I’m not advocating for laziness or complacency or apathy in a time where there are people that need your help and rights to fight for and action to be taken, but sometimes you need to do something that for a second or an hour makes you forget that the world as you knew it is crumbling. I am also not promising a list of things that will make you happier or healthier in the long term, or contribute to your spiritual or personal growth, just a bunch of shit that might help to distract you for a moment and won’t cost you more than a tenner.
- Watch cartoons; Peanuts, King of the hill, Bob’s Burgers, The Simpsons, or Rick and Morty. Don’t watch that one episode of Peanuts where Linus Van Pelt is sad about his new friend dying of cancer though.
- Put on some new socks, if you’re real fancy pants and have your own dryer then put on warm, clean socks fresh from the dryer. The best socks are 100% cashmere but only multi-millionaires can afford cashmere socks, if you want to raise money to buy your own pair of cashmere socks you can sell your stinky old gym socks to men on the internet.
- Find a goat. Preferably you will be able to find a goat in real life and you can hug it or brush it’s hair or watch it jump back and forth over your legs. If you can’t find a goat IRL then just look at a picture of one or watch youtube videos of them.
Anglo Nubian goats I watched being born
- Trees; looking at them, being near them, smelling them, thinking about them, reading about them (my heart skips with joy when I read about their symbiotic relationship with fungi), even just burning a tree scented candle helps. My mum used to get me to hug trees when I was a kid, she made out like I could get some kind of caffeine hit by absorbing all the energy from the ground.
- Of course you should be smashing the patriarchy but if you don’t have the energy for that today there’s a bunch of other things you can smash. I like to stomp on crisps personally, Wotsits or Cheetos feel the most satisfying under my feet and if you’re really mad you can always pretend it’s a a bigoted human Wotsit shrunk down to size. This is a good way to deal with small bursts of impotent rage. Sometimes you will luck out and find one laying in the street, just looking for somebody to bring their misery to an end, but other times you will have to buy a bag of crisps yourself and sacrifice one or two for the greater good. If your internal ball of rage is bigger than this you can throw an empty wine bottle (if you don’t have an empty wine bottle then buy and drink a bottle of wine in order to procure one) in your own kitchen and then sweep it up, scream into your pillow or wrestle with a good friend.
- Hang out with your best friend.
- Eat cheese on toast, ideally with Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce. If you’re vegan you can use those Violife kind of plastic slices made out of water and coconut oil, they’re actually kind of okay-ish. If you have an intolerance to dairy, like I do, then just suck it up because the post melted cheese pain is worth the post melted cheese comfort gain.
- Masturbate, if you’re a woman. All the men I know report feeling kind of bummed out afterwards. My advice for doing it so that you don’t feel sad and ashamed afterwards is to stop looking at crying porn and just use your imagination to think of nice wholesome things while you do it, like puppies and kittens and sweet old people holding hands in the park.
- Make a fire. You can use the dreams of your foes as kindling, or just old dry wood and paper. Sit by the fire, look at the flames, stick a marshmallow or some palo santo in it if you want, and soak up the smell.
- Dig a hole. Put some welly boots on, get your best spade out, find a good patch of dirt and just keep digging until you reach Australia/treasure/enlightenment/the bones of your long lost dead dog. I don’t know why digging holes feels so good, or even if it does for other people but I know that some of my happiest childhood moments were digging holes to bury time capsules in.
- Listen to something you can sing along very loudly to. My personal choice is Misfits – Last Caress, but most of Beyonce’s songs work, as does anything by The Police.
- Go outside and look at the stars. If it’s night, and it’s clear, and the stars haven’t been snuffed out with light pollution where you live. If stars are in short supply you can cover the inside of a cardboard box with glow in the dark star stickers and put your head in the box. You can get somebody to move the box while it’s on your head so you can pretend you’re witnessing a meteor shower.
- Watch Northern Exposure.
My other family
- Put on some Beenie Man or M.I. A and dance until you’ve soaked through your clothes with sweat, dance until your heartbeat becomes a thunderous rhythm, dance until you fall on the floor in an elated heap, dance like Carlton.
- Slide down the stairs in a sleeping bag.
- Have a bath, solo or shared. Light some scented candles, play some Julee Cruise, and throw a bath bomb in. Don’t fall asleep in the bath, don’t try to practice your balance skills on the rim of your bathtub after you get out and however lonely you are don’t share your bath with your toaster.
- put a message in a bottle and throw it into the sea
- send a message on a helium balloon
- Donate your time and/or money to charity. If you are feeling shitty because the world is full of suffering and you feel helpless there is shit you can do that will help other people and make you feel better in the process.
- Watch an ASMR video. Lots of people find these creepy and I totally get it but sometimes it’s really soothing listening to someone whispering about cleaning your ears, or doing a pretend cranial nerve exam, or teaching you Korean.
- Send something in the post, not anthrax or a severed hand but something nice like sweets and a letter or a book that you love and think the recipient will appreciate. If you want a penpal that will write you a decent letter back instead of a whatsapp saying “thanks for the letter. x” then go to http://writeaprisoner.com/
- Float. Float in the sea, float in a pool, lay on your back on your bed and focus real hard until you levitate.
- Finally, don’t forget all the important shit that you need to be doing daily (if you can) to feel a base level of okay – sleep 8 hours a night, wear dry comfortable clothes, eat nourishing food, take the medication you need to take, listen to souls of mischief. Where you can, help those who can’t do what they need to feel a base level of okay.
