How cool would it be to date a porn star?

I heard some idiot at the bar say this the other day, and I call him an idiot because he seemed to genuinely believe he would enjoy dating a porn star, which means that he didn’t think it all the way through before opening his face, leaving me with no choice other than to crap all over his hopes and dreams. Allow me to elaborate.

If he had said, “It would be cool to have sex with a porn star,” I would have let that slide, because that sounds like a typical drunk guy thing to say. That’s what porn stars do for a living, after all, so I’m sure it would be a lot of fun (given enough condoms). However, he did not say he wanted to ‘have sex’ with a porn star, he went the extra mile to specify that he wanted to “date” one.

At first, I had trouble just wrapping my head around the insanity of the concept of wanting to emotionally invest yourself in someone who has sex on camera as a profession. Can you imagine the level of baggage they would be carrying? I mean, daddy issues are a given, and I think we can safely add narcissism to that list as well; because let’s face it, if you’re stripping down and getting pounded for millions of strangers, you have an over abundance of confidence. But those are just the universal psychological issues. That’s your baseline. And I’m sure each individual girl has her own exciting collection of emotional traumas, but this is just the introductory part of the relationship…the getting to know you phase. Don’t want too get too crazy too quick.

If you do happen to move past the first phase; if by some Hail Mary from the bowels of hell, some god-forsaken miracle of Satanic inception, you manage to fall in love with that girl…then you’re really fucked. I get pangs of jealousy when my girlfriends hug people I didn’t know. I can’t even imagine having to kiss her goodbye every morning, KNOWING that she’s going to go get tag teamed by two of her co-workers. That’s not just a jealous fear anymore. That’s not your irrational insecurities putting ridiculous images in your head. That’s a fact now. You have to face yourself in the mirror knowing that the love of your life is willingly walking into a gang bang…arms (and orifices) wide open.

Sounds to me like my own personal hell. I would rather wipe my butt with sandpaper for a year than voluntarily subject myself to that sort of torture.

The same thing goes for any guys who think it would be awesome to date an actress. You’re also an idiot. Most guys have a hard time trusting their girlfriends as it is, and most girls are terrible liars. Now you want to date someone whose yearly earnings are based on how well she can lie? That is what an actress is, after all. Someone who gets paid to pretend to be other people, a.k.a., lying. Do you really want to get emotionally involved with a person that fakes emotions professionally?

You guys need to think this through and stop focusing so much on the part where they’re hot and famous. That is a very small aspect of the overall picture; and let’s be honest, you don’t care about the relationship, you just want to be able to tell people you’re dating an actress. You can still do that, without all of the jealousy and frustration. Granted, everyone will probably think you’re a crazy person, but that’s better than dating one.

 

We don’t matter. Isn’t that great?

Have you ever really considered the extremes of your own ego, or for that matter, have you ever even acknowledged its existence? The majority of people are so deluded in their own private world that the possibility of their own worthlessness has never even entered their head. Why do we think that our lives matter so much? Why are we so convinced that all of our efforts are working toward an ultimate goal that will provide meaning to our existence? We dedicate years of our time on this planet chasing after these fiscal goals, these benchmarks of social status put in place so we know when we’re winning, so we can measure ourselves against the bell curve of humanity. So when the day finally comes when we run out of road, we can say “I did better than most people.” That’s all we really strive for these days, isn’t it? That’s what passes for ambition: doing better than the average person. It doesn’t matter who the average person is, what they wanted from life, or what their opinions were. As long as we can confidently say that we’re better than them, we can die content.

This whole train of thought stemmed from the service industry jobs I’ve had in the past few years. I see all of my superiors working their asses off to make these restaurants and bars profitable, sacrificing their mental and physical health for what? To more adequately prepare for their own funeral? Constantly striving to please their customers, to make the lives of their clientele just a little easier to tolerate? It’s like we’re all apart of one giant ant farm, toiling our short little lives away, each of us carving a path that leads to nowhere, ending in an arbitrary spot, only to be erased in the blink of an eye.

Nobody wants to think about their own insignificance because we like the delusion. We like thinking that the things we do matter. We like to think that all the time we sacrifice to our educations and job stability amounts to something, that it benefits society as a whole. The truth is, it doesn’t. The truth is that society would be just fine without you. The truth is that if you died tomorrow, very few people would mourn you. To some, you would just be another picture in the obituaries. To others, you would simply be a statistic, and to most of the world, not even that. To most of the world, your death would be no more significant than the death of a common termite: a life form whose existence they weren’t even aware of, and therefore, could not possibly be bothered to care about.

I realize these things seem rather depressing in a suffocating-with-the-weight-of-your-own-unimportance kind of way, but these ideas will only have that effect if you allow them to. Accepting these things, as the self-evident facts that they are, can be the most freeing realization of your entire life. No pressure to succeed. No stress of arbitrary task deadlines. No anxiety to keep a job that you hate.  No incessant desire to please other people. Fuck other people. They don’t know any better than you do. Everyone is just taking their best guess, and hoping things go as planned. And if somebody tells you differently…tells you that they have an answer…feel free to smile and nod, and say “wow, that’s great”…but don’t believe a single word they say. Trust only yourself.