Contrast: It Makes Your Life Worth Living

“Now we will destroy your leader, or at least make him keep hitting himself, unless you let us live in peace.” – Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends

What do you use to contrast different Scandinavian cultures?  A Sven diagram.

When I was a kid, the Wilder Family had a subscription to Reader’s Digest®.  Reader’s Digest™ started out in 1922 when a bored wounded World War I veteran started re-writing and condensing articles he read and combining them because there was no Internet.  It must have worked, because 40 years later Reader’s Digest© had a circulation of 23 million when the bored vet finally retired.

Regardless, the Internet was still didn’t have pictures of dancing cats when I grew up.  Not that it mattered – the thing that most closely resembled a computer within 100 miles when I grew up was the one that was used by Adam and Eve – an Apple®.  Their computer had a downside – one byte and everything crashed.

So, Reader’s Digest™ was something I read as a kid.

Reader’s Digest© version of Titanic:  “The boat sinks.”

It will probably not be surprising to any regular readers here, but the first things I read every month in Reader’s Digest® were the jokes and the humorous stories.  One, in particular, has always stayed with me, and I’ve quoted it before here.

It goes something like this:

One day a mother looked out in to her backyard and saw that her eight year old son, Timmy, was holding an empty can on his five year old sister’s head.  He was hitting the can with a rock.

“Timmy, what are you doing!”

The little girl replied, “It’s okay, Mom!  He’s almost done.”

There are multiple ways to create a humorous story, and this one (to me) is a classic story because it wraps at least three different methods of humor (familiarity, cuteness, and absurdity) up so very well.  But, in the best humor, there’s always a grain of truth.  And that may be why this simple story has stayed with me for decades.

Also Scott Adams?  “There’s nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.”

As I exercised this week, I was listening to Coffee with Scott Adams (of Dilbert© fame).  I’ve listened to his podcast and once or twice he’s featured a theme I just published.  No, I don’t think he’s reading here, but if he really is thinking along the same lines as me, he should probably consider professional help.

There was one phrase that hit me this week:  memories are built from contrast.

That stopped me in my tracks, and immediately made me think about the old Reader’s Digest® story.

Contrast.  That’s the key.  Like beer, Contrast is both the cause of and solution to all of our problems.

Scott Adams’ point was that when you have a long series of crappy days, the good one stands out.  If you spent all day in abject misery having to rub oil on Joe Biden’s hairy back moles, and had five minutes in a hot tub eating ice cream while angels tickled your feet?  Those five minutes would be wonderful, assuming you got to wash all the Biden back oil off of your hands first.  The contrast of those five minutes with the rest of the day would make them a wonderful memory.

Joe Biden would love to have memories. 

Contrast is also the father of Envy, which I seem to recall is a bad thing.  I recall that at one company I worked at, the CEO’s pay was openly mocked (in public, to other employees) by a person that I knew was making six figures – he thought it was shameful that the CEO made so much (high six figures) while he made so little (low six figures).  I knew the CEO.  The CEO wasn’t a rocket surgeon or even a brain scientist, but yet the CEO was making big money.

So?  The guy who was complaining had a pretty good job, and a pretty good life.  But he didn’t make as much money as the CEO.  That Contrast, that Envy, worked against him.  It made him unhappy for no real reason.

Part of the magic of Contrast is how you focus on it.  Had the employee in the example above focused on how well he had it, perhaps he’d think like me:  I want the CEO to make gobs of money, so when they look at my pay they think, “wow, he created so much value, and he makes so little money.”  In that way, Contrast can work for you.  Contrast is your friend, but only if you let it be.

But I hear the CEOs of pretzel companies are the most twisted.

Life would not be possible without Contrast.  Every single process that we understand is built on thermodynamics.  Thermodynamics is just a fancy way to say that “energy moves.”  And the Contrast between hot and cold drives power plants, cars, light bulbs, and every bit of energy used by every cell in your body.  Don’t like thermodynamics?

Move to another Universe.

Outside of being the gears that move the planets around the stars and allow the fusion reactions that warm those planets, Contrast is also what drives Virtue.  Bravery versus cowardice.  Modesty versus pride.  I could go on, but you get the idea.

One time, when living in Texas, I was trimming a hedge.  I decided to increase the difficulty (and try to get a higher score from the Romanian judge) by trimming the hedge while standing on a fire ant hill.  Fire ants are called fire ants for a reason, and it isn’t because their hearts are fully of loving fire.  One time one SINGLE fire ant bit me on my hand and a friend looked at the resulting swelling and said, “That looks like one of those things an alien will pop out of.”

Fire ants seem to bite simultaneously – all at once, regardless of where they are on your body.  Non-psychopathic ants, like the ones I grew up with, would just bite you whenever.  Not fire ants.  They want to have dozens and dozens of them on you when they all decide to chomp down and inject an alkaloid poison that has cytotoxic, hemolytic, and insecticidal properties.  That’s 95% of the venom.  The other 5% of the venom contains proteins that create an allergenic reaction in animals.

That’s a lot of syllables that mean that fire ant venom is a finely tuned combination of chemicals that are made of hate and spite.

Some people think it’s the vibration that they react to, as I said up above, I think it’s just that the ants are psychopathic.  27 ants bit me at the same time.  I know, because I counted each bite.

Ouch.

I jumped.  I jumped so hard that I thought that I pulled a hamstring.  I have no idea why they call it a hamstring.  Me?  I’d call it a thighcep instead of a hamstring.

Anteaters never get Coronavirus – they’re already filled up with ant-y bodies.

The hamstring pain went on for months.  It was fine when I walked, but when I sat down?  My hamstring was like an electric rod jammed down my left leg, and not in the good way.  A guy I worked with finally said to me, “John, that’s your back, not your hamstring.  Same thing happened to me.”

It was my back.  I started doing some exercises to build my back muscles and core muscles.  In a week all of the pain went away.  After three months of excruciating pain, I was finally pain free.  It was like Madonna® had never been born.

That was a Contrast that was wonderful.  The pain hasn’t come back, and it’s now been a dozen years.  And I’ve moved very, very far away from fire ants.  If you’ve ever had pain for an extended period that went away?

The Contrast is delicious.  It’s like there’s a can on top of your head, and someone stopped hitting it with a rock.

So, if you’re driving yourself crazy with Contrasts, especially Contrasts that don’t matter?  Take the advice that my older brother always gave me.

“Stop hitting yourself.”