I used to be a brat.

I am working on not being a brat, and that takes a great deal of discomfort, humility, and severity. Most modern people have a raging, inner brat whom they placate and appease at every turn. Think of how many you know who believe the world owes them a living because their mothers and fathers brought them into it. Think of how many cannot withstand a scant half hour of mild hunger pangs without becoming utterly nasty . . . now think of how many of those are grown, adult men.

Even our elders are not immune to brattiness -- the whiny Boomer stereotype exists because it is true.

Brattiness is contagious, and that is how we get posh, exclusive, gated communities where each household tries to outdo its neighbor in ostentatious, unnecessarily luxurious remodeling jobs. Litter in any space attracts more of the same. It amasses via the magnetic attraction of brat anonymity: bad behavior multiplies when nobody is sure who is doing it; just ask the internet.

The rationale of brat anonymity is “everybody is doing it, so why should I do any better?” In a sea of brattiness, personal brattiness becomes diluted and invisible. The niggling, rapidly diminishing voice of the shred of consciousness within the brat begging her to BE BETTER is easily squelched. The heiress party girl never strays outside her elite group of adrenochrome addicts because she could be confronted by someone with an intact, unsold soul. The alcoholic tries to get you to drink because being the only drunk in the room is a stone’s throw away from self-assessment in an unforgiving mirror.

Deep down in their cores, brats are driven by fear, specifically the fear of missing out. I know of one brat who is openly miserable during any recreational outing because when she goes on an outing, she spends most of the time living provisionally for future outings that may or may not happen. What this means is she vociferously complains that outings are too short and too rare, and that’s why they kind of suck because she does not get to go on enough of them. In other words, she is perfectly modern.

Lost in pursuit

The primary condition of modernity is to spend a lifetime chasing happiness and to never form any kind of gratitude for it when and if it actually occurs. Modern people pursue happiness, and that is fine and good, but when they find it, they are never the least bit satisfied and already on the lookout for their next happiness fix. They cannot perceive past happiness without painting it in bitter regret that it is vanished or now belongs in some other form to someone else. Any brief focus upon the good is accompanied by severe longing and hideous damnation that nothing can ever be as good again.

But I’m poor!

Etheric starvation -- that feeling of being constantly tired, raw, rode hard, and put away wet -- is far worse when you are poor. It is exacerbated by low quality food, and the more processed the food, the more depleted and unnourishing it is on the etheric or energy plane. Poor people must often literally work themselves to death to survive, never gaining enough rest or sleep to regain their etheric mana. Food and rest, however, are just the beginning. Beauty is nourishment, and the poorer you are, the more ugly life tends to be, at least in modern times. The medieval peasant at least had the rhythm of the seasons, the symmetry of church buildings, exquisite craftsmanship in everyday objects, and the closeness of his fellow people. He may have starved to death on the physical plane more often than we did, but slow death of etheric starvation and the autoimmune diseases it carries in its wake were not an issue.

Billionaires are some of the only individuals who can mostly insulate themselves from etheric starvation these days. They do this by consuming the most exquisite of foods, living in luxurious, beautiful spaces, and having ample time for rest. Lower and middle class brats want to become billionaires because they covet etheric bounty in our age of endemic etheric starvation, and who could blame them?

Nature or nurture?

There are some people who were born to be bratty. I know this because I was one of them. I have a big personality, an ego that likes to run rampant, and a propensity towards Type A perfectionism. All of the above create the perfect recipe for brattiness.

In the 4-Hour Workweek, author Tim Ferris “teaches you how to escape the 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich”. He has an alleged net worth of $100 million and an annual income of $10 million. Like many self-help gurus in his milieu, Tim Ferriss purports to believe we all can and should be millionaires. Most of his strategy, conceived before the AI era, involves setting up “systems” where one’s fellow humans, referred to as virtual assistants, do most of your annoying tasks and actual work from places in the global South, such as India. In other words, he suggests becoming the computer age equivalent of a Victorian era English lord, delegating your mundane tasks to an army of underpaid, brown serfs as you enjoy the fruits of your plantation.

