smart we really are, is a source of constant distress for us.
Most of these delusions are evolutionary adaptations we should all be grateful for. But this fact comes with a big BUT: none of this information means anything, if you’re just going to be a thoughtless determinist about it. They may be your nature, but they’re not your fate.
Nobody loves determinism more than ol' Dumpity Doo-Dah. That way, he never has to change. Fate is his first trump card against sound advice.
If he did read this, he might: stop self-handicapping; stop forming self-fulfilling prophesies; stop confirming his nihilistic biases; recognize when he's confabulating in the face of ignorance; account for the Dunning-Kruger effect; drop his expensive brand loyalties; distrust supernormal releasers; be careful where he finds catharsis; or combat learned helplessness; etc. etc. etc. to name his biggest and most correctable flaws.
All of the above, he'd just call textbook autism or OCD. Too arcane for us to understand fully. Whatever it takes to keep his flaws firmly in place. His greatest strength, is his illusion of weakness.
Here’s David McRaney's blog/podcast. If you think this series apes his work, wait till you see what I got planned next. Oh baby, I’m gonna invent my own psychology all by myself. I might call it, ‘You Are Not Convinced’ I’ll test fan-submitted fried chicken recipes on my podcast and everything.
I developed more confidence, patience, and humility after reading this. Confidence, knowing my shortcomings aren’t unique to me. I don’t err cause I’m an error, I err cause I’m an ape. Patience, knowing nobody is really on the ball, and we’re lucky anything actually works at all. And humility, I rarely claim to be certain; certainty is a childish indulgence. I’ll tell you I have these flaws long before you see one acted out, if you ever even do.
It’s definitely still diarrhea.
• #2 The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz •
Funkadelic Toltec knowledge from OUTER SPACE. Four simple agreements, pinky swears at the ready! Lets go:
Be impeccable with your word
If my secular home had a holy book, it was this one. My mom read this when I was four, and did everything in her power to adopt these agreements into practice. I'm a lucky son of an alien.
It helped her reverse the narcissistic gaslighting my grandma raised her with. This was where my mom learned to stop being emotionally manipulated. A problem Humpty has complained too much about.
My mom's practically a guru, among her friends. Because she's always there to remind them of these agreements.
This keeps her on that constant Bruce Lee, 'be like water' shit. Her words are honest, clear and settled. Insults pass through her like a vapour. She flows without the friction of assumptions. She crashes into goals with all her potential. And some people think she's ice cold, but she just a solid pimp, sucka.
I read this in 2017, and until then, this was all just 'Gangster Mom Wisdom.' Now it's 'Ancient Toltec Wisdom'. Far more credible. If I want people to buy my amazing advice, it needs to be more than plain old mamma's-boy-ism.
The rules have vulnerabilities and caveats, on their own. But as a quartet, they make up for any of each others’ shortcomings. They're more complex than a point-form list. They create a whole ecology of good behaviors in your life. Don Miguel Ruiz does a fantastic job of illustrating how a regular human can effortlessly live these agreements every day.
The more you conform to these ideals, the more brave, optimistic, relaxed, and reliable you become. It’s a powerful thing, being able to look someone in the eye and say ‘When was the last time I misled or lied to you?’ I’m a hit with all my bosses, because these, and some other rules, are my first priority at work.
You’d think, at this point, that people would get sick of hearing me say ‘I dunno, I’d have to assume. So [shrug]’ But they haven’t yet. I literally gave up on making stupid wild guesses to others, and it made me look 12% smarter.
Humpty does nothing BUT take things personally, assume, and half-ass. The lies, I'm only starting to fully uncover. His whole life story is a tangled ball of non-sequiturs and red herrings. Reading this would put some responsibility on him to know better, and to act better. Hence why it's holy water to his vampire ass.
He'd once again claim an autist can't fix these problems. We're gonna hear that a whole lot.
