My Hearty Friend

Everyone is an untrustworthy bastard. The most important emotional skill I grokked from being with my ex is living under the assumptions that:

1) Everybody will eventually fuck you over. People like him are cynical, but "cynical" in this instance only means more attuned to the truth. And,

2) A primary determinant of a person's character is how he responds to this reality.

Do it right, and you can be a suprisingly (if not profoundly) happy and optimistic person. The key is not to become too attached to any person or any set of assumptions about the trustworthiness of people collectively. When your baseline assumption is that people are going to treat you like crap, the world frequently is a much better place than you "expect," and you're not as suseptible to the onset of suicidal fits of rage and despair when the world is falling apart all around you. It's just that nobody happens to be putting on the show of niceness at that moment. It's only the base case showing through, nothing to be alarmed about.

A demystified view of the human being as automaton — or, more optimistically, as well engineered hardware-software system &mdash makes it much less disappointing when people behave as if only responding to sufficiently strong stimuli: that is precisely what they're doing. Enough horniness, enough anger, enough fear, enough lust will make anyone do anything. I wouldn't be too out of sorts if my computer crashed when I gave it twice as much work to do as its hardware can handle. Likewise, I've come to expect that other human beings, even and especially the ones of whom I have expectations, will substantially and, on the whole, frequently disappoint me; I chalk it up to the way the machine works.

Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.