How to handle getting old. Seriously.

First you need to come to terms with the problem: an inevitable, irreversible state of decay. This is the first part of what will happen when you are dead and in your grave. It is a problem without a solution. Just accept that. You can slow things down, and talk yourself into being okay with it, but it does not matter, you are dying already.

Alcohol
If you drink enough you simply will not care about growing old. It just will not matter. The sense of life slowly seeping out of your pores with every passing second will fade away and you will be as unconcerned about aging as when you were young. Alcohol brings you into the moment, allows you to forget past and future and be here, now.

Being an asshole
Just by having enough experience with people and relationships you should have learned how to hurt feelings effectively. You also know that you have nothing to lose. Being able to make others genuinely miserable with the things you say helps to alleviate your sense of helplessness in the face of death by making you feel powerful and superior to them.

Going crazy
Remove all your inhibitions and do pretty much anything you feel like doing. All there is left to experience is death. It is coming soon. If you think seriously enough about your death, then nothing else matters. The approval and sensibilities of those around you are insignificant, the rules and obligations of society are likewise minor considerations.

Being kind, helpful, and using your life-experience to help others
Bullshit. They have no interest in hearing from you and are basically just waiting for you to get buried so they can pick through your belongings like old women at a yard sale. To them you are a useless old husk whose value is in your possessions. Most people need to suffer to learn, so good advice will go unheeded.

Some People Never Mature Past Their Teens

Sometimes people peak in their teens. This is the last point in their life at which they actually had it good, felt free and optimistic. Often these people never actually grow out of being teenagers. They never get any better at life, and at age forty still have the coping skills that they did when they left high school.

Talking to them when they are adults is exactly like talking to them when they were kids. It is impossible to befriend such people. It is impossible to have a meaningful relationship with them.

The only way for some people to grow, is to suffer and to find a way out of that suffering. To experience a bad, bitter marriage, and an ugly divorce, to lose someone close, to see have multiple shifts in life and to emerge from them, to learn how to handle setbacks and despair.

Don’t Care About the Feelings

The only way to deal with, hysterical, over-emotional, mercurial people is to not care too much about what they think or are feeling at any given point. Take them too seriously and you find that your emotions run riot right along with theirs.

You can't take their feelings seriously until they stick for a period of time, then you acknowledge them. They will still probably pass, but you have to deal with them while they are around.

These up-down-up-down people take what they feel very seriously, so you can’t ever openly dismiss them. This does not mean that you don’t care about them, their lives, or that you are not interested. You just don't care about what they feel.

The things that reveal the real you

Your fetishes, your sexuality, reveal who you are. The problem is that it's not affected, it is really you, it's what you do for pleasure, what you truly want to do. It shows a side of yourself that could easily be disgusting to other people. It might gross people out. It's like the skid-marks on your underwear or blowing your nose or merely appearing naked. It makes you vulnerable to scorn. This is why viewing “adult material”, for most, is private, especially if they like minorities or homosexuality or something that nobody they know finds appealing. It's secret and personal. This gives the people who make adult entertainment, who make the things that are shameful powerful in society, power. You make erotica with submissive men, or fat women, or grannies, you become powerful.

Anything that can destroy a reputation or ruin a relationship is powerful because it thrives only as the result of a compulsion, something that goes beyond options and what people want to do. If you can tap into the thing that people need to consume and you can control your product, meaning who has it, then you will make money. It becomes like crack or heroin.

Cater to the low, dark side, the side that wants revenge or is fascinated by stories of serial-killing and rape and perversion. You make any story into a soap opera with clichéd twists and contrived circumstances that are simple enough for anybody to understand and yet too complicated for the people on film to figure out and solve until the requisite number of episodes.

Everybody has a dark, stupid side, the part of themselves that longs for the lurid. Usually, it's the same side. Intelligent women whose identity is in their ability to think, they long for the release of ridiculous romance. Women who claim to respect themselves and embody feminist or wholesome family values, they long to do away with discretion and indulge themselves in the lifestyle of the "low woman," the indiscriminate slut. People and the rules they crave to violate offer a market to the intelligent entrepreneur. Everybody longs for their own forbidden fruit, longs to jump the fence eat from the greener pasture, you just have to come up with a way to satisfy it and sell it to them without anybody finding out.

People and their judgments

In the recent months I have been around kids for more consecutive hours than at any other time in my life, including my childhood. I have come to realize that there were probably many times when I was a kid that the adults around me were fed up and disgusted, but kept it to themselves because I was a kid.

The only reason you feel at ease around people at all is because you don’t really stop to think about how you might come across to them. You have grown out of your self-consciousness if indeed you ever had any. Your childhood was before you were aware of the concept, were aware even of who you were and the fact that there was indeed a right way for you to act and a wrong way.

People judge. All people do. They use their opinions of you to escape from the circumstances of their lives. They assess you in order to find a flaw so that they can feel that they are superior to you, or at least not your inferior. Only the man in trouble does not judge, becoming so swallowed up in his circumstances that he does not care about anything beyond himself.

The criteria varies based on how much of life you have seen. The "amount" of life is not measured in quantity of years but breadth of experience, how much of the range of possible human events have you seen? You grow up in a small-town all your references are limited to that small town. You cannot conceive of life on the outside, but you don’t know it, you don’t know how limited your imagination is.

The Nature of Success

Successful people, or people who think they are successful, all believe that life is a meritocracy because this makes them superior to all of the average people.

Average people want to believe in this principle when they are faced with those who are less-than average, but any such ranking system would indicate that they are inferior to the successful. They can’t admit that so they just don’t think about any of it.

Life is not a meritocracy. It’s not a crap shoot either. Nothing is guaranteed. Lazy people get successful, hard-working people fail and wind up smoking crack in a corner behind the dumpster. Kind people suffer and die and assholes prosper, good guys get shot and bad guys get away with it. Everybody likes to pat themselves on the back and forget the advantages they had and pretend that they got success because they are just too cool to fail.

Everybody alive is more successful than the dead people. That’s how “success” really works. You have no control of anything. People who have money, who have fulfilling and profitable careers, just have not meant the right drunk driver, rapist with AIDS, workplace shooter, or period of suicidal depression due to a malfunctioning brain. If you think any of that is because you are so awesome, remember that the cancer, or one of the aforementioned things is out there, waiting for you. You won’t always be cool.   

The Life Skill of Maturity

The word "immaturity" can, in certain contexts, conjure up a picture of childlike innocence. Toilet humor, for instance, is "immature", but it brings back memories of youthful innocence and the time when bodily functions were still novel. It can make you laugh because it's juvenile and nostalgic.

There is another kind of immaturity that is not at all pleasant. It is that of people who have not learned how to handle life. This is the teenage, pubescent kind.

These are people who in their thirties and forties still have tantrums, still have issues dealing reasonably with others, and controlling their emotions.

Immature people are a burden to themselves and to the people who get involved in relationships with them. Never learning how to escape your adolescence and get into adulthood is a kind of retardation, a kind of defect.
If you are one of these people, you probably won’t know what I am talking about. You probably would not read this far down the page either.