Your uncalled-for optimism

This probably sounds like a completely ironic subject, since irony is your means of survival, and oftentimes when you make a statement, even you're not sure if you're being ironic or sincere. Or, when you're being sincere, you make it sound ironic to throw people off. You've generally fooled yourself into thinking you're the most cynical person on the planet, who will say mockingly optimistic phrases for laughs, like "I'm finally going to do something this year!" But your real problem is that you're ridiculously, embarrassingly optimistic, and you have to feign cynicism so that when you're proven wrong about life on an almost daily basis you don't look like a naive asshole. If you're living to the fraudulentest, you should be a super-secret, barf-making romantic who believes everything will turn out for the best and that every endeavor you undertake will gain you fame and success and happiness. And you should have no cause to believe this whatsoever.

Basically, your outlook on life and life events should resemble the following scenario: Let's say you're an American who gets into a car in England. You automatically pull into the right-hand side of the road, because you're sure this is where you should be. A car crashes head-on into you and you get horribly maimed. Once you're out of hospital (forget the article; remember, you're in England), you get back into the car and pull out onto the road and into the right-hand side. Another car crashes head-on into you. After awhile, on the phone and at parties where you don't want to be, you start talking to friends about how you're going out driving later, and you jokingly say things like, "Dude, I'm totally going to get into a goddamn awful car crash today, because that's what always happens to me" when you're really thinking to yourself, "I'm going to be fine, because I'm supposed to drive in that lane, and I'm an excellent driver." And then you go out again and pull into the right-hand side of the road, and a truck hits your car, flies up into the air, flips over, and lands directly on top of your car, causing your head to be asymmetrical because part of your skull has been bashed in. And this happens about five times a day for the rest of your life.

Now, the point of this likely scenario is that experience should teach you nothing. Even if you understand "if A, then B (where B=crap)" in an intellectual sense, you believe your own rules, like, "if A, then lollipop (where lollipop does not equal B (crap))." This is all to say that, despite your being fairly intelligent, you're actually incredibly not smart at all.