Words of Unwisedom
- Jim G
- Sep 16, 2024
- 16 min read
Updated: Apr 7
The inspiration for this collection of philisophiocal demotivators came from wanting money for writing down some of the stupid things I think about without having to create a complex plot, interesting characters with back stories or compelling, dramatic scenes. If I already had a talk show or sitcom or had appeared on some awful reality show I could have gotten away with writing any old shit anyway and sold loads of them, but I haven’t. So what follows is my phisophical take on anything and everything, in no particular order, which is just how they arrived for me. Please also note, just in case it’s not already clear, this is not an inspirational self-help book. This is what you read as an antidote to those, and usually whilst on the toilet.
Life is a cake you will never finish, never eat. You'll just be making it, year after year, until one day, as it nears completion, you’ll realise the cake is dry, old, crumbling, decaying and doesn’t look anything like the recipe you now realise you were never following. And then you’ll die. And your cake will get thrown in the bin by your kids because they need the space to make their own never to be eaten cake.
Dreams are your minds way of getting away from you, because your mind really doesn’t much care for the way you waste its time all day on petty worries and terrible ideas. Nightmares on the other hand are its way of paying your back for particularly bad days of inane thoughts, worries and ideas.
It takes a lifetime of trying to do what’s right to realise there is no right and you were wrong all along. It’s not possible to realise this though until your final moments, so this one won’t help you. Don’t dwell on this though or you’ll have nightmares later.
Happiness is a sub-conscious feeling. It can be connected to many things; people, places, activities, but they are interchangeable external influences that your mind assigns as the reason for the feeling of happiness in order to justify it and understand why you feel the way you feel. It is at that moment that you start feeling uncertain about why this is so and how long it will last and then the feeling is gone. Which is ironic really.
Unhappiness is a sub-conscious feeling. It’s very much like happiness only better in that when it’s gone its replacement is far more enjoyable. Albeit Briefly because you immediately start wondering why.
Children spend their time in a quest for more freedom and autonomy. When they eventually get it they quickly realise freedom is responsibility and autonomy is loneliness.
Adults spend their time chasing freedom and autonomy from their responsibilities and loneliness.
Humans as a species spend their time chasing freedom and autonomy from their own lives. Just when they eventually think they've got it, they are cremated or buried.
Pets are cute. They’re also your own personal little zoo in which you can falsely convince yourself that you’re actually important and somewhere near the top of the food chain of life. You’re not. You probably wouldn’t survive if you got stuck in your own back garden for the night let alone lost in a rainforest during a monsoon. Your pets meanwhile would happily move in next door where the old lady feeds them biscuits.
Gods are like cars. There are loads to choose from and they come with plenty of optional extras. They also cocoon you into a false sense of security or superiority and cause thousands of injuries and deaths every year.
To do things religiously means to do them regularly and without fail, to be relied on that it will be done. Like brushing your teeth before bed, taking a shower in the morning, watering the plants, turning lights off when leaving a room or indeed invading other countries and chopping people’s heads off on camera.
Judging people by your own standards is often considered rude and arrogant. You should try to judge people by their own standards. This isn’t easy though because you have to imagine what it is like to be them and that’s not advisable because other people are just rubbish.
Always remember that when you do judge someone else, they could well be judging you too. So make sure you judge them as harshly and critically as you can, that way, whilst you may never share the results, you can be confident that you probably won.
Sport is a competitive physically challenging activity that challenges the individual and team mentality and physical capabilities of those taking part. Watching sport on the other hand is a solo and sedentary activity that usually only challenges those around you. Wearing a sports kit whilst watching sport with other sports kit wearing people and then getting emotionally agitated as a group by it is probably why aliens haven’t bothered communicating with us yet.
The phrase “A man’s home is his castle” refers to the idea that the one place in which you can be safe and truly free to do as you please is your own home. Of course most castles were built during the Middle-Ages and 90% of them now lay in ruins across much of the world. This of course makes sense for those of you that has seen what happens if a man is left home alone for more than a week.
An argument is a disagreement between two people that has escalated into a threatening situation. A scrap is a disagreement between two people that has escalated beyond the argument into violence. A fight is a violent disagreement that has escalated to include or affect a small group of people in a localised area. A battle is a violent disagreement that has escalated to include a number of people on two or more opposing sides. A war is a fantastic opportunity to generate revenue for governments, corporations and arms dealers whilst also subjugating the general population. It’s definitely where the money is at. This is why when possible, countries skip the first stages and go all in.
War, huh, what is it good for? The question posed by Edwin Star in his most famous song, War! He got the basics right but didn’t really examine it in enough detail. The answer of course is in the last paragraph. Black Sabbath figured it out in their gloriously dark and timeless song, War Pigs.
Poetry is charmingly written short stories in which the author couldn’t be bothered to go into too much background detail but did spend several days struggling to make something rhyme with the word Orangery before giving up and using garden room instead.
