I am not a psychologist.

What’s worse, unrelenting negativity or ceaseless positivity? Depends on my mood probably, but they are both ridiculous ways to live a life. Some things are shit. The menu at my kid’s school (although there are apparently plans afoot to change it), the fact that my four-year-old daughter has to go to school at all, terrorism, Newt Gingrich – all utter cock. In fact, many, many things are shit. It is okay to say so. A lot of things are also great. Music, cinema, the sound of the sea, boobs – each of them stupendously brilliant. The world (and by extension, my life upon it) is both lovely and terrible. As a citizen of the developed world, it is undoubtedly better than most.

I’m not quite sure what my point is. I guess I think that a spade should be called a spade. It is a digging implement (or possibly a playing card). I can’t imagine that it is possible to be either in a great mood or a miserable one all the time, and people who pretend either one are a bit bloody annoying. Shouldn’t self esteem issues work the same way? Sometimes I’m alright – even pretty damn good; when I got my degree, when someone pays me a genuine complement, when my wife smiles at me. Other times, I’m a useless hateful piece of human sputum – when I get something wrong or forget something that causes problems for others, or when I spout some ill-considered, off-the-cuff remark that upsets somebody. I know there are people with genuine deficiencies that can cause extreme spirals of depression, but for the un-afflicted, a love-hate relationship with yourself is surely par for the cause, isn’t it?

I don’t think feeling like crap is necessarily a bad thing. That oft-repeated balls about how you’ve got to love yourself before you can be a proper person makes no sense. Self-hate is just as normal. So feel free to despise yourself at times when you feel useless, fat, ugly or whatever. But try to remember to give yourself appropriate credit when you do brilliant things as well. It might be worth remembering that we’re on a ball of rock flying through the vacuum in the tiniest corner of an inconceivably huge uncaring Universe with only a small layer of atmosphere held down by gravity stopping us all from dying horribly. With that in mind, who really gives a monkey’s bollock how fat you are or how stupid I am?