The Secret's Secret

Many of you might have heard all about the rage of the new book and coming movie “The Secret.” The philosophy behind The Secret is that you can create the life you want for yourself. You must simply see success in your mind in order to achieve it in the real world. This is a powerful exercise that can be remarkably successful. There is one major problem to such a philosophy. You must be convinced that the philosophy will work in order for it to work! If I am convinced I am an intellectual and envision myself being one, then there is a better chance I would become one. I cannot simply pop the idea into my head and hope for the best. I truly have to be 100% convinced that I am an intellectual to better my chances at being one.

You can’t take a placebo, knowing it’s a placebo, and have the placebo effect work – that is just silly. Same thing goes with The Secret’s philosophy. You must blindly accept that The Secret will work in order for it to work. Just as if you were to assume a placebo is not really a placebo for it to work. The real secret in “The Secret” is the book itself. The book yields authority to the general public. Similar to a scientist giving you a pill – the scientist has authority with his medical knowledge and sleek lab coat. The general public is fooled to blindly believe that the book is an omniscient one. This is what makes “The Secret” so powerful – it convinces people to believe in its philosophy because it’s a book!

I am going to come up wtih my own bullshit self-help book too:

The Idiots of YouTube

Whenever I watch a YouTube video I like to quickly scan the first page of comments to see what other people have to say. Lately, ever time I take a quick glance at the comment thread I am cluttered by ridiculous chain letters.

Here is an example:

wwygmaya (1 day ago)
“PLEASE DON'T READ THIS you will die in seven days if you don't post this comment on 10 videos in the next hour. if you do, tomorrow will be the best day of your life.”

With YouTube’s growing popularity, its stupid people population has also grown. There are absolutely no motives for wwygmaya to post this, other than the fact that he or she believes it! The level of superstition people have really scares me. They are probably just falling for the Pascal’s Wager Paradox, which goes like this:

Just substitute the word ‘God’ with ‘The Chain Letter’
· You believe in God.
o If God exists, you go to heaven: your gain is infinite.
o If God does not exist, your loss is nothing!
· You do not believe in God.
o If God exists, you go to hell: your loss is infinite.
o If God does not exist, your gain nothing & lose nothing.

The biggest flaw with this wager is that it has to assume that believing the chain letter will grant you the rewards it promises. It is quite obvious that the chain letter should not be believed and I must conclude that the people who do believe them are plain idiots. Luckly, I know how to end this cycle of idiocy. I will submit my very own chain letter and believing in it will only negate all the other chain letters.

Here is goes:
PLEASE DON’T READ THIS YOU’LL REGRET IT! Your family will die in a car crash if you believe any other chain letter except for this one and you must post this in 10 other videos.

Atheism, the cool kids are doing it.

I am disappointed at today’s youth; they are failing to realize that being an atheist is the cool thing to do!

Most teenagers go through a rebellion period and conform to minority sub-cultures. Some of these rebellious sub-cultures include Emos, skaters, or Goths. I think that Goths have recently gained majority status and there exists sub-sub-cultures within the system of Goths. The taxonomy of such a system might be something like “Wrist slitters,” “Wannabe wrist slitters,” “Learning to slit wrist, but too afraid to try,” and the ever famous “Stopped slitting wrist because they ran out of room.”

I think it is pretty common knowledge that atheists are a minority in America. This is a perfect opportunity for young rebellious go-getters to capitalize on this un-touched fad. Becoming an “Athei” would be a lot cooler than, lets say, becoming an Emo. If you are an Athei, you are rebelling against the mainstream yet still maintaining an intellectual persona. There still is a problem with becoming an Athei, they lack all the neat perks that other sub-cultures have. Getting around this problem won’t be easy, but I’ll give it a try:

Emo Vs Athei

Cool haircut that covers your emotion filled face – instead we have – “The just-got-out-of-bed haircut” because we stayed up all night reading scientific journals.

Skinny jeans – instead we have – Normal fit jeans

Skinny button up shirts – instead we have – Sweatshirts with witty anti-god slogans

Fall out boy as a role model – instead we have – Richard Dawkins

Being able to express teenager angst – instead we have – Apathy

Sappy Poetry – instead we have – The Origin of Species

Eye Liner – instead we have –Trendy reading glasses


With the new Athei sub-culture, being an Emo just doesn’t look appealing anymore:


Nuff said.

Do you hate speeches?

