Props (optional): clipboard, running pants, a bottle of beer

(Ordinary looking guy, maybe a little mussed, a little fussed, like he had a ling night, gets up in front of a group in a room)

“Hey. Hi, my name’s Larry [use any name you want]. I’m here to tell you about a new service.
You know how they always say take a passion you have, a personal thing you love, like a hobby you are very passionate about, and turn into a new business – like the things you know how to do best, had lots of practice with? Something that a lot of people are obviously extremely interested in, and you turn it a new business. Well I’m starting a new coaching practice, a new kind of personal trainer, called “Your Personal Misery Coach”.

So let me tell you about some of the areas of Life Misery we can help you with…
We can start you with easy stuff and do a full program of progression: go from some Daydreaming and Fantasy, and work your way to Basic Irritability and Annoyance, then to Feeling Sorry for Oneself. See, we need to make sure you’re thinking about yourself day and night. That’s a good solid basis. From there it’s possible to go all the way up to full scale Clinical Depression. Anyway after the basic introductory course in Daydreaming and Fantasy, we will go on to the unit Workplace Stress for Dummies, and Relationship Drama and Conflict.

Once you’ve got that under your belt, you’ll get to more advanced topics. But before we get into the Addictions Unit and uh, also the Obsessional Compulsive Behaviors, you’ll want make sure you’ve got the Self-Centeredness course down pat. In the meantime you can enjoy some things like Basic and Applied Overthinking, which you can even do in your sleep.

Now, one of the more natural, easier ones for people is the Overthinking training, and the Overactive Mind, the Busy Mind. And you can even do this while you’re sleeping. I mean literally: you can do it at night, while you’re asleep. You can wake up nice and exhausted from your mind going all night. I mean you’ll wake up exhausted, ready for more. I’ve done it many many times. There’s nothing to it. We’ve found that it’s helpful, before bed, to you know, have some life dramas with relatives or close ones. Get a couple good arguments, debates, conflicts in, or at least a good intense bout of worries and stress… anything to help get the mind spinning. A few cups o coffee, or even a couple energy drinks during the day helps too of course. Stir the pot.

With obsessiveness and overthinking under your belt, you’ll have a good solid basis for moving onto out Expert Addictions Course. And the great thing about the addictions – be it to drugs or alcohol or sex or shopping or the internet, whatever, or basically any of these – is they will help mask any real feelings you have that might have helped you know, respond appropriately in life and do things like make meaningful connections with others or good decisions.

The other thing with the addictions though is, you need lots of practice. So uh, get a good coach. And uh, repetition is very important for learning. So practice, practice, practice, until you just get so good at it and it becomes unconscious. You can just pull it out of the hat just any time you need it: depression, anxiety, addictions, you know, cranky reactiveness, bad moods, uh, superiority, judgmental-ness, arrogance. These are all part of your toolkit for not being your true self.

We can also get into some special sub-areas that people enjoy, like Overworking, and the related Pride, which includes the benefit of validation from the spouse and family, culture, advertisements, and the American way. We also offer Political Debate, getting yourself fired up, charged up, righteous. Learning how to Not Listen to anyone at all except yourself. You’ll find this all on our lovely new website… No-reason-to-live.com, under the heading Self-Centeredness, which includes the Addictions unit, the Unhappy Marriage Course, and the wonderful Obsessed Driven Executive Training specialty course, along with the ever-popular Miserable Autocratic Dictator track.

We can also include some basic acting courses, because it’s enhancing to be able to involve the family and coworkers and be able to impress them with the sincerity of your deep misery, get lots of sympathy and commiseration with your friends, teachers, professors too – very handy if you, say, want to get out of a taking a test, and you want to have a talk with them about your personal problems. A personal problem or mental illness, a clinical diagnosis, is very handy in this regard – you can even go the whole hog and employ a therapist or psychiatrist – you can help convince each other your misery is totally real – they’ll even give it a clinical name. But you really have to get your act down for psychologists because they’re harder to fool, although it’s their job to listen to bullshit as long as you’re paying …

We will even include some sub-units on Bigotry, Prejudice, Narrow-mindedness, and Ranting. We’ll get into jingoism, racism, all kinds of -isms. At a very low cost. But don’t get me wrong, this is very high quality prejudice. We’ve had some post-PhD students and professors go through the course and they are now teaching their students a very high level of bias and political stridency.

