Fr the Start, How to Achieve the Best Long, Healthy, Contented Life
1. Choose Parents with the right genes. Failing this go to step 2
2. Choose the right country and the right historical time period in which to be raised. If you failed to do this go to step 3.
3. Arrange to have a lot of luck in your life, this will enable you to move forward without any merit on your part. Failing here go to step 4.
4. Be sure to choose two supportive happily married parents who have the time to focus on your needs. If you fail here go to step 5
5. Be sure your family moves around in your formative years until you have chosen the best possible neighborhood and school friends. Failing here go to step 6
6. Be sure, during your formative years that you choose not to suffer from chronic stress. The presence of chronic stress hormones in your blood will impede optimum maturation of almost every body system, especially the brain. By the time you are like 18, chances are you will be damaged goods. If you have chronic stress during your formative years go to step 7
7. Be sure your family environment provides you the following psychological tools to help you reduce any developmental damage from Chronic stress:
a. Outlets for frustration.
b. Social support
c. Predictability—When we know a task is going to be difficult in advance we can prepare for it, and mentally the body stress responses will be less.
d. Sense of Control—If you are at the top of the control ladder you have lower levels of stress hormones in your blood. If you are ‘middle management’ level in the control ladder, you have much higher levels of stress hormones in your blood. Of course, you have high demands being placed on you and your job is at stake to carry out orders and succeed with them. At the bottom of the control ladder are those who have little responsibility, low expectations, and no control. They are bored, frustrated and no light at the end of the tunnel, which can lead to depression. Sometimes we just can’t win.
e. The perception of whether things are getting better or worse—Chronic stress will generate less concentration of stress hormones in the blood when we see light at the end of the tunnel. We feel the stress of studying hard, but we also realize we are getting closer to having a successful career so we have less response to the stress. We work on a demanding job but can feel that we are on track to be promoted to a better job position. We try hard at a sport and we can see ourselves getting better and better.
Of course the above 5 psychological forces, which impact on just how the body will respond to a particular stress, are not straightforward. There are always a multitude of factors to keep track of here. For example, if we are simply hell bent and obsessed on getting more control and desperately needing a high degree of predictability for the stresses in our lives, we just make things worse. In this case our chronic body stress responses will be more vigorous, not less.
If you fail to have these tools available then go to step 8.
8. Be cute enough with a pleasant personality so that you can derive support from most anyone who crosses your path. If you fail here try not to notice the huge hole you are now in because you keep failing to achieve the necessary prerequisites to reach the goal here—a long healthy contented life. But continue on by going to step 9,
9. Find the perfect partner to marry so that it will be a long happy stress free marriage. That perfect mate will be out there but this is tricky as this person may live thousands of miles away and you have no name or address to guide you to them. Do not marry someone with a different level of sex energy or prefers different sex acts than yourself. This will generate endless awkward moments and Freudian mental states. The odds are great that you will end up via any marriage search dependent on who is available and like you, is willing to settle for less than the perfect mate. If you fail with this step too, you are falling far behind. Go to step 10 and try to shape up, quit making all these horrible choices.
10. Make sure your spouse adapts to your personal changes over time, or you will need to do all the adapting to their personal changes. Things can often go amiss as time moves on so if you divorce or separate go on to step 11. If it becomes a bitter divorce this is serious damage to your future contentedness so consider ending your life before it goes irreversibly downhill. You are probably not prime grade on the dating meat market anymore, certainly less than you were at a younger age. Young, sexy, and energetic has long left the scene. Just more neuroses. Go to step 11.
11. Married or not, don’t select a career where you are at the bottom of the ladder in terms of competency. That kind of ensures chronic stress as an adult. Go to step 12.
12. If you are good looking enough to be a gold digger, practice a facade of being happy knowing you are nothing but an acquired trophy, an attractive but essentially empty shell. Unfortunately, an empty shell remains an empty shell and only drugs or psychological gimmicks can help you pretend otherwise. Your meaningful life is over. If step 12 does not apply go to step 13.
13. Only societal safety nets can help you now. These nets simply prevent you from free fall and how far the free fall depends on the political climate at any given time. By definition you are now a welfare queen, responsible for your failure from step 1 on down to step 13. Ironically, the biggest welfare queens are the millionaires, then the affluent, and finally the poor. The amount of money spent on the poor compared to the amount of money legally grabbed by the wealthy is rather paltry.
14. You will hear it often in life that “In America you can become anyone you want to be”. It is, after all illegal for the homeless to sleep under bridges as it is for the affluent. Still, life is hardly fair. Diversity does not allow us to be equal. But it does allow for advancement, as that best suited for the environment survives. What percentage of citizens can achieve considerable contentment in life is heavily dependent as to what extent the Golden Rule prevails throughout any society. Those who bring the most happiness to the less fortunate are the ones who reap the most contentedness for themselves. That is the kicker, and the reward for following the Golden Rule. Money past a modest level, power past a modest level, titles past a modest level, popularity past a modest level, and so on do not bring maximum contentment. While there are exceptions and some who achieve high success in these other areas become happy campers, most are not happy campers in life. The Donald Trumps, the Kardesians, star athletes, etc. are not noted for high levels of contentment in their lives. They are invariably upset about something. Contentedness does not occur in anyone when enough is never enough. That is called addiction, never contentment. If someone is compelled to sweep the floor 25 times a day we don’t call it contentment, but a compulsive behavior or addiction. Compulsive behavior is not pleasure.
We need remember that ‘family values’ is not the Golden Rule unless by family one means all of ‘God’s children’. It is during the formative years that parents have special obligations to their own offspring, and for obvious reasons. As adults, every society has the responsibility to ensure that the varied communities which comprise that society are well suited to raise their offspring in a safe, healthy environment in which all children receive good education, good health care, good food to eat, decent job at decent pay opportunities for teenagers and adults. Pro life is not limited to generating babies, but really is ensuring that all babies have a chance to be raised in relatively stress free environments with assistance available for their needs, even when parental care is inadequate for any number of reasons. Then, and only then can that society claim ‘in our society a child can become whatever that child wants to be.’ Well, this is not really true, but at least it could be that ‘in our society every child has the environment in which they can best reach their potentials, whatever those potentials might be’.