• #3 The Practicing Stoic by Ward Farnsworth •
The cub on the right... I hope that’s just his leg.
No philosophy produces cooler people than stoicism. No other ‘–ism’ comes close. From Keanu Reeves, to Clint Eastwood, to Yoda.
‘Stoic’ comes from the Greek, ‘stoa’ which means, ‘porch’. As in, the kind of wisdom you get from an old person, chilling on their porch. What are old people thinking on their porches? They’re thinking, ‘I’m right about everything, and I’m not chasing your silly ass down to tell you.”
So unless you’ve been cordially invited to porch class, to play dominoes with your local sages and crones, you better read this book. Otherwise the only way to get it, is wait about 50-80 years. Or you could fight in a war. It’s also known as the philosophy of the veterans.
Nassim Taleb got me hyped about the idea of PTG (Post Traumatic Growth), in his book, Antifragile. A lot of the discussion around PTSD involves a gravity well of pity and hopelessness, that just sucks you deeper and deeper. Some people take a PTSD diagnosis, like they’ve been informed they have Alzheimer's. Instead of attempting to treat it, they just start searching for hospice caretakers and adult diapers.
PTG is a concept older than written language, but in the history of trauma research, it’s still very young (90′s baby club yass). And the aircraft carrier of PTSD treatment is still turning very slowly in its direction. So in the meantime, how bout a philosophy adjustment? PTG is stoicism’s bread and butter.
Life’s just one big plate of steaming shit after another, and you just gotta eat it without complaining. – My dad. Not a practicing stoic.
Speaking of other ‘–isms,’ stoicism is an Axial-age philosophy.
Look at those old mustard-colored Boomer religions. Stinky!
Ever look at all the major religions and think, "seems like they’re all kinda gettin’ at the same thing"? Well, they were all attached to the same ancient trade network, the one that crystalized into the Silk Road. All these nerds were sharing ideas for centuries. A number of large figures from each team could have met face-to-face. Coulda gave one another blowjobs, who knows.
If stoicism ever gives you Buddhist vibes, it’s because in Greece’s Macedonian days, they parked their borders right up next to the Hindu Kush, made like a tree, and stayed there for a couple centuries.
Although, come to think of it, can’t remember the last time I’ve heard anyone say, ‘Want to be less anxious? Think more like a Greek.”
• #4 The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk •
This is what got me wondering if trauma was the nucleus of Humpty Dumpty's woes. Rather than autism. His most pronounced symptom, as a kid, was screaming/crying fits. That's mostly it. The rest of his autism-cred comes from merely being institutionalized over his early fits.
The only thing I won't doubt or denigrate about Humpty's life story, is that he was traumatized as a young man, by his family, by institutions, and by peers. Although getting him to specify where it maybe came from leads to babble. The non-sequitur fountain starts back up.
What I've pieced together from these tales, is that whatever Humpty did as a kid, got him scooped up by the Ontario school mental health system, labelled defective in every measurable way, prescribed every treatment available, robbed of any internal locus of control, then mentally vivisected and left unzipped. No identity, no agency, no guidance, and most importantly, shockingly little time spent socializing with peers.
But anyway, more about the book:
PTSD manifests in two ways: Overstimulation, or numbness; Panic attacks, or dissociation.
Never had a panic attack in my life. I’m Snowcone Jones, not... Volcano Alfredo. When everyone around me is wide-eyed and terrified, I enjoy a guilty moment of bliss. I float around in a little endorphin bubble, and everything moves just slow enough to handle.
The coping mechanism in his L-M-N-O-P’s went from healthy, to unhealthy, to a hell he never leaves – Aesop Rock, Lazy Eye
Psychologists say the cut-off age for adolescence keeps extending. To how old, thus far? 25, and climbing. We’re going to need a new Catcher In The Rye for this century, with a 30-year-old Holden Caulfield.