Of course, I would recommend the essential core course called Dishonesty 101. It’s an excellent foundation for most of the other courses. We really want you to work on your self-deception in particular – maintaining a healthy False Self is essential to your life misery – and this needs constant effort to build up, maintain and improve. We’ve even contracted with a special instructor to help you with your Phoniness. She’s a fully committed phony and has had enough plastic surgery to make Michael Jackson look like Mister Authenticity.

Now, if you fail the Pride course and get humble, you’ll have to take Egotism and Self-Centeredness over again.

Anything else? Well let’s see, I mean I don’t want to reveal all of my secrets haha but I will tell you that uh there’s almost no limit to what you can achieve. You’re only limited by your imagination, creativity and ambition.

So you see, we will really get you in touch with your essential wrongness, that deep sense of being flawed, wrong, basically unlovable.

Just for this crowd I’m going to offer a special coupon, a limited time offer where you will get personal attention from one of our head trainers. This will include: Browbeating, Criticism and Discouragement, at no extra charge. He has decades of practice: four failed marriages, a boutwith alcoholism, special training in Japan with emotional repression, and a German teacher specializing in moodiness and a strict discipline of withering criticism and disheartening ignoring of feelings, along with a hearty dose of miscommunication, passive aggression and misdirected hostility. All for one low price…

You know I should make the disclaimer that this is no cake walk; this is no picnic. We’ve had a a few people fail and come out happy at the end – they just couldn’t manage enough misery to make the grade. They were smiling and laughing and shit. Its pretty discouraging to us trainers at the time but we quickly get over it and realize there are some weirdos that are just naturally upbeat, secure and hard to perturb.

But I can guarantee you that by the end, we can get you into, at the very minimum, some feelings of deep unworthiness and self-loathing. You’ll come crawling out just primed and ready to find an abusive spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend. Not everyone is that ambitious of course, and some settle for just a miserable job.

And, you can always come back for remedial courses: we have Basic Fear & Dread 101 along with Tension & Anxiety.

As far as extension courses, we have a special sub-unit in the Egotism section where you can study One-Upmanship, like if you’re dating or have started a new job. You can enjoy feeling really alone but superior. This is great for those in a management positions or public figures, like politicians, teachers and the clergy, that need a sense of alienation from themselves and others.

And for those that have completed the course and might feel a bit of wisdom or love of life creeping up on them, we do have a course on Remedial Ignorance. It puts you through a few hoops, but most people come out pretty stupid.

But overall we’ve had tremendous success. I mean, some of our students have gone on to get advanced degrees in Clinical Depression, Psychosis, Delusional States, Paranoia, even Schizophrenia in one outstanding performer.

For those that have graduated, we have some advanced courses on Stubbornness. This will really help you keep the lessons and practice in place, on a go-forward basis in your life. I mean you can really keep going with this stuff, all the way into old age and senility.

Now, we’ve had a very high success rate, but I know some of you may read the article, have heard about – in the name of total honesty and disclosure – we did have this jerk, a guy that ended up in eternal bliss and was badmouthing us, strutting around talking about “causeless happiness”. He was a fluke though – a hard case – he was being really loving and giving and open and giving and good-hearted and free. Really annoying. But some people you just can’t do anything with - they’ve had a good upbringing, or who knows, just cursed by good fortune and grace. These bastards give us a bad name.

I had to tell this asshole, “Look, I don’t care how fucking happy you are, I’m not giving you your money back!” Can you believe the nerve of some people… The ego! (shakes head)