By 
Is there anything worse than someone who can’t laugh at themselves?
Well, okay. Yes there is. There’s cancer, genocide, and people who wait to decide on what they want once they’re at the front of a Starbucks line–sure. But right behind all of that is people who can’t laugh at themselves.
There’s the obvious problem here, which is that it’s insufferable to be around someone who has their ticket to Butthurt City, and is just waiting to get on the train. These people suck. They’re awful to be around. They are startlingly efficient vacuums of joy. They take something so universal, beautiful, and important to discuss–our collective sucktitude as people–and find a way to make it impossible to talk about.
What makes these people even more insufferable is the reason they don’t like being the butt of the joke. People who hate laughing at themselves generally try to remain completely in the dark about their faults in general. To avoid self-deprecation is–very often–to avoid self-awareness, and to avoid self-awareness is to be the fucking worst.
This is why these people flip out when you confront them with who they are. They have a house of cards idea of themselves in their head, and if you so much as blow on it, this whole thing will come crashing down, and they’ll cry, shit their pants, and start throwing cards at you.
So instead, they avoid knowing what they really are, and they go through life denying the essence of what makes them them, and as a result, they tell you terrible stories, and do terrible things, and have breath that smells like terrible ass. They become a machine gun of shit that is mindlessly shooting at everyone around them.
But you almost have to feel bad for them. After all, they don’t know it’s shit they’re shooting at you. They think they’re shooting sunshines, rainbows and hilarious jokes about “the Chinese” at your face, and you should thank them for it.
But if that makes you angry at these people who avoid self-awareness, take some solace in the fact that they’re making things way worse for themselves than they ever could for you.
When you’re unaware of who you are, you’ll never be comfortable in your wet tissue paper skin. You can’t help yourself because you don’t know what your problems are. You don’t know how you can best be utilized. You don’t know how you can be happy. You don’t really know how to interact with others as the person you really are. You don’t realize what mistakes you’re making over and over, because to you, life is a series of things that happen to you, and not a series of things that are of your own doing.
In short, not knowing yourself sucks ass.
But shit. Confronting who I really am–how do I do that? How do I look in the mirror and fully acknowledge the asshole looking back at me? How do I rip down the delusion of who I am in this world and see that ugly weakling underneath? How do I confront “Oh I eat too much salt,” or “Oh, I’m kind of emotionally abusive,” or “Oh, that furry porn I accidentally clicked on just gave me a boner, didn’t it?”
Laughter. That’s the key. Make yourself and your realities the butt of the joke. Get ahead of your critics and make yourself fully aware of all of the shit wrong with you. Look at your dumb ass from the outside in. Treat yourself–at least temporarily–like a character. Look forward to how you can entertain others with stories of your humiliation, your failures, and your complete lack of self-discipline. Laughter is the lube that makes it feel okay when your self-awareness enters your body.
Without laughter, understanding yourself can be fucking brutal. Approaching a personality flaw, such as “I’m kind of a dick to my family all the time when they’re nothing but great to me,” is fucking torturous on its own. It’s like seeing a picture of yourself with a double chin, or remembering all of the times you called kids “faggots” in middle school, or…ugh…hearing the sound of your own voice.
Who wants to look at the ugly parts of themselves in a world full of pictures of cinnamon rolls and tits?
But if you approach it with a sense of humor, seeing your ugly self becomes tolerable–even fun sometimes.
So you need to be able to laugh at the essential flaws of your personality. Laugh at the ways in which you awkwardly fit into the world. Laugh at your failures. Laugh at the time you accidentally called your boss, “Mom,” and all of the weird shit that means about your psychological problems.
Laughter allows you to fess up to being a socially awkward idiot who makes everyone around them uncomfortable…and to feel okay about. Because from the outside, that’s kind of funny.
Ripping on yourself is the transition you can make from denial to really realizing a problem. This is why self-deprecation is not only positive, but essential.
So how do we laugh at something, and still seek to fix it? This can be really difficult, and this is why.
Our usual motivation to change ourselves comes from a woe-is-me desperation. It comes from getting rejected because of your stupid body you don’t work on, or from losing a tooth because you never brush it, or from actually getting caught leering at women at the p0ol while whispering to yourself, “Oh, this is nice.”
But if you’re able to laugh at and acknowledge your faults, it can be hard to have the same desperation. After all, once laughing at yourself makes a harsh truth comfortable, it becomes easier to accept that truth. Sometimes it can be so effective, and you can feel so comfortable with who you are, that you can approach life with an attitude of, “Yeah I eat a Costco sized bag or Ruffles every day, I’m prone to marathons of Guy Fieri-based shows, and I sometimes like to tip over people in wheelchairs. Haha! Oh well! That’s wacky ol’ me!”
But fuck that shit.
Fully acknowledging what is wrong with you is outstanding, but it’s just a start. Once you do it, you have to separate the weird but forgivable flaws you have from the ones you really need to address, and then you need to actually address them. You can’t just keep eating that many potato chips. Your body will almost-literally turn into a potato.
So instead, once you’re able to laugh at something about yourself, dig into why you are that way. Why do you talk down to your girlfriend? Why do you not work hard towards your dream? Why do you pay $150 a month for a theoretical possibility of going to the gym?
Use your laughter to get to know yourself better and better until you really understand why you are the shitty, shitty way you are, and work to discover how you can fix that. Read books, try exercises, talk to friends or professionals about how to stop your awful behavior. Dig into yourself, get to the root, and ask yourself why that root sucks.
Go look in a mirror somewhere, and act like you’re meeting yourself for the first time. Notice your neediness, your stupid archaic beliefs, and your tendency to be a bit of a fuckhole when you don’t get your way. Fully accept these foibles, before you resign to change them.
Then laugh. Laugh in your own stupid face. Laugh at all of the dumb, destructive shit you do every day. Don’t laugh with yourself. Laugh at yourself as an outsider. Roast your pasty ass. Laugh as you get ready to leave these flaws behind.
Laugh at this fucking idiot that, as of now, you used to be, and make that a part of the past.