Adolescence isn’t biological, it’s cultural. It comes down to material things like attending school, living with your parents, etc. But also, mental aspects. Like sociopathy, and having an uncompromising sense of uniqueness.
We all need a sense of uniqueness, in order to create a sense of being an individual. But taken too far, it creates a frightening state of isolation. Trauma, while always deeply personal, is rarely unique.
This book shatters the feeling of lonely uniqueness that trauma can generate. I can connect with people in catatonic states, similar to my own. And more importantly, I can see overstimulated people, whom I used to refer to as ‘spazzes’, and recognize that there’s someone very similar to me, reacting to their pain with plan A, rather than B.
One of trauma’s secret ingredients is a lack of agency. That locus of control I was referring to is vitally important to your wellbeing. Bessel’s book focuses heavily on how trauma victims can inject some agency into their past, present, and future selves.
Trauma can be a Horse and Stag sorta deal. The stag is a traumatic event, and our physiological reaction is like the hunter with the saddle. We accept the hunter’s help, and it makes inspirationally quick work of the stag. But when we invite the hunter to kindly piss off, he says ‘Hey, thanks for the horse’ and there you are, stuck in a stable. A stoic’s worst nightmare.
Bessel sees the way out of the stable. If you can lose the Stag, and the saddle, that’s post traumatic growth.
If you’ve watched The Sinner on Netflix, it’s basically this book in cop drama form. I love it.
• #5 Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink & Leif Babin •
You gotta grit your teeth and flex all your neck muscles when you grumble the name of this book.
So much to love: Doing your best, checking your delusions, philosophy from sexy veterans, and vast agency-expanding wisdom.
The absolute last thing Humpty Dumpty will ever read. If I wanted to improve him with this book, my odds would be better if I just hurled it at his head like a baseball, and prayed for acquired savant powers. Which I won't do, because I got the audiobook. And because he's an egg.
I mentioned being a hit with my bosses. This is the cherry on top.
Corporations hire Jocko to come in when a team is failing to meet its goals. Jocko shows up and says, with his navy SEAL stage whisper, ‘what’s the problem?’ And the leaders say, ‘everything but us.’ And he squints like, ‘biiitch... please’ then he sinks back into the water with a Bowie knife in his teeth.
No bad teams, only bad leaders.
Responsibility isn’t a question of guilt or shame, when things go south. It’s a question of awareness and control. e.g. Did you have what you needed? No. Did you know you’d need it? No. Could you have checked beforehand to know you would need it? Yes. Then at some point, success was under your control, and you made the wrong choice. You share a portion of responsibility, own it.
We're most often the victim of circumstance only once, and the rest of the time thereafter, a participant. If you know better, then you're responsible for acting better, period.
There’s a big caveat, though. One can have a pathologically internal locus of control. Jocko alludes to this fact a lot in Extreme Ownership, but people struggle with the idea so much in practice, he wrote The Dichotomy Of Leadership and made a 2-part series of it all. A book on leading, and a book on following.
I, for example, have to stop acting like Dumpty is under my control. I want to believe I did something wrong to fail this quest to save his mind. I feel this urge to take ownership of his choices. That's extremely unhealthy. It's time for some malicious compliance; it's time to let him own his choice to languish.
It’s daunting, the practice of dropping the flattering excuses, and just owning your shit. For about a week, it feels like all you’re doing is masochistically barbequing your ego. But once the spiciness wears off, you’re left fortified. Or, dare I say, matured.
We all need help leading others, leading ourselves, and being led. It’s a delicate process. Few things are worse than a bad leader. Authority is not a trivial thing.
I've never once witnessed Humpty take ownership of his choices. Every decision of his was made by someone or something else. This book is the most counter-Humpty-Dumpty book I've ever read.
I'm still hanging with Humpty. I just don't reward his pity gimmicks with attention. The most malicious thing I plan to do is bore him.