The rhyming words thereafter would probably be yard and broom.
For hundreds of years cooking was the English word used to describe the act of preparing, combining and heating fish, meat and vegetables for the purpose of eating them. Since social media, cooking is the English word used by people on online to convince other people that they’ve got a cool life and are a good person and that you should want to know them.
Baking is cooking in an oven. It is not, contrary to modern popular belief, proof that your kids love you more than mine love me or indeed that you are in the process of transcending human life as we know it. It’s just a cake. To be honest, the oven deserves more praise than you do.
Advertising and Marketing is the process of convincing people they need something that they don’t need more than someone else’s similar version of the same thing that they don’t need. It is a process because shortly after that, you have to convince the same person that the thing they now have that they don’t need isn’t the thing they needed, because they actually need the new upgraded version of the thing they don’t need, so they don’t go off and buy the similar upgraded version of the thing they don’t need from someone else.
Apple iPhone (aka iPhone 1, 2G or Original - How original...) through infinity
Faith and facts are mutually exclusive. Never try to combine them. The more of one you have the less of the other you think you need.
The news is the process of convincing people that they need to think something that they don’t currently think more than someone else is convincing them to think something that they don’t currently think about something that they probably don’t need to think about anyway. It’s like advertising only you don’t end up with a once-used Breville Sandwich Maker gathering dust on top of the kitchen cupboard. You do however fall out with all of your family and friends and spend most days alone worrying about immigrants, terrorism, the environment and whether you might have just contracted the latest winter killer flu because you sneezed four times not three this morning.
You only live once is not intended as an invitation for complete and utter stupidity. If you’re thinking about going to your first ever live concert with your best friend at Maddison Square Gardens, fair enough, if you’re thinking about sky diving out of an aircraft that’s held together by duct tape and string over a mountain range in Central America and being piloted by Carlos, who is nervously looking around and impatiently telling you to hurry the fuck up and who had earlier, asked you to help him load 200 small brown packages into the back…you may well soon be adding the letter d to the word live.
Stuff. When is it enough? It’s never enough is stuff.
That’s poetry for you. I told you. It poses unanswerable questions or seemingly meaningless wafflings. Means you have to think about it, try and unscramble it. And once you do that you risk pissing off your mind which means you’ll have a nightmare later about your stuff coming to life and deciding it doesn’t have enough owners and it starts acquiring more and more of them until you suffocate under a massive pile of owners that your stuff kept in a room it didn’t have a use for in the first place.
Whistle or Hum? The answer is simple. No.
The internet is a quite remarkable thing. Sadly, it’s a bit like Earth in that the moment people got on it, the whole thing filled up with shit, anger and filth and now nobody knows whether it’ll survive much longer without a mass extinction event.
Customer product reviews. There’s now websites dedicated to analysing and reporting on how genuine customer reviews are on other websites. There are also websites that review the websites that analyse reviews. Basically it’s impossible to tell what’s going on. I now only buy things that got 2 out of 5 or lower as I know that I can at least trust that the reviews are genuine and honest. And it works, I totally agree that my Breville sandwich maker isn’t the best design and is a nightmare to clean but it did make a decent toastie as I recall. The one time I used it.
Working is like eating healthy food. You’d rather not but it’s actually good for you and you’ll probably get sick and die if you don’t do it. The best approach is make sure you do things in moderation. That’s why when working on this book I’ve kept it short, because I know when to sto…
The prevalence of takeaway food is effectively providing us with a remote kitchen capability and means we can now advertise a house or apartment as a three bed rather than a two bed. That’s a 20% mark-up right there. An added bonus for potential buyers is that one of the bedrooms benefits from its own en suite sink. And oven. And has loads of wardrobe space, for very small clothes that don’t need hangers. And a fridge.
Sun cream was invented by someone that didn’t have children. Applying sun cream to a child is the equivalent of trying to shave a cornered hyena. Or pack of hyenas if you made the same error I did I didn't stop at one. If you do decide to have children, move somewhere cold and cloudy that doesn’t need sun cream. Or take them on holiday to Africa, where they have actual hyenas.
Or just don’t have kids.
I mean it. Don’t do it, you’ll regret it for the rest of your now entirely shared parody of a life.
Don’t skim straight past that one about kids. Think about it. Seriously…I do, every day, every single day. Well, between 8:30pm and bedtime (10:30pm) when I have a moment to my fucking self to actually think anything…too late for me though, I made my mistakes. Doesn’t have to be your own history and experience you learn from, learn from others…seriously, learn…don't do it, oh well. Moving on.
