Problem: You're a blogger who feeds on an audience. Not actual feeding, because that's cannibalism and is illegal in the Philippines. I think.

But you feed on an audience in that you want them to want you. Part of you needs them. Part of you hates them for needing them. And then part of you use them. You feel guilty because you might be wasting people's time with your ideas or you might be actually harming them with the ideas you think are helping them.





You feel guilty because there's just so much consumer stuff in the Philippines, in Cebu City in particular, and every street in Colon has a billboard and flyer that appears to tell you that your sadness can be cured by just shopping or throwing away your money or eating your guts out until you get Diabetes in a resto that offers Unlimited Rice. And you feel guilty because your business is selling Chicken with Unlimited Rice.





You feel guilty because you're a vegan and you're scared of being a hypocrite, even if the idea of a "hypocrite" is being sold to you by people who make money from making people think they're hypocrites. "Being Perceived As Honest" is a commodity you buy, like a yogurt drink.





You feel guilty because no matter how much you try to tell people how to live their lives by being decent or by not cheating on their partners or by not using marijuana, you know that deep down there's actually no one concrete answer that can prove that cheating on someone is wrong.



You're horrified by the idea that there's no real right and wrong, and the law can just be ignored at a cost you can just circumvent if you know how to, and still you feel like you must do something.





You feel guilty because while you make tons of money with your blog's advertising tricks, you don't know the cost of your ideas.



Maybe somebody read your blog post the wrong way and now they're out there abusing people's rights because of your suggestion? Maybe the poverty situation is there because you advertise too much in your blog? Maybe the reason the internet is so slow and hurting people's feelings is because you upload high-quality videos and crisp photos of travels no one but you cares about?





You feel guilty because you review movies and you still download illegally.





You feel guilty because you complain against everyone who is not you and living not the way you want them to, and yet you still download movies illegally, and stealing from people's intellectual property.





You feel guilty because you write about food and shopping and books and commercialism and then there's an abominable flood situation in Cebu and part of it could come from the plastic bag trash in malls resulting from the absurd level of online advertising from which you're blog thrives.





What do you do to not feel guilty?



Solutions: Digest Bo Burnham's Comedy

1. To reframe your guilt, maybe you can listen to Bo Burnham's jokes in his famous show above? Then think for probably two days about his ideas in the said video about:

The effect on your mental well-being of having always an audience to make you feel valued in such a way that you derive ultimate worth from external conditions

The effect of uploading so much "Videos and Pictures That Are Important" online in wasting electricity and internet bandwidth that might be causing our government and businesses' money that could've been spent on making sure Colon doesn't flood as much.

The effect of your blog posts in making big businesses richer and destroying opportunities for smaller businesses who can't afford advertising

The effect of your blog ideas and social media uploads in how much greed and envy you're generating from Cebuanos, causing them to drink and use marijuana more because they felt bed about not living the life you tried to show in your blog posts, even if you don't intend them to be jealous

The effect of your blog posts to the promotion of High-Cholesterol and Other Unhealthy Dishes that leads to Cebuanos having unhealthier diet, costing money from the taxpayers because when these Cebuanos go to government hospitals after eating too much Crispy Pata from the a restaurant you're blog is promoting, it's immediately the government's problem, right?





2. Go to Bo Burnham's website by clicking HERE . And then go to the part of his website that shows his favorites, and you can watch there a video interview of David Foster Wallace reminding us how the business of entertainment and "Me First!" attitude might be the reason we have so many important people in our lives killing themselves.





3. Know how to not feel guilty by reading Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now because the book proved to me that in the right mindset configured mathematically in the book, I seem to be able to detach myself from the feeling of guilt and self-hatred that comes from a narcissistic, self-obsessed attachment to pain, which is a form of insanity, and something that I can escape from. Pain attachment and being imprisoned by the idea that "One Has To Feel Pleasure Every Time And Sacrifice Is For Religious People And I'm An Atheist And Reason Is King Even If I Know That The Reason I'm So Proud About Is Just As Religious As Religion If We Follow Albert Camus' Reasoning" is optional, and the book helped me be reminded with that, and now I've never been happier.





4. Quit blogging, Seriously. There's a book from Nicholson Taleb called Anti-fragility and one good story there is the Hydra Myth where a Hydra's head multiplies after you decapitate one, which means the Hydra increases a value after his head got hurt. I'm not saying you're a Hydra but if your blog is your head, and you cut it off, your happiness might increase.





5. Go to jessicarulestheuniverse.com and then on the lower left is a Hotline Number that connects you to a Professional Listener who promises to help you in times of despair and existential crisis. Call the number now.





6. Forget everything that I said here and live your own.













Yours Truly,

A Bad Richard