No more explaining, cajoling, demanding, pleading, bargaining, or Socratic back-and-forth. No more time alone, ruminating over his endlessly complex life puzzles, or fantasizing about how much potential he has under all his self-sabotage. No more positive attention for being a dedicatedly permanent loser. No more making excuses for his disgusting misogyny. Not after this series is done.
In the event that I'm wrong in my judgement, and I'm just pooping on a harmless victim of fate, these books will always be here. Here, waiting for Humpty to simply take recovery into his own hands.
Honestly, if he just read a single one of these books, I'd see him in a hopeful light again. But he won't.
If you're wondering what he'll think about this, I have a pretty good guess:
I promise, everything stated in this series has been said to him multiple times, by multiple people, in every variety of mitigated language. Mostly loud and pleadingly. As a matter of fact, while writing this, I decided to put a couple verbal haymakers together, and fire them at him next time he inevitably did more of his exaggerated Negative Nancy spiel.
I went in as accusatory as possible, brutal, no humor, expected defensiveness, and was ready to dial things back, the moment I got his attention:
I said he collects self-diagnoses for pure vanity's sake, and that they give him endless moral license to wallow in a pity puddle for attention. That he's consciously and deliberately working to never improve, so he can get attention forever. That he's a faker.
He didn't skip a beat. Rattled off some inaccurate OCD trivia to something said earlier in the conversation and moved on.
I said he has some form of Munchhausen disorder, explained it, and repeated that he's actively committed to never getting better, and nearly all his sickness is a bullshit contrivance exhausting people's attention and energy. And we're all fully losing interest in his recovery.
Another instant and effortless non-sequitur, so disconnected from the conversation I can't remember who he addressed it to. But we advanced like I said nothing.
Then after hearing him describe another person supposedly reading his mind, and thinking evil thoughts about him, I said all he does is project his shadow onto random people. Did the whole Carl Jung elevator pitch right then and there, and reminded him, "You know, like that game you love, Persona."
He told me the latest news on Persona 6. And we kept on rolling.
In one ear, out the other. Nothing disturbed him, because he still had everything he wanted in that moment: My attention.
The story of Humpty Dumpty, to me, is about Munchhausen disorder. I know that isn't even close to canon, but I think it's why it has held in our imagination.
Humpty Dumpty was an empty egg, with nothing growing deep inside him. An egg, first of all, knows how fragile it is, and knows it doesn't belong on top of a fucking wall. Yet in the face of an impotent existence, he reckoned his greatest strength was his weakness, and he shattered himself to pieces. Pieces, which spent their last moments lovingly tended to, by the skilled hands of the King and his horsemen.
I wash my hands of this brimstone-scented shell salad. He can smash himself into pigment for all I care. It's always been his choice. I suspended a lot of valuable and accurate judgements for long enough. There are better marks for him to con. Endless wells of sympathy. Marks that don't know a fraction as much as we do about psychology.
But YOU, lovely reader, have merely ONE thing to do to avoid being a devilish HUMPTY DUMPTY (fuckin booooo):
Participate in your own recovery.
Don't drown all your lifeguards. Shit, at the very least, when the lifeguards throw you a floatation device, don't catch it and mischievously hurl it as far away as you can. If you ask someone to spoon-feed you help, don't blow it off the spoon and laugh in their face.
Nobody can pump and swing your limbs around and make you burn fat, you gotta move them yourself. Nobody can integrate your shadow into your conscious self, that's for you to investigate personally. You can't humble others, only yourself; People call humbling others, "humiliating". And nobody can cure your addiction to self-pity till you alone decide you want to.
See you all next month, with another 5 books, an Aesop Rock quote, and more lessons from one of fastest growing character archetypes in our generation: the Humpty Dumpty.
We gon talk about autism! We gon talk about all this suicide shit! Ooow we gon talk about work! Humpty gon come to my house and kill my life! I'm excited! hahahahaha yisssss!
What a way to get murdered. Death by book club.