Tim Ferriss is clearly a Class A Brat who enjoys a vast amount of unearned wealth. I’ll also hazard a guess that much of his Bathroom Class lifestyle comes from investments. Perhaps he believes his entitlement to unearned wealth is justified because:

1. He wants others to live the same way, which he frames as “sharing” but is more akin the drunk who is afraid to drink alone who I described earlier in this essay

2. He fails to understand all unearned wealth was actually earned by others and stolen away from them

3. He will be earning every penny of his ill-gotten gains back in future lifetimes, regardless of whether he believes this or not, because it is basically the reincarnation law of physics

If Mr. Ferriss siphons enough wealth away from those who earned it while encouraging others to do the same, he could be earning multiple life sentences as the poorest of subsistence farmers, starving to death many times under the cruel yoke of the same forces he propped up in his misspent lifetime as Tim Ferriss. There are entire timelines ready and waiting to swallow his soul.

Go for it, Bratty!

Big personalities easily become brats because we are go-getters. Luckily for me, I was not raised in a permissive era by excessively soft parents. I earned plenty of spankings along with my brother, who is another big personality. We both ended up as functional, non-trauma-focused adults.

Some kids never become brats at all because they were born sweet and retiring. Not me. Some kids need stricter limits than others or they become brats. I was bratty, but I was also given a defined set of behavioral parameters of what was and what was not OK. My love of my parents, order, discipline, and routine was more than enough to keep me in line most of the time. My parents were of a better crop of parents who understood that limits are love: they taught me to clean up my own messes, contribute my share, work hard, and to keep my mouth shut a great deal of the time.

How not to be a brat

The remedy for brattiness is the routine acceptance of limits and working within those limits, whether we are children or adults. When we encounter Tim Ferriss’s philosophy or the plethora of advice like it, our first line of questioning should be “Why do I feel I deserve wealth that others must earn for me?” instead of “How do I get as many goodies as Tim Ferriss?”

Let’s say you have a rich friend who orders Door Dash seven days a week. Instead of getting pissy that you cannot afford restaurant meals delivered to your door by a Door Dasher with 2 other jobs, be grateful your circumstances have not conditioned you to be as lazy as your friend. The karmic or consequential reward of great food that is available all the time is food obsession: food becomes an easily-accessible drug that you must imbibe to survive. The Door Dash recipient who does not become enormously fat can easily swing into equal and opposite imbalance, falling into anorexia/bulimia because not having to do any work at all for food makes it far easier to develop a complex about eating too much food.

Brats get what they deserve, if not in this lifetime, the ones that follow. The gods are very, very patient. So stop being a brat unless you relish the idea of paying for it.

Ways to stop being a brat

The first step to recovery is recognition, so if you’re seeing your own brattiness, congratulations, you’ve already done some heavy lifting. To stop being a brat, I believe you must take six steps. These are:

1) Stop screaming

Brats love to pound sand, yelling at the sky, Mommy, God, or whomever else is half-listening to their literal and metaphorical tantrums. Behind every tantrum is the idea that someone owes the brat something. In my own case, as a bratty young woman, I felt I was owed the posh, upper middle class existence I grew up in as a child. It made me very angry, both at myself and at the greater world, that I had not experienced what was necessary to achieve that goal: Number 1 which would have been marrying the “right” man. Once I had immersed myself in daily discursive meditation as an older woman, however, I realized that I despise the concept of marrying for money with all my heart, and that I chose to marry on the poorer side in this incarnation because my soul wanted the experience. When you look at your own anger, can you identify the fear hiding beneath it? My fear was that I would disappoint my parents, whom I believe wanted me to marry “up”. I also feared the stigma of being poor.

2) Stick to a single, intentional commitment for several years, no matter how absurd

Brats are all over the place, trying to put their hands into every pot and candy jar because they are afraid someone else will get it first. They want the whole world on a plate yet they won’t do any genuine work to get it. In my own case, I have always been sore that I cannot speak Spanish, and now that I live in a mostly Spanish speaking neighborhood, my broken, deer-in-headlights Spanish makes me feel even more insecure. The only remedy is to study a little Spanish every day and slowly become more conversant in the language. I may never speak it, but at least I am trying!

3) Be your own parent

Raising humans is tricky. If you never had a decent, good parent, it is much harder as you have no behavior on which to model your own self-parenting. The very best parents still make mistakes. I had good parents, so I will describe some of the characteristics of good parents. Good parents are punctual -- they are not late to pick you up from school or wherever. They are stable. They put their all into providing a home for their kids, regular meals, and they don’t punish their children without good cause.

