So you know how sometimes you’ve fallen lower than your lowest low? Like, to the point where the distance between the bottom of your misery pit and the peak of your crowning moments is several light years long? Yeah outer space.

You’re lucky! You have the opportunity to 1) reset your base zero, 2) reset your starting point, and best of all, 3) rationalize like no fucking other.

Rationalizing is an art. It’s taking a shitty situation, and trying to find a way to explain it or reframe it, and therefore minimize its negative impact. Yeah sometimes you look stupid when you do it, but hey- if it works, then who gives a fuck?

And a fun way to rationalize at those truly, terribly, awful moments, is to think about the fact that you could have done things that are even worse. Hurt someone? You could have done that, and simultaneously genocided an entire ethnic group through a nuclear holocaust. Fucked up your relationships? At least you didn’t use psychic powers to erase those people from existence.

In addition to whatever you’re doing wrong, you could always be doing even more wrong things on top of that, so take some credit for the fact that there’s always more you could be doing worse. That being said, there’s a difference between rationalization to feel better, and rationalizing to avoid responsibility. Your rationalizations may help you feel less like shit. Still, they won’t be of much solace to other people who would much rather you owned up to your fuck ups. If you want to share your rationalizations with them, go right ahead, just don’t expect them to be too impressed.

So things can really get worse. There’s always something even more awful that you could be doing in addition to whatever it is that you are doing. Putting all this shit in perspective makes it more possible to recognize that there’s room for improvement, just as there is room for dis-improvement. And hopefully, it will help you realize that there are things you are doing right, even if you don’t realize it all the time.