Disgusted - now it's time for a change

Some people need to get disgusted, mad, enraged or scared before they'll change stubborn habits.

Have you hit bottom? Do you need to?
We put up with lots of bad behavior and bad decisions because we aren’t mad enough to do anything about it. Get mad enough now about your current situation so that you vow to change it and never go back.
Your financial future depends on you making such commitments.

I hit financial bottom once, and it was unnecessary in many respects. For me, I felt like I needed to go all the way through to financial disaster before I would get mad enough to get back on top and head toward financial freedom.

And, that's exactly what I did. With all the debt piled on my back, I was one motivated man with a mission of financial survival and climbing back out of the hole that I had allowed myself to fall into.

I’ll never to go through it again, because I know through sad experience that the frugal mindset works well for me and other "devil may care" approaches to money management are for other fools and their followers.
My problem was that I didn’t know when to cut and run. I should have seen it much earlier – way earlier. You need to be able to recognize trouble when it approaches and then know how to avoid it. Avoiding trouble is the best way to stay out of it.

Like Elvis Costello sings, "I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused."
Well, I didn't find it a bit amusing then, and I don't find it amusing now. It certainly was an education, but it wasn't the least bit amusing.

To keep myself from getting into financial trouble again, I've set my trigger points quite low. In other words, I'm much more sensitive to trouble approaching. I don't need to wait until I'm mad enough to do something to protect my best interests - I head it off, nip it in the bud, and tell all those potential troubles to "talk to the hand."

Been there, done that, and I ain't doing it again.
Get mad, get disgusted, get riled up real good. Whatever it takes to shake yourself up and get you sufficiently motivated to put an end to what's killing you financially. Your future depends on it.

 

Stop Being Disgusted With Yourself 

Stop Self Hate Immediately

Self Hate, or just being disgusted with yourself, takes away your energy, and dramatically reduces your enjoyment as well as productivity in your life. When you start feeling that you hate yourself and that you deserve bad things, then in all definition, you become your worst enemy!

Self Hate may have started because of being conditioned in the past: perhaps you were given negative ideas from others about yourself. Maybe other people have treated you like just an object to be used and thrown around. Or perhaps your self hate actually comes from someone else’s voice and is not your own sense of what you’re self is at all. Over the years of being conditioned you may have started to have an obscured vision of how you really see yourself.

Self Hate and Perfectionism

It might be that you are a perfectionist. A person who is a perfectionist usually sees reality in black and white without any shades of gray. Therefore, whenever you do something that’s not perfect you feel absolutely disgusted with yourself.
You may have also been conditioned to feel guilty about all different kinds of things. Which makes you over ruminate about the mistakes we’ve made in the past.
Maybe you feel other people are better that you or it seems you’re always saying or doing something wrong.

Start Getting a More Realistic View of Who You Are

Too much self hate is still too much self focus and self regard. When you are able to feel more relaxed and better about yourself, then you won’t have to think about yourself so much which will allow you to focus on other things that are going on in your life.
When you start to give yourself more room and start showing some more decency to yourself then you will be able to live your life to the fullest extent!

 

Instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves

Empathy has crashed. No more cruel to be kind. We must simply be cruel

 

The argument that there is enough money to go round is now a fairytale, like winning the lottery. Photograph: Martin Lee/Rex Features

She is there whenever I go the shops. Every time I think she can't get any more skeletal, she manages it. Wild eyes staring in different directions, she must have been pretty once. I try not to look, for she is often aggressive. Sometimes, though, she is in my face and asking me to go into the shop, from which she has been banned, to buy her something. A scratchcard. She feels lucky. "Maybe some food?" I suggest pointlessly, but food is not what she craves. Food is not crack. Or luck. She has already lost every lottery going.

An addict is the author of their own misfortune. Her poverty is self-inflicted. All these hopeless people: where do they all come from? It is, of course, possible never to really see them, as their distress is so distressing. Who needs it? Poverty, we are often told, is not "actual", because people have TVs. This gradual erosion of empathy is the triumph of an economic climate in which everyone, addicted or not, is personally responsible for their own lack of achievement. Poor people are not simply people like us, but with less money: they are an entirely different species. Their poverty is a personal failing. They have let themselves go. This now applies not just to individuals but to entire countries. Look at the Greeks! What were they thinking with their pensions and minimum wage? That they were like us? Out of the flames, they are now told to rise, phoenix–like, by a rich political elite. Perhaps they can grow money on trees?

Meanwhile, in the US, as this week's shocking Panorama showed, people are living in tents or underground in drains. These ugly people, with ulcers, hernias and bad teeth, are the flip side of the American dream. Trees twist through abandoned civic buildings and factories, while the Republican candidates, an ID parade of Grecian 2000 suspects, bang on about tax cuts for the 1% who own a fifth of America's wealth. To see the Grapes of Wrath recast among post-apocalyptic cityscape is scary. Huge cognitive dissonance is required to cheer lead for the rich while 47 million citizens live in conditions close to those in the developing world.

