I noticed that a number of people felt that my recent posts have been self-absorbed and arrogant. My first reaction is “Gee, I don’t want to be self-absorbed and arrogant.” So I decided to apply my gigantic intellect – the one that is far, far superior to yours – toward solving this problem of seeming arrogant.
But here’s the quandary, as I see it. There are three qualities I want to have:
1. Success
2. Honesty
3. Humility
At most, logically, I can only have two of the three qualities. It’s impossible to have them all. For example, if your life is a complete disaster, it’s fairly easy to be humble while being honest, as in “To tell you the truth, I’m a worthless pimple on the ass of society. You could strangle me with my own putrid bed sheet and no one would notice I was gone.”
Things get tricky with success. Suddenly there are huge chunks of your life that you can’t mention without appearing to brag, even though they are nothing more than a description of what you did today. And omitting them seems somehow dishonest. In the old days, pre-Dilbert, when someone asked me about my day I would simply recount what I did in the wittiest way I could. Now if someone asks me what’s new, I have to say things like “Not much” or “The usual.” Other times I just complain about how busy I am without offering details. If forced to talk about myself, I have to focus on some story that shows how unlucky or incompetent I am. Anything else would sound arrogant. Nowadays, if I step in a huge pile of dog crap, my first thought is, “Excellent. Now I have something to talk about if someone asks me how my day went.” I’m not complaining; being a minor celebrity is a great deal. But there is a strange sort of loneliness that comes with it, and I never would have expected it.
I owe my current understanding of this phenomenon to my ex-friend Amy who taught me that no one likes an honest successful person. She taught me this lesson by not liking me after success “changed me.” And by changed, I mean I acted exactly the same as I always did, but that honesty seemed grotesque when things started going my way. Any mention of what I was thinking or doing during these successful times automatically sounded arrogant and braggy.
Let me show you how this works. I just got back from giving a speech in Miami, at the Jackie Gleason Theater. The “honest” story is so full of celebrity-like experiences that you’d want to punch me if I described it. So if any of my friends ask how it went, I’ll tell them the following true story:
I walked out of the hotel to meet a car that would take me to the theater at 7 am to check the AV setup. As I walked toward the waiting car, two supermodel-looking women in their early twenties, wearing practically nothing, noticed me walking past. One was behind the wheel of a nice car and her friend was talking to her from the side. The driver flashed me a huge smile and said in a flirty-pouty voice, “Are you leaving us so soon?” My response was, and I quote “Uhh, blpshdph amsp fphr wah.” You see, supermodel-looking women wearing next to nothing rarely strike up conversations with me, so I wasn’t prepared. Nor do they represent my target demographic for Dilbert, so I was confident they didn’t recognize me.
The supermodel-looking driver reacted to my unintelligible mumble by smiling seductively. When I got in the car and looked back to get my last “bonus” supermodel glance, the driver was looking directly at me, with an obvious “I want you now” expression. Again I was caught off guard, because no supermodel-looking woman ever has ever looked at me when she could be looking at something else, such as a lamp post or the sky. I thought to myself “I must look good in this shirt.”
But there was one other theory that I couldn’t rule out. I asked the driver “Are those women high-priced hookers?”
“Yeah,” he said. “They’re probably just getting done from last night.”
Still, I do think I looked good in that shirt.