{"id":776,"date":"2010-08-29T05:16:38","date_gmt":"2010-08-29T05:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/visaisahero.wordpress.com\/?p=776"},"modified":"2025-03-08T09:06:54","modified_gmt":"2025-03-08T09:06:54","slug":"john-mayer-on-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2010\/08\/29\/john-mayer-on-life\/","title":{"rendered":"John Mayer, on life."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

I wish that when I was younger I could have met my current self. We would have sat down at a coffee shop so that I could explain life to young me in terms that only we would understand. It would have saved me a lot of hardship.<\/p>\n

You can listen to all the sage wisdom you want, but things only make sense when you can explain them to yourself in your own words. For instance, I\u2019ve been told for three years that Breaking Bad is the best show on television, but only after I watched it was I able to tell myself exactly why everyone was right. Other truths I know now that I can explain them: that I\u2019m not missing any crucial information and that poker really isn\u2019t all that fun; that heartbreaks do fade but they take about a year longer than you expect and by the time they do you really don\u2019t care about it enough to notice; and above all else, life is simpler than you think.<\/p>\n

I used to think that life was an intricate series of levers and pulleys, buttons and switches, Mexican standoffs and hostage negotiations. As I get older I realize that life is more Netherlands minimalist than Jackson Pollock. The problems don\u2019t get fewer, and in fact they grow in number, but the way I index them in the database is different. More problems get filed under fewer category headers.<\/p>\n

Things are getting simpler, and it\u2019s making life better. Here\u2019s the cheat sheet:<\/p>\n

People want to be liked. We all crave attention and affection and we all reject shame. When we get embarrassed we send a thug version of ourselves to the forefront to do our fighting for us. We\u2019re at the top of the food chain just under fear.\u00a0 We don\u2019t want to be in a relationship to hear the words \u201cI love you,\u201d we want to be in a relationship to say the words \u201cI love you.\u201d We want to feel needed, and exceptional and we hate feeling insignificant. We want to ace a hearing test. We are binary creatures; if we\u2019re the plaintiff, we want to win every dollar. If we\u2019re the defendant, we want guard every penny. We want to make more money than last year. We don\u2019t want to get cancer or die in our cars and we want the same for our loved ones. We go out on weekends to try and have sex while trying not to get punched in the face. We drink so we can be ourselves and not mind it so much. We\u2019re desperate to be understood. We want to know someone else has felt it, too. We hate being judged unfairly. We want to make the person we heard wasn\u2019t all that into us change their minds and admit they had us wrong. We want sunny skies with a chance of killer tornadoes, just to keep music sounding good. We take hours upon hours to admit to self consciousness. We don\u2019t know exactly how to pleasure each other. We just want love. In any and every form.<\/p>\n

See? It\u2019s simple. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Wise words, Mr. Mayer. Trust a blues musician to eloquently capture the human condition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wish that when I was younger I could have met my current self. We would have sat down at a coffee shop so that I could explain life to young me in terms that only we would understand. It would have saved me a lot of hardship. You can… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[582],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reference"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-cw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14662,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions\/14662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}