Mecvisuals

Hello there, friend. What’s that I hear? You’re pissed off at someone? Someone is pissed off at you? You have a fight in your life and you don’t know what to do? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Whether it’s with your mom, your aunt, your best friend Stan, or maybe even the mailman, I’ve got the solution to all your relationship problems! Below is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” for resolving your conflict. Yes, my friend, your conflict is an adventure. A rage-infused shit-festering adventure full of four-letter words and smashed cell phone screens, I’m sure. But an adventure nonetheless. Simply start with the first question below and navigate yourself to the end. By the end, you’ll know exactly what to do about your conflict. If not, well then fuck you, buddy: How I usually handle conflict. But even if there’s not a flaming dumpster fire of a relationship in your life right now, reading through each decision tree is still a worthwhile exercise in not being a terrible hu...

Eighty years ago, researchers began one of the longest and most complicated projects to understand human behavior in history. It would take almost 50 years to complete. But their work would define an entire field of psychology. It started with an idea: that people have different fundamental character traits and these character traits are inherited and stable throughout one’s life. It was the idea of personality. The problem was that there was an infinite number of human behaviors, so how could you know what was caused by someone’s personality, and what was caused by all the shit going on around them? To test and find stable personality traits, researchers would have to make an exhaustive list of all of the possible human behaviors and then measure these behaviors in a lot of people over a very long time to determine what was fundamental personality and what was just noise and bullshit. The project started out humbly enough. In 1936, Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert pulled out a...

Y ou can’t change yourself, so don’t even try. I know that’s not what the infomercials and self-help seminars tell you. But fuck it. They’re wrong. You can’t change. Like a thirsty man in a desert chasing a mirage, or a fat man peering into an empty fridge—there’s nothing there. So stop chasing it. Go do something else instead. Why can’t you change yourself? Because the whole idea of change is an arbitrary construct. It’s something you just made up to make yourself feel good (or bad). Yesterday, I hadn’t written this article. Today, I have. Did I change? Both yes and no are correct answers, depending on how I define change. Technically, you are both always changing and never changing. It just depends on how you look at it. What you decide is change or not is an imaginary line drawn in your head. I could decide that “changing myself” means having a billion dollars. I’ll then sit around beating myself up for not being able to “change” for the rest of my life. Therefore, that’s ...