I swear, people who know little are so much more annoying than people who know nothing. This is the case everywhere – you have people who dabble in psychology and go around sharing their oversimplified, mostly wrong ideas about people and society. You have beginner photographers who heard something about the rule of the thirds or sharpness across the frame and now they endlessly annoy people thinking how every photo has to be composed according to the concepts they heard of in order to be good. Or you have people who just discovered the Bible and go around preaching about this or that sin and how you need Jesus. Or people who discovered spirituality and now they can’t shut up about karma, reincarnation and vegetarianism. Or people who developed some inkling of energetic/spiritual insight and now they annoy people about how impure their aura or chakras are. You know those people. The “saved Christians”, the Hare Krishnas who discovered the “truth” about reality and now they have to preach in order to save the rest of you unwashed masses. The astrology chick who’s all about Mars entering Virgo. The vegan who’s saving the world from cow farts.

The people with simple solutions to complex problems who annoy others to no end with their ego tripping of having an imagined higher ground over others. We all know them, we all sigh deeply, roll our eyes and pray to God to give us patience.

I recently read about something called Matrons’ revolt; essentially, it’s a psychological phenomenon first described in the ancