Feeling the Hate

Dear Jason Adair the Unlicensed Therapist,

I want to love people. But I often feel the hate coming on. As far as I can tell, the mandate to love/accept/understand people spans every religion, and most enlightened non-religious views. But does the idea of loving everyone cheapen the very idea of love?

-Tired of Loving


Dear Tired,

According to a song my son learned in kindergarten, and the hit book/video/lifegasm "The Secret" the more love you put out into the universe, the more will come back to you. You can argue with my son's beliefs, as he does go to an alternative school, but can you possibly ignore the bazillion copies of the book that people bought for their loser friends? Analytically speaking, loving everyone does not cheapen the idea of love because it is statistically impossible to love two people equally. (Unless they are identical twins. Or paternal twins dying from a rare non hereditary disease). This is possible, because love is not a constant but a variable whose value is dependant upon the relative lovability of the person in question. This allows you to assign different love values to everyone, thus preserving the "good love" for those whom you really love, and the "poor" to "negligible" love for those who keep going on and on about how much The Secret has changed their lives. The best thing about this assigning of values is that it is constantly in flux, which leaves room for your loved ones to jockey for position. (When I worked in an office, I kept a list on my window ranking all my coworkers from most favorite to least favorite. The people who had the most competitive dispositions would try to one up each other to get to the top of the list by giving me food. ) This turns your love into a commodity, whose value can only increase when demand is greater than supply, which will ultimately lead to most people realizing your love isn't worth the price and that they can live without it.

Don't be afraid to share the love,
Jason Adair the Unlicensed Therapist