Where were we? Ok, always brush your teeth when you’re already doing something boring. There are so many things in life that can be considered boring. A long car journey, conference calls and meetings, queuing at the post office, airport delays, every fancy dress party ever held, to name just a few. Which makes it all the more strange that brushing your teeth is one of the most tedious tasks out there. It’s four minutes of the day if you do it twice yet at that moment you realise it’s time to do it your mood takes a kidney punch like you’ve just found out your flight to Barbados is being diverted to Belgium and your luggage has just arrived in Turkey.
Teeth scraping dental check-up or the air puff in the eye test. Both employ people that probably have 13th century ancestors that tortured peasants for a living. If you are a dentist or work in an eye clinic, you are basically Ted Bundy without the imagination or charm.
When going out with your friends you may have a drink, something to eat, a chat, perhaps watch some form of live performance or sport. Then, when it’s time you will head home. The frequent difference between men and women in this regard tends to be the following (Female vs Male):
Girls Night Out | Boys Night Out |
Drink until merry and fancy a dance. Then stop drinking and dance. | Drink until blind and look like you are dancing when standing still. Have another drink, next to a dancefloor. |
Eat something agreeable to all during the early evening in a nice friendly environment. | Eat Kebab outside a taxi rank at 11pm and then order a Chinese takeaway at 2am. Drop it. Pick it up, east noodles out of your hand, drop it again. |
Chat about family, work, life. Reflect on those conversations for some time. When you get home, discuss those chats at length with your partner, nudge them awake if they don’t respond to be sure they didn’t miss out on what you were saying. Repeat nudging until you are done. | Chat about the football match you’re already watching and the barmaid. Forget immediately. When you get home respond with ‘He’s fine’ and ‘Nothing much’ to every single question asked of you. Nod off…stay that way for 10 hours. |
Watch a band at a gig or an art performance perhaps. Note down the ones you like for future reference. | Watch a football match on a screen in a pub whilst eating peanuts and drinking beer. Look at unrelated football scores on your phone a lot. |
Head home at the end of the evening, brush teeth, go to bed. | Wake up at home surrounded by Chinese food with no recollection of how you got there and a worryingly numb face. You probably don’t even own a toothbrush. |
Disclaimer – I’m just saying stuff. Doesn’t mean it’s true. If I offended you, that’s on you, you effectively just self-offended yourself through your own inability to understand context. Don’t blame me.
Monogamy is like mahogany in that it’s quite hard and nobody really likes it except old people.
Old people are terrified of change. They’ll literally stick with anything to avoid it. Unless their favourite newspaper tells them to change, then they’ll do it, regardless of any actual consequences, because, well, consequences are future based…and that’s not a long term problem for them is it
Relationships are like cars. There are two types. Ones that work and ones that don’t work. In order to keep a relationship working it requires regular service and maintenance, much like a car needs regular service and maintenance to stop it breaking down. When a car starts breaking down and needing frequent visits to the garage, you know it is time, no matter how attached to it you’ve become, to start looking for a new one. Relationships are like cars.
Love is complicated. Love is a feeling that you can’t really explain. This is why poets write poetry about love. It doesn’t require any background detail or facts or indeed much effort. If I try to explain it I’ll end up having nightmares about it. So I’ll move on.
Hate is brilliant. It’s sort of like love only far less wishy-washy as you can pinpoint all of the reasons for it quite easily, right down to the tiniest detail. Like chewing noisily, whistling and humming or just the way someone breaths. Or even just the fact they still are. It’s often at its most potent when it has just recently replaced love. Poets don’t often write about hate because it requires actual relatable details and facts and a fair amount of effort. Although it is possible.
Roses are red
Violence is red
Blood is red
I wish you were dead
You left me for your personal trainer
Please come back
Oh God what’s the point of it all
Shit.
Modern life doesn’t exist. It’s relative to the time in which one considers it. Socrates will have considered modern life to be the time in which he lived, as would Plato and indeed Roald Dhal and Hitler. One thing that does exist though is the fact that modern life is nowhere near as good as it never was and tomorrows version will still suck. Modern life is rubbish. It was then and it is now.
Nostalgia can be quite calming and therapeutic. It is the term given to looking back in history and imagining things were somehow better. This is probably because you’ve reached a point in life where you think everything’s a bit shit. It’s fair to say that it’s true, because assuming you are the one being nostalgic, you’re not dead yet and you can’t be adversely affected in the past, only the present and future can do that. You could however be adversely affected by the past and die of cancer or syphilis so if you’re nostalgically looking back on a time when you could smoke in pubs and bars and have copious amounts of free-love sex then whilst nostalgia paints a romantically charming picture, remember that things related to your particular past may well be killing you.
People often look to the future with hope. Hope for change, improvement, something better. The past was once the future, for the people alive before it. Which tells you all you need to know. The future rarely pans out in the way positive inspirational speakers suggest it will. Hard work, passion, dedication and determination are no guarantees of anything resembling success in life. That said, at least you’ve got rose tinted nostalgia to look forward to once it’s all gone to shit.