This contradiction is also one of the few things we in the UK are good at producing. I heard a radio interview recently with a depressed young man with three A-levels (yes, in properly Govian subjects) who had been unemployed for three years. The response of listeners was that he was lazy and should try harder. Samuel Beckett's "fail better" comes to mind. Understanding what three years of unemployment does to a young person does not produce a job, any more than the scratchcard will change a crackhead's life. But pure condemnation is divisive. This fear and loathing of those at the bottom is deeply disturbing.

Three years ago I was on a panel with Vince Cable at The Convention of Modern Liberty, when Cable was still reckoned a seer for predicting the recession. He said then that the financial crisis would mean civil liberties would be trampled on. But what stuck in my mind was a sentence he mumbled about the pre-conditions for fascism arising. Scaremongering? The emotional pre-condition is absolutely this punitive attitude to the weak and poor.

Our disgust at the poor is tempered only by our sentimentality about children. They are innocent. We feel charitable. Not enough, perhaps, as a Save the Children report tells us that one in four children in developing countries are too malnourished to grow properly. Still, malnourishment isn't starvation, just as anyone who has a mobile phone isn't properly hard-up. Difficult to stomach maybe, but isn't all this the fault of the countries they live in?

At what point, though, can we no longer avoid the poor, our own and the global poor? Or, indeed, avoid the concept that frightens the left as much as the right: redistribution, of wealth, resources, labour, working hours. Whither the left? Busy pretending that there is a way round this, a lot of the time.

The idea that ultimately the poor must help themselves as social mobility grinds to a halt is illogical; it is based on a faith for which there is scant evidence. Yet it is the one thing that has genuinely "trickled down" from the wealthy, so that many people without much themselves continue to despise those who are on a lower rung.
The answer to poverty, you see, lies with the poor themselves, be they drain-dwellers, Greeks, disabled people, or unemployed youth. We will give them bailouts, maybe charity, and lectures on becoming more entrepreneurial. The economy of empathy has crashed, and this putsch is insidious and individualised. No more cruel to be kind. We must be simply cruel.

The argument that there is enough to go round is now a fairytale, like winning the lottery. Poverty is not a sign of collective failure but individual immorality. The psychic coup of no-liberal thinking is just this: instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves. This disgust is a growth industry. We lay this moral bankruptcy at the feet of the poor as we tell ourselves we are better than that.

Instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves

She is there whenever I go the shops. Every time I think she can't get any more skeletal, she manages it. Wild eyes staring in different directions, she must have been pretty once. I try not to look, for she is often aggressive. Sometimes, though, she is in my face and asking me to go into the shop, from which she has been banned, to buy her something. A scratchcard. She feels lucky. "Maybe some food?" I suggest pointlessly, but food is not what she craves. Food is not crack. Or luck. She has already lost every lottery going.

An addict is the author of their own misfortune. Her poverty is self-inflicted. All these hopeless people: where do they all come from? It is, of course, possible never to really see them, as their distress is so distressing. Who needs it? Poverty, we are often told, is not "actual", because people have TVs. This gradual erosion of empathy is the triumph of an economic climate in which everyone, addicted or not, is personally responsible for their own lack of achievement. Poor people are not simply people like us, but with less money: they are an entirely different species. Their poverty is a personal failing. They have let themselves go. This now applies not just to individuals but to entire countries. Look at the Greeks! What were they thinking with their pensions and minimum wage? That they were like us? Out of the flames, they are now told to rise, phoenix–like, by a rich political elite. Perhaps they can grow money on trees?

Meanwhile, in the US, as this week's shocking Panorama showed, people are living in tents or underground in drains. These ugly people, with ulcers, hernias and bad teeth, are the flipside of the American dream. Trees twist through abandoned civic buildings and factories, while the Republican candidates, an ID parade of Grecian 2000 suspects, bang on about tax cuts for the 1% who own a fifth of America's wealth. To see the Grapes of Wrath recast among post-apocalyptic cityscapes is scary. Huge cognitive dissonance is required to cheerlead for the rich while 47 million citizens live in conditions close to those in the developing world.

This contradiction is also one of the few things we in the UK are good at producing. I heard a radio interview recently with a depressed young man with three A-levels (yes, in properly Govian subjects) who had been unemployed for three years. The response of listeners was that he was lazy and should try harder. Samuel Beckett's "fail better" comes to mind. Understanding what three years of unemployment does to a young person does not produce a job, any more than the scratchcard will change a crackhead's life. But pure condemnation is divisive. This fear and loathing of those at the bottom is deeply disturbing.

Three years ago I was on a panel with Vince Cable at The Convention of Modern Liberty, when Cable was still reckoned a seer for predicting the recession. He said then that the financial crisis would mean civil liberties would be trampled on. But what stuck in my mind was a sentence he mumbled about the pre-conditions for fascism arising. Scaremongering? The emotional pre-condition is absolutely this punitive attitude to the weak and poor.

Our disgust at the poor is tempered only by our sentimentality about children. They are innocent. We feel charitable. Not enough, perhaps, as a Save the Children report tells us that one in four children in developing countries are too malnourished to grow properly. Still, malnourishment isn't starvation, just as anyone who has a mobile phone isn't properly hard-up. Difficult to stomach maybe, but isn't all this the fault of the countries they live in?

At what point, though, can we no longer avoid the poor, our own and the global poor? Or, indeed, avoid the concept that frightens the left as much as the right: redistribution, of wealth, resources, labor, working hours. Whither the left? Busy pretending that there is a way round this, a lot of the time.

The idea that ultimately the poor must help themselves as social mobility grinds to a halt is illogical; it is based on a faith for which there is scant evidence. Yet it is the one thing that has genuinely "trickled down" from the wealthy, so that many people without much themselves continue to despise those who are on a lower rung.
The answer to poverty, you see, lies with the poor themselves, be they drain-dwellers, Greeks, disabled people, or unemployed youth. We will give them bailouts, maybe charity, and lectures on becoming more entrepreneurial. The economy of empathy has crashed, and this putsch is insidious and individualised. No more cruel to be kind. We must be simply cruel.

The argument that there is enough to go round is now a fairytale, like winning the lottery. Poverty is not a sign of collective failure but individual immorality. The psychic coup of neo-liberal thinking is just this: instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves. This disgust is a growth industry. We lay this moral bankruptcy at the feet of the poor as we tell ourselves we are better than that.

 

Andrea Morales and Gavan Fitzsimons can both remember when and where their current research interest began. It came during a talk at the University of Pennsylvania a few years ago: Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology, took a cockroach that had been sterilized, dipped it into a glass of orange juice, then asked if anyone was willing to take a sip.

Nobody was. But if an involuntary ewww just went through your mind, as it almost certainly did, the experiment is still working. Rozin specializes in the psychological study of disgust, and he was demonstrating the universal concept of touch transference. It's a fancy term for cooties. If something repulsive touches something benign, the latter, even if it's physically unchanged, becomes "infected."

Fitzsimons and Morales, who teach marketing at Duke and Arizona State University, respectively, suspected this phenomenon had implications for the consumer marketplace--and in an article in this month's Journal of Marketing Research, they show that it does. In a series of studies, the researchers found not only that some products--trash bags, diapers, kitty litter, tampons--evoke a subconscious feeling of disgust even before they're used for their ultimate messy purposes, but they can also transfer their general iciness to anything they come in contact with. "We were pretty surprised at how strong the effect was," says Fitzsimons. "This is probably the most robust result in my career."

It's also part of a growing trend of applying science to supermarkets (see chart). Analysts who study shopping habits have already made some surprising discoveries about product placement. "Eye level," for example, used to mean, not surprisingly, "at the level of the eyes." But shoppers tend to keep their eyes aimed at cart level much of the time, making sure they aren't about to run over another customer. And because Americans read from left to right, shelf-stokers tend to put name brands like, say, Heinz, on the left side of the ketchup display, and the lesser known, more profitable in-house brand on the right.
This may be the first study, though, that reveals an evolutionary basis to shopping preferences. Low-threshold revulsion makes sense, protecting our ancestors from eating rotten or poisonous food or touching animals that had died of infectious disease. The face of disgust--with the nose wrinkled and the eyes squinted as if against some pungent smell, and the tongue often protruding as if spitting something out--tells you a lot. "It was probably," says Fitzsimons, "a pretty good proxy for the germ theory of disease before anyone knew germs existed."

The idea that negative qualities can be passed by a touch has become hardwired, says Fitzsimons. (That applies to good qualities too, which is why touching a holy object or person is considered a way of acquiring a little holiness for oneself.) So he and Morales set out to see whether toilet paper and other products could psychologically contaminate food in a shopping basket. They used real shopping baskets, though they did not conduct their tests in a real supermarket, and told subjects that the study had to do only with product preference.

Strong preferences were just what the subjects exhibited. Any food that touched something perceived to be disgusting became immediately less desirable itself, though all of the products were in their original wrapping. The appeal of the food fell even if the two products were merely close together; an inch seemed to be the critical distance. "It makes no sense if you think about it," says Fitzsimons. More irrationally still, the subjects were less comfortable with a transparent package than an opaque one, as if it somehow had greater power to leak contamination. Whatever the severity of the taint, the result was predictable.

"We'd take cookies out of the basket and offer them to the subjects," says Fitzsimons, "and we had some really tempting-looking cookies." No takers. Moreover, he says, "everything we did suggested that these feelings were below the level of awareness. If we told someone, 'You didn't take the cookie because it touched the kitty litter,' they would say, 'That's ridiculous.'"

A product does not stay contaminated forever. The aversion tends to fade after about an hour, though that's not much use to the grocery store, since shoppers don't generally return a short while after leaving to reconsider their purchases.

Unlike a study in, say, particle astrophysics, this one has practical consequences. "More and more stores organize products by category," says Morales, "so you have a baby aisle, for example, with diapers and wipes and baby food all together." Supermarkets might want to rethink that arrangement. And other retailers will be interested to hear about Morales' next study, on the opposite of the cooties effect. "It turns out that if male customers see an attractive woman touching a garment, like a T shirt, the men are more likely to want it."