Have you ever been nervous before a speech? I am assuming you have, but can you pinpoint exactly why you felt that way? There are as many answers to this question as there are people who get nervous before a speech. Some people, like me, might be well prepared and are confident about not screwing up, but still manage to be nervous before a speech! I have realized that my irrational fear is on a completely different logical level than most reasons for being nervous. I am actually nervous about being nervous!

My level of anxiety is a subset of a certain level of nervousness, however, this subset is that same higher level of nervousness, thus going in an endless loop. To better understand the recursive nature of my anxiety, consider a movie within a movie. The original movie would be on a higher logical level as the movie within the movie. Basically, I could be nervous about being nervous about being nervous about being nervous about being nervous…

Maybe we have a whole set of other emotions that are on lower levels of the logical hierarchy. Realizing these undiscovered emotions might help you reason them out and eventually overcome them. I think that really irrational phobias like Pogonophobia (fear of beards) might stem lower level emotions. This is why it is harder for a person to think rationally to overcome their phobia.

The Apple Guy

I was once asked by a 9 year-old I baby-sit “Why do we celebretize people?”

I couldn’t really give him a real social-economic answer because the attention span of a 9 year-old is equivalent to the average length of a TV commercial. Instead I gave him an answer that was along the lines of “People who feel that their lives are too boring like to celebritize others.”

I was very impressed by how he asked his question. He did not ask me “why are there celebrities?”

The question tells me that he already knew that celebrities are ordinary people and there is a certain thing that society does to transform these individuals into celebrities.

I think that businesses realized there was a demand for a celebrity image and then brainwashed society to further demand celebrities (for certain monetary reasons). I think a more interesting question would be “What makes a celebrity?”

A long time ago, without technology, those who were written about in scriptures were sort of celebrities. They were made up of army generals, religious leaders, inventors, leading scientists, government officials, etc. Now a day all it takes to be a celebrity is the right public exposure. Celebrities now range from Britney Spears to William hung to Jared from Subway.

Celebrities are very profitable for businesses in many different ways. The problem is, the bigger the celebrity the more costly they are to acquire for sponsorships and/or endorsements. To get around this problem, businesses should take non-celebrities and create them into celebrities themselves. This way, businesses have a celebrity to profit from and only at the cost of what it takes to turn that person into a celebrity. For example, Apple should take an average guy and have him in every commercial, banner, billboard, etc. This guy will be known as the “Apple Guy,” he will have a catch phrase and a hip button up shirt he always wears. Not only will they have a celebrity, people will be talking about the Apple Guy and thus perpetuating free additional advertisement.

I need to lose a few pounds

For some reason, everyone says that they can “lose a few pounds,” no matter how fat or skinny they are. They do not even specify how much they want to lose. The easy part about saying “I need to lose a few pounds,” is that it’s very ambiguous. You may want to lose those pounds because of health reasons, physical appearance, or you just aren’t happy with how your body exists in accord to Newtonian law.

Whatever your reason may be you probably should be doing more than just losing a few pounds to reach that goal. If you need to be healthier, you may lose a few pounds and still be as unhealthy as you were to begin with. If you are overweight and lose a few pounds to look better, you’re probably still going to be as unattractive as when you started.

Take a look at this person. Losing a few pounds is exactly what she needed to do to reach her goal:



She literally needed to reduce the amount of space her body takes up so she could give higher quality hugs; a perfectly legitimate reason to lose a few pounds.

Say cheese!

Are you the kind of person who’s self-conscious when getting their picture taken? Or are you the type of person who’s annoyed by the person who’s self-conscious when getting their picture taken? I have to admit that I am the second type of person. Other than finding it annoying, I find it quite amusing too.

The really self-conscious types would yell at you for trying to include them in a group photo, those are the annoying ones. The funny ones are the moderately self-conscious. They will allow you to take a picture of them, but once the camera is pointed at them, they morph into some sort of amateur model. They quickly pucker their lips, give you a seductive smile and position their face to make you get their ‘good side’. Imagine how much practice they must of done in order to reconstruct the exact facial expression that would yield the most favorable photographic outcome.

I would say that the average person is moderately self-conscious when it comes to having their picture taken. The average person will probably only consider 1/25 of their photos to be presentable. This is an unfortunate ratio when it comes to deciding their main profile picture in whatever social networking website they use. Lets say you find a suitable profile picture of yourself with your best friend. The probability of your best friend being suitable in the picture is only 1/25! So do your fellow photo buddies a favor and crop them out of the photo.