Mistakes are life’s greatest lessons and the ones you can learn the most from. If you believe that you’ve never made a mistake then you are mistaken and also, you’re probably irreparably stupid.
When you aspire for perfection you are left disappointed. That is a certainty. Perfection is out of reach. You are better off aspiring for mediocrity or perhaps somewhere just short of it. Maybe aim for something between needs improvement and tolerable in short doses. And yes this particular one is specifically for you. Everyone else can move on. You’re all doing great.
Always have a friend that’s a bit shit. They help you feel better about yourself when you are having a bad day and they also make you look good when you are out and about. It’s amazing how popular you can be when the alternative is a dim-witted flabby skin sack of tedium with a clammy complexion, ill-fitting clothes and a tendency to talk about their extreme political views that they stole from looking at gobshites on social media and the headlines of a just about any newspaper.
If you’re now thinking to yourself that you don’t have a friend like that, don’t worry, you can still feel good about yourself, because that means you are a friend like that. That’s something.
If that made you feel better. Good for you. You are that friend. Bless you.
If you own a garden shed it will, without doubt, be smaller than you want it to be and larger than you need it to be. Nobody needs four pairs of shears, three rakes, a spare front door and a roof rack for a car they sold six years ago.
Having things means choosing physical items of property you would like to own and keeping them for a while until you no longer need them. Hoarding things is the term given to collecting any physical item of property regardless of whether or not you need it to own it and then keeping them forever. If you can’t get into your garden shed you are the latter. But then that’s probably not an issue, because you have loads of old garden sheds, you’ve been hoarding them for years.
Ornaments are things that serve no purpose other than to be decorative. Decorative things are aesthetically pleasing to their owner. If you walk into a house filled with people, you can usually tell who owns the property by looking at the people’s faces and finding the one who isn’t looking at an eighteen inch tall pair of blue and pink porcelain dolphins on the mantlepiece with an expression that translates in any known language, dialect and culture to “What the actual fuck is that?”
A shelf is a great place to keep things you need regular access to but don’t want to step on in the middle of the night when you need the toilet. If you haven’t touched the things on the shelf for over a week then those things are in fact ornaments and it’s extremely likely that the most valuable thing on your shelf is the brackets holding it up.
Crime doesn’t pay, so they say. Complete nonsense. Crime pays. Getting caught is the problem. Subtle, but important difference.
Justice comes in two forms. You have your own variable and subjective sense of it and then you have societies fixed, written version of it. Regardless of which you choose to focus on, not saying thank you when someone holds the door open for you means you are a complete bell-end. Society thinks so and so do the billions of little individual sense of justices all padding around the world hoping you have a really shitty day.
The regular, grid like lines painted in car parks are intended to help you park your car neatly and easily to aid both yourself and others in a large shared space in which vehicles are required. If you have a line quite close by, on both sides of your car once you’ve finished, good job, you have parked your car perfectly. If there are two lines, one under your front wheels and the other under your rear wheels, you’ve gone in sideways. If both lines are quite a distance away, you’ve parked across a dividing line. Under no circumstances should you ever leave your car if there aren’t two lines neatly running alongside your car. You have NOT finished parking, even if you get out and walk off, you have NOT FINISHED PARKING.
If you learn one thing from reading this book, please let me know what it was because I’ve got nothing.
The glass is half full or half empty. This determines what point of view you tend to take in terms of positive or negative personality. Whilst that is arguable, what isn’t arguable is that it is in fact both, so we’re all wrong. I knew we would be. We’re always wrong. Everything's wrong...
#64*
Deciding to fix something yourself by studying how things work and perhaps watching someone else do it on You Tube is admirable. It shows a willingness to try something new, to test oneself and ones skills. None of my bikes work, the car hasn’t started in three years and every door in my house get wedged against the floor long before they fully open or close.
Skilled professionals are expensive. The alternative though is not the self-satisfied smug grin of a DIY handy man admiring his own achievements, as that is a social media myth, the alternative is walking home from the shops carrying six grocery bags, and going to the toilet with the door always half open. Or closed. Depends on your personality and point of view.
Listening to other people playing games or watching sports is immensely frustrating. They chose a pastime and then spend almost all of it sounding like they hate their life, their fellow players and the
That moment you realise the positive reviews online were probably all written by the author…
The End
There. I think we’re done. We must be, we reached 67. Not 50 or 100 or some other neatly rounded number requiring fillers and a lack of effort. No, we have 67 demotivating quotes. Which is exactly the number there is. I got them all and you are very welcome.
If this were available in print it would have been great as a cloakroom/downstairs toilet pocket book for people that forgot to take their phone with them when they went to take a dump. It’s not available in print, that costs too much and nobody wanted to print it. But feel free to print it off at home and leave copies in every cloakroom, toilet, bathroom, washroom, and outhouse you visit.
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