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The Manifest Advantages of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
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A crippling mental condition is a great thing to have. Well, maybe not for the
actual sufferer. It's certainly a great thing to have around. Or at least I enjoy
it. It keeps me happy, amused and quite frankly, if the world ran out of OCD
there'd be not enough Zoloft for my depression.
The most fun ones however, aren't the clinical cases, so far gone the weird chute
you can barely make them out. No. The best laugh comes from people that are just
marginally under the water, shifting in and out of it, the subclinical, unaware of
their problem, thinking they're you know, just normal, and wondering how come
things never turn out normal for them.
The best pool of such human amusement parks used to be weekend stock brokers. You've
probably seen at least one of this glorious breed. They're usually low level
cubical drones, making just enough to afford rent, gas and fast food. However, they
read the stock page. Multiple times. About once an hour, they pull out the stock
page and check the quotes. What if the stock quotes changed on the paper ?
They spend every waking hour thinking about stocks, margins, trends, reversals.
They memorize quotes, they can tell you historical stock prices of obscure
companies the way other people spit out batting averages. Of course, those other
people are 14. They feverishly do averages, they will tell you which are the best
stocks, the stocks to buy, the stocks to sell, which stocks are hot, they know it
all.
How do they know all that ? O, dare not ask. For the remainder of the week, you
could be listening to intricate explanations of patent bullshit. That's the beauty
of it. They always know. Stock exchanges being some of the most complex,
chaos-driven, absurd and unpredictable constructs ever to see the light of day. And
yet, some chump in a threadbare plastic shirt with matching brown patches on his
jacket elbows knows. Warren Buffett will plainly tell you he has no clue and is
just trying to keep afloat, like everybody else. But our champ knows.
He knows. Moving averages, candlestick patterns, Gann charts and resistance levels,
he has it all. It's the secret of the Fibonacci numbers. It's the 3rd word on the
5th page of Eleanor Roosevelt Playboy centerfold. Stuff like that, but stated with
the conviction of fixed pupils and impending doom.
He can tell you what's wrong with either the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, and
take as long as you have time. Have you ever noticed this ? There's people who have
something to say that takes them as long as it takes them, and then there's the
people to whom it takes as long as you have. Funny bunch, these last ones.
The irony is that for all the time spent going blind on stock listings and covering
everything in magic marker, for all the sleep interrupted with sudden screams of
"Buy !! Sell !!" there's not a single success story. Lottery has its winners,
billions of people spend a few dollars every month or so, and the net result is,
one chap gets a few millions, every month or so. Some money is lost, but that's the
breaks.
Not so with our working class stock experts. They spend hours each day, worth, you
know, 5 dollars or more each. They spend money to buy and sell stocks, and even
more money on books and courses to be taught by others how to buy and what to sell.
And yet, when was the last time any of them became a millionaire ?
It never happens does it. And none of them notices. If they'd get a second job in
accounting for all the time they waste on the stock mania, they'd make more money
by a 100:1 margin. And yet.
They were becoming somewhat predictable and boring, but luckily, with the advent of
the Internet, there's a new crop of the same breed, eagerly awaiting to please.
They're called Make Money Online Bloggers, which would be an oxymoron.
This seems to be a sort of new disease, that develops atop pre-existing
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, in a rather viral manner. First, the unsuspecting
OCD sufferer accidentally reads a blog run by one of the already infected.
Incubation begins.
The unfortunate soul spends a few weeks devouring the blogs of every disease
carrier he can find. This accounts for 90% of all the traffic the entire make money
online niche gets. The other 10% is people looking for porn. (Everything on the
Internet gets 10% of its traffic from people looking for porn. This is the
Zenofeller Apothegm.)
After the incubation weeks, the disease progresses to its first visible stage. The
patient starts his own blog, and makes his very own, personal and unique posts on
the grand subject of making money online, which, in spite of being his very own,
personal and unique, are indistinguishable from a machine standpoint from all the
other posts already available on the subject.
Consequently, very little in the way of traffic and even less in the way of
advertising revenue is directed to the fledging online money maker person guy. This
is no end of frustrating, especially after having read 500 pages under the title of
"How to make money online", consisting mostly of permutations of the words money,
make, and online.
This frustration builds up, and aggravates the obsessive symptoms. The sufferer
becomes over-concerned with the notion of making money online, which prevents him
from realising it's a void concept.
There obviously exists no such thing as "making" money online any more than making
money offline. What are you going to do, print it ? How do you just simply "make"
it ? Money isn't just made, you have to sell something.
A few people have figured out they could just as well sell the notion of making
money online, and if enough people buy into it, then it'd make money. Online. But
for the sellers not for the buyers.
There was a story in the news a while back about a salesman who sold 12 pianos over
the course of a few years to an old lady suffering from Alzheimer. While perfectly
legal, it isn't very nice. Replace pianos with making money online, and Alzheimer
with OCD, and you've got it straight.
However, an interesting side of mental disease is that the afflicted can easily
create their own reality. After enough frustration piles up, amplified by the
obsessive side, and enough copy has been ingested, ensured by the compulsive side,
some patients progress to the ugly phase two of their money making delusion.
Somehow, something cracks in their head, and they suddenly think they ARE in fact
making money online. And start writing about it. This second, severely delusional
phase can remain stationary for years, or can abruptly evolve into full blown
psychosis with all the risks and dangers involved. Medication can control it well,
if started early and taken religiously.
As to prevention, we think the best way would be to have special entry pages on
such websites that are dangerous to the marginally compulsive, or the yet
undiagnosed. There's an estimated 40 million people who show some OCD symptoms, but
not enough for a clinical diagnosis. These people could well be protected, and
should be protected.
If every adult website is required to carry a splash entry page, presumably to keep
40 or so million computer literate but underage kids off porn, then certainly all
websites endangering the sub-clinical mental patients should be held to do the
same. Even more so, seeing how pornography may or may not pose a risk to the health
of teenagers, but making money online hype certainly damages otherwise happy and
productive members of society.
To close on a more cheerful note, I had a friend, who lived in Manhattan. Rent went
$100 a square foot, and just going shopping cost $20, even if he didn't buy
anything. He had a small garden in his balcony, and grew tomatoes.
He'd tell you about how this year he's produced 25.5 lbs, which compared to last
year's 21.7 lbs is a significant (!) increase, all credited to the Super-Duper Root
Feeder (tm) he used this year being a superior product when compared with the
Millimetrically Nano-Enhanced Plant Grower (tm) used last year.
Then he'd tell you about relative rainfall patterns in the Upper West Side, and
averaged measurements of solar luminosity over each week of the year (and why
averages are more important than means).
He died recently, after 30 or so crops, for a grand total of maybe half a ton of
tomatoes, to offset his time, effort and expenses, a happy man. But then again, he
came up with his insanity all on his own.
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people think they make money online.
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copyright 2007 by Zenofeller
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this page was made using a
bent spoon. anything else is for failures
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