As for punctuality, if you are late for everything, be stricter with yourself. Leave earlier and make sure you have enough time not to endanger yourself or anyone else. Pack snacks and emergency supplies like a good mom would do for her kid. When you make a commitment to yourself, keep it as a good parent keeps their commitment to their child. When you behave badly, and if you are a brat like me, you are going to behave badly, don’t overreact. Give yourself a time out, force yourself to sit and think about what you did in discursive meditation, and then work out a strategy that entails not doing that anymore.

Be kind to service people, neighbors, and semi-strangers. No good Mom or Dad would allow their children to mouth off to a cashier, waitress, barista, manager, or mailman. One of the reasons Europe and the British Isles are about to fall to the insane Muslim clown posse is the propensity of Europeans to be rude to “the man on the street” and to treat any casual interaction among semi-strangers as a potential hostile confrontation. Most Americans will start up a conversation over a shopping bag with a random cashier (been there, done that recently) and we often discover we have so much in common, it is uncanny. Europeans don’t have those kinds of conversations, and naturally they also lack that kind of social cohesion. I plan on writing an essay about this phenomenon in the future.

4) Clean up your own act

Make your bed every morning and thank it for keeping you safe while you slept. Shortly after you wake, sweep the floor and put away the dishes. Clean the mirror, toilet, and sink every single night, thanking them for their hard work. Brats do not clean up after themselves and the last thing they are is grateful for simple luxuries such as soft beds, clean floors, and indoor flush toilets. To clean up after yourself is the opposite of entitlement. Humility is brat kryptonite, and you are not just humble toward other humans, you are truly humble toward the gods.

Brats are not known for their personal hygiene. Take a bath or shower every day, always keeping in mind that your personal stank is not as glorious to others as it is to you. Don’t go outside of your domicile looking like a slob. Brush your teeth. Keep your clothes clean and orderly, hung and folded. Brats wear whatever presents itself on the floor. Mature adults present themselves in clean clothes that fit, not baggy, stained, ripped, or overly revealing attire from the stinking laundry pile in the corner.

Stop swearing. Nothing says “early 21st century vulgarian loser” louder than compulsive F bombs, the S word, and every other sentence featuring words that could not be said on TV until the 1990s. You do not sound smarter when you use language that requires little to no thought and has become the common vernacular of our age. Your term that rhymes with “duck” and “suck” is about as edgy and creative as a gibberish Chinese character tattoo.

5) Stop whining

Chances are you have it pretty good. Stop the heavy sighs 30-40 times a day. Stop seeing life as one big, painful series of disappointments. Whining is addictive like drugs. People who whine often pride themselves on their honesty, as if traipsing through life in your rawest, simplest, most explosive form was some sort of gift to others. Consideration often takes the form of a metaphorical mask, and the mask adapts to protect and spare various people and situations from your unadulterated, ugly, uncultivated truth.

Whining gets old fast. There is a stereotype of old people wishing for death that is so prevalent, it was written as one of Grandpa Simpson’s tics in The Simpsons. In one episode called Million Dollar Abie, Grandpa Simpson finally gets to try to commit assisted suicide, but of course this goes wrong. Whining in old age is a choice. When I die, if it is of natural causes, nobody will know I was sick, because I am never going to whine. Not to the doctor, not to the nurse, not to random people or friends, and certainly not to my loved ones.

Gossip and complaining are forms of whining. In both cases, there is a displacement of one’s own problems and a lack of control when it comes to blathering on and on about the negative parts of life. Just shut up already, and consider that you might be the cause of most of your own worst problems. Nobody knows the trouble you’ve seen . . . and nobody wants to know!

Blame is another addictive drug. Blame enough as a brat and you will eventually blame God himself. We have all been wronged in some fundamental way: that’s Meatworld, and Meatworld sucks. The only point to being wronged here is that you might learn something from it.

6) Stop cursing and start blessing

You won’t ever get anywhere cursing what you hate because the energy you project only makes your enemy (be it a force or a person) stronger. Use your energy for better things. Ignore what you hate and pour your blessings, gratitude, and good will into what you love. Trust me on this one; it works.