I once ate a boot filled with ham.

Every day you see ads for new diets, products proclaiming health benefits derived from shit like acai berry, probiotics, and super steak, and helpful tips for not being an outrageous, cholesterol-and-saturated-pudding-laden fatty. I think I made up super steak, but it sounds like it'd be awesome if it were real. You choose to either ignore these or look into them, but regardless of the choice you make, there's a good chance, even if only for a moment, that you wonder whether you need to make a change. And then later you choose that salad instead of the fries. You choose the stairs instead of the elevator.

Now before I lose you, I'm not saying those are bad choices. Those are good. It's good to want to be healthy, it's good not to butt chug butter at parties and use a scooter to go from the buffet to the toilet to the buffet again. But the reason so many diets fail and so much money is paid out for all these new fitness programs and jerk-off replicator Shake Weights and juicers and shit is because most people want the benefits but not the effort. Write that down: I'm the first person to ever think of it. But the noteworthy part is that you make yourself miserable trying to make yourself happy and eventually misery wins out, so you stop and gorge yourself on microwave burritos and unhappy masturbation because it's way easier than gluten-free rice crisps and a stair climber. And, in a depressing way, happier. And you'll do it over and over.

There are varying degrees of satisfaction in the workplace, and likely a lot of people are "mostly" happy with what they do, but a lot of that almost satisfaction is born from resignation. Like how you decide what courses you should take in college based on the demand that will exist in the real world for people with those skills. You mold your life to fit a world that tells you there's a demand for male preschool teachers, even though children are less appealing to you than actual mold.

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"I cry myself to sleep at night. Now spit."

Dental hygienists are probably the best example of the despair of modern employment. They needed to do something, they weighed their options, and the best they could come up with was dental hygienist. I don't mean this as an insult; I mean that, when you weigh things like salary, challenge, and skill, and potential for employment, a dental hygienist is a really good choice. You're not slinging burgers, you make a livable wage, and you provide a necessary service. I will never, ever believe there's a single dental hygienist on Earth who wanted to be one, who pursued it for love and interest rather than necessity. No one wants to be the person who drains spit and blood from the mouth of an incapacitated and narcotic-addled stranger.

Work tends to work out like an arranged marriage, where you end up together because shit happens, and maybe in the long run it'll work out, or maybe not, but something had to happen, and running off to live in a cave wasn't an option.

Ever read the comment section under an article on Cracked? Ever read the comment section anywhere on any website? You'd think a solid 50 percent of all the people who go to that site, and it really doesn't matter what site it is, just hate it. They despise it. And that's fine -- maybe you do despise the site. But why keep going back?

Why keep watching shows you don't like and then tweeting about why they suck? Or go see movies made by Michael Bay even though you've never liked a Michael Bay film? I guarantee right now that Michael Bay's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will be ripped apart online -- in Facebook updates, on Twitter, and on numerous message boards -- and not one of his pseudo critics will be some poor schlub who just came to America from a quiet Polynesian island where he'd never seen a Michael Bay film before and was totally unaware of his shitty style of thunder-tit filmmaking. They'll be the same people who hated all three Transformers movies and Armageddon and every other cinematic toilet grunt he's sharted out during his career. And no one will make them go see the movie; they'll willingly pay because they want to see how much they hate it. They want to know how badly Michael Bay didn't make the movie they wanted to see, and they'll do it again when he makes Transformers 4, or Michael Bay's Sense and Sensibility.

People seem to really enjoy not enjoying themselves. It's just a way to pass the time. I'm almost positive this explains the existence of things like Nickelback, Donald Trump, and Lindsay Lohan. Do you know anyone who sincerely likes any of those three, not in an ironic way, or in a "Let's see what dumb shit happens next?" way, but just for what they offer society? Of course not -- they don't offer society anything. But not liking them is kind of fun, because you can think of clever insults to sling at all of them the longer they continue to pop up in the news making the world around them some kind of painfully sad joke.