Melancholy of Me and My Friends

 

Now we finally got to the final chapter of Me and My Friends Series, Melancholy. Melancholy can be examined in its own right, but that would be short and simple. However, will miss important details. Instead, I decided to make it a somewhat summary and synthesis of all the previous traits. 

Melancholy is the outcome of three other traits combined. Great intelligence, facing all or mostly obstacles in the world first produces cynicism, then escapism and satirical humor and then melancholy. However, if cynicism, satire and escapism are tactical responses to the reality, then melancholy is the overreaching summary. It is the final stop and a crowning achievement. It is also a summary or an umbrella term that covers all three to a certain extend.

Finally, melancholy is one of 4 (five in other versions) tempers. Together with sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and supine they make the tempers or humors that people are divided into. Each temper has its own characteristics, I covered them partly in my other article and posts on MAL.

Melancholy often associated with sadness. However, it is a particular form of long-term chronic sadness. After all, when you know the world can be so much more than it is but unable to do anything about it. When everyone stands in the way of your ideas and prevents you from getting ahead. What else can you feel, but melancholy.

You can mock your enemies and stupidity of the world with striking humor to make you feel better. Be cynical about the world and refuse to work the treadmill that feeds others but not you. Escape with a good book, movie or videogame. However, when you finish playing you still feel this overreaching feeling that it's all futile and nothing will ever change. The melancholy never does not go away for good; it can only be temporarily eclipsed with the other three.

There is a saying that in "with much wisdom there is much sorrow". That is true. The smarter you are, the better you understand just how ridiculously unfair and fucked up our world and life is.

From my experience, everything in world is luck describes world much more accurately than hard work is rewarded. Most the rewards I got or did not get was due to luck and other such things completely independent of my own efforts. A lot, but not all, of hard work I did gave me nothing of value.

Post financial crisis economy makes its even worth with all these volunteering opportunities, where they do not even pretend, they will pay you anything for the efforts you make. Actually no, they promise that someone will hire you for a paid work sometime down the line in future based on your volunteering experience. A clear scam. However, they will not hire a person who needs to be paid and paid well for a job they can make someone do for free. 

Post crisis economy is designed for idiots, too dumb to realize people obviously just using them and will give them nothing in return. A person with more than room temperature IQ should avoid working in such economy.

Room temp IQ idiot, they want to hire, would just believe anything they tell them and work hard for no reward. Such an idiot could be happy in his own way, but you do not wish to have his kind of happiness. Yes, you are sad, but you do not want to be like an idiot, run around like a puppy dog and be exploited by those around you. 

Idiots live for other people sake, get exploited by them and then get dumped. They end up with nothing because they are stupid.

Melancholics are smarter than that. We will not be used for others sake, instead we will use other for our sake.

We do not settle on just what we have here and now. We want to see things change and improved. However, we are few and there are many who instead want things to continue the same and not change. Conflict with such people make us melancholic and cynical as we feel powerless to get what we want from life and people who control stuff. That powerlessness to change things you want to change about the world leads to other things we indulge, such as escapism and satire.

Occasionally we can lament the fact that some people get good parents or other benefactors who give them anything they want, and we do not get the same. We have less simple because fickle fate gave us stingy or abusive parents. 

So how you go from there? You can just live a Charlie Munger strategy and keep on living an escapist life until life will finally deal you a good hand. Yet time goes on and on and a good hand does not come. Leaving you to wonder if that will ever happen.

I guess you can use Astrology to find out when good times are finally coming. 

On 20 of November this year Pluto will finally leave Capricorn for good and continue its journey in Aquarius. Capricorn was always associated with conservatism, preserving status quo and resisting any change. We have seen a lor of that in the years after Financial Crisis of 2008 when Pluto was in Capricorn. In contrast Aquarius is associated with radical change that more than willing to uproot and overhaul, all structures and foundations.

In 2025 Neptune will begin its transition into Aries and Uranus into Gemini. Both will complete this transition only in 2026. It's typical for outer planets to dip into new sign, then backtrack out during a transitional year or two. Pluto begun its transition to Aquarius in March of 2023 and is about to complete it only this year.

Melancholy Connects

Different tempers work differently with each other. Some can get along and others do not. However same tempers can at least understand each other and Melancholy is no exception. For example, in my conversation with TrueHellDei it became clear from the start that she has the same melancholic disposition as I do. That early conversation about the world and religion let me conclude this much.

That common trait let us connect, find common ground and grow increasingly found of each other. I said many good things about her, retrospectively I can say I did so because she is as melancholic as I am. Melancholy was that common ground and foundation on which our relationship was build.

My other friends have some of the same melancholic disposition to them.

That is how we melancholics are. We only like each other's company.

And Disconnects

You might call it snobism, but reality is that people of different termers think too different from us because they come from a completely different mindset that is based on different premises and worldview.  Choleric for example likely believe in their own inferiority and deficiency, that is why they torture themselves and others around them to "improve" them. We melancholics do not think problem is with us, we think it's the world that is broken. 

Thus, an interaction between Melancholic and Choleric would be a constant argument where Melancholics would assert that problem is with the world and Choleric instead insist the problem is with Melancholic and world is perfect. Such an interaction is an insufferable torture. I can even say it from experience as my parents are Cholerics.

Conclusion

A melancholic's great intelligence entitles him to stand above room temperature idiots and other stupid types. Al least in his own mind. 

Thus, we should unite and figure out how to exploit the rest of society for our sake. After all society was likely designed by other melancholics just like us to work for them. They likely called themselves upper class/caste or something like that to make sure they are entitled to rip benefits from everyone else's work. Now that this place is vacant, we simply need to find way to get there. 

Society is large enough to comfortably provide for a group of savvy melancholics, on the other hand its rules are too complicated and convoluted for a single mind to overcome them. Thus, we should work together and brainstorm how to bypass them.