1. Live your life normally, with normal expectations and a general sense of composure and self-assuredness.
2. Receive a small amount of good news.
3. Roll around in this good news the way a dog rolls around on a particularly scratchy carpet. Absorb the good news through osmosis directly into your bloodstream.
4. Begin to believe that this small amount of good news has set the tone for the remainder of your life. From now on, everything will be as good or better than what has just happened to you. You’re on an elevator heading straight to the top. Your happiness levels will never dip one iota below where they are right now. This is your new baseline.
5. Find yourself consistently irritated by the news of others, good or bad. News is what happens to you.
6. Console yourself by extrapolating the small amount of good news you have already received into the future — just imagine the kind of news you’ll be getting soon. It won’t just be good. It will be incredible. You will be the greatest success in the history of successes. They will have to come up with a new word just to describe how successful you’re about to become.
7. Heavily intimate to people you don’t know very well that you’re about to get some very good news. Accept their congratulations graciously.
8. Allow your hopes to rise with every email and phone call you receive. Treat ordinary people calling you with ordinary requests with obvious disappointment.
9. Receive a small amount of good news.
Tags: advice, happiness, how to ruin things
Oooof. Wish this weren’t so dead-on…
HAVE KIDS
No, just kidding, sorry kids*
* thanks, Mom.
Mallory what’s your news?
Is that picture from The Descent?
Allow me to offer my condolences on your good news.
HOW DO YOU KNOW ME SO WELL MALLORY ORTBERG WE’VE NEVER EVEN MET
Number five, yep, on such an unconscious AND conscious level (c’mon, be honest, we’ve all been “uh-huh, I’m listening” when our thoughts have been elsewhere with at least an office co-worker or in-law).
NOT ME, THOUGH, I’M PERFECT.
I wish I could roll around on the carpet with good news. Instead, I do this thing where I get worried because life is a zero sum game and now that means that bad news is coming next. Just me?
Also, congratulations, Mallory?
No, me too…
I got some good news last week, then an unrelated piece of good news this week, and my brain went “… huh?” like a dog watching a magic trick. Poor brain is scampering in circles trying to understand that TWO GOOD THINGS HAPPENED and that they don’t cancel each other out.
Me too. Me too. “Receive good news. Assume equal amount of bad news will arrive imminently, or that the Good News will be found to have been a terrible error. Treat every phone call, email and letter as if it is going to cancel out your Good News.”
Assume that somebody has found out about the Good News, and will soon arrive to take it away.
3. Roll around in this good news the way a dog rolls around on a particularly scratchy carpet.
Yep, this is the interior of my head.
(But, to be fair, I also do this with bad news. And depressing thoughts. And stressful things. Just roll in them and let them sink into my skin.)
Congrats, Mallory! Please share your good news so that we may wallow in disappointment with you.
Man, I wish I could enjoy good news! Even the small bits! This is my process:
1) Receive small measure of good news.
2) Cringe before the hand of god(s)(esses) who will undoubtedly smite you down for your hubris. The better the news, the greater the dread. Do not ENJOY the good news because enjoyment will hasten the smiting.
3) Any bad news that happens to anyone, anywhere is confirmation that good things are simply tricks to get you to lower your guard and relax for a moment. DO NOT RELAX.
4) Get smote.
5) Feel slight measure of relief because you knew it was coming and at least now things can’t get THAT much worse. WHY DID YOU THINK THAT. OF COURSE IT CAN GET WORSE. IT CAN ALWAYS GET WORSE.
6) Consider that this list will finally convince your therapist to give you some Xanax.
OMG. Are you my long-lost twin? I was just thinking that my own process was something like “Receive good news. Immediately decide that you have used up your lifetime’s supply of good news, and that fate is about to drop an anvil on your head to counterbalance the good news. Be constantly worried about falling anvils.”
People are always mad when I make their “news” (as if) all about me? I don’t understand, what do they have against my taking it from pretend news to real news? Was hoping to get some tips from this piece but AS USUAL I am disappointed.
Well, this has me looking forward to Part II, because I have got Part I down.
PS: watch this space for my upcoming announcement. It’s… well, I’d better not say. BUT WHEN I DO, boy howdy.
I got some good news last week, then an unrelated piece of good news this week, and my brain went "… huh?" like a dog watching a magic trick. Poor brain is scampering in circles trying to understand that TWO GOOD THINGS HAPPENED and that they don't cancel each other out.
Oh god, number six so much. Followed almost immediately by crushing disappointment when my dizzying daydreams don’t eventuate by the very next day.
Oh god, number six so much. Followed almost immediately by crushing disappointment when my dizzying daydreams don't eventuate by the very next day.
Another fun thing is when you get bad news, and then you hear someone else's worse news, and you are grateful that at least your bad news wasn't as bad as theirs…and then you realize that IT STILL COULD BE, because there is not a finite amount of bad stuff that can happen to you. You have not filled your bad news quota. It's not like a vaccine where you get a little bit of something bad that wards off something worse. The universe is not keeping score of what it throws at you! It is most unsettling!
One of my aunts does #4 about her kids all the time. I mean, everyone does it with little kids (oh, you made that rainbow glitter card all by yourself, you’ll grow up to be a famous artist, etc) but now that her sons are in their 30s and 40s, it’s less cute.
I wish I could roll around on the carpet with good news.