I’ve lived my life slightly more popular than the loser crowd and significantly less popular than the popular crowd.
My social status hasn’t changed much since I entered school in second grade.
As a bachelor, I naturally orient upwards in my social aspirations and ignore the suffering. It usually takes a wife, family and community to broaden a man’s concerns.
What do I mean by “loser”? A loser is somebody people avoid. A winner is somebody who attracts people. For instance, when Dennis Prager walks in a room, people notice and try to get close to him.
From first grade to 12th grade, Dennis was always elected his class president. That’s a winner.
A panhandler is a typical loser. Very few people want to engage with some smelly bloke on the street asking for a handout.
I don’t like to write about my triumphs. I prefer to specialize in my humiliations. The down side of this is that people who vibrate the strongest to my tales of woe tend to be losers and they consider me one of them.
No way, dude! I’m a winner who just happens to focus his writing on losing. This distinction is a bit fine, however, for the crowd with IQs under 120.
In 1992 while I was bedridden by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and living with my parents in remote Northern California (95658), I placed a singles ad in the Northern California Jewish Bulletin talking about how lost and lonely I was. It was the featured ad.
It got one response from a woman every bit as screwed up as me. But not nearly as attractive.
She empathized with my ad. She had few friends. She had a difficult personality. Her family was socially awkward.
When I talked to her on the phone, I kept wincing because she’d get upset at things I said. She was always offended. And she wasn’t cute.
I wouldn’t have kept up with her if I wasn’t so lonely.
I placed a new ad in the Jewish Bulletin that read something like this: “Australian-made world traveler convert to Judaism…”
This got responses from my targeted demographic — attractive high-achieving Jewesses. Most of them lost interest when they learned I was bedridden but some of them made the trip up to visit me.
When I was in constant contact with the girls I wanted, I dropped the loser girl. I told her I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. “I was just getting fond of you,” she said in a small voice.
I’ve been blogging since 1997. I learn time and time again that what I put out into the world comes back to me. I love to write about my humiliations but if I am not careful, that can increase them. You have to be precise when writing about feeling like a loser to make sure that your observant reader realizes that you’re on the right side of the social divider.
Since my own experience of chronic illness, I’ve consistently enlarged my soul by dedicating some of my time and money to helping those less fortunate than myself. But I don’t want to let losers into my real life. They’ll suck the life out of you.
I remember one guy in grade school with low social status who wore a t-shirt to school featuring some Peanuts character talking about how he hates jogging. The shirt was a hit.
Then the guy made the mistake of wearing it two or three days in a row, by which time he had a bad odor.
One of the great things about growing older is that people rarely try to humiliate you in person after age 40. Rather than believing that people are born good and society corrupts them, I think most people start out rotten and society makes them better.
I have a friend in his twenties who constantly tries to embarrass me in public by telling people about embarrassing things I used to do. I’ve asked him many times to desist. I remind him that it is forbidden by Torah law to bring up a person’s sins prior to his conversion or penitence, but this reference to Jewish law does no good. Time however will fix the problem. By the time my friend is 40, I doubt he’ll still be doing this.
We all feel like losers much of the time. The world keeps spinning and we all keep moving in and out of four different stages — dependency, feeling small in a big world, mastery and grandiosity (Stephen Marmer). But wherever we are in life and no matter what we’re feeling, we can always work on mastery. Losers don’t work on mastery much and it shows.
One of my nightmares while reporting on the porn industry was that I would be considered one of them. “One of us, one of us,” they cackled, while hauling me off to hell.
I blog about the heartbreak of ostracism and losers relate to that. They think that you can recreate yourself on the internet and change your social status, just like Mark Zuckerberg did with Facebook. They see me as somebody who ran away in 1997 and joined the internet circus, earning an independent living by telling all. No boss. Lots of women and media attention and enough money to pay for psycho-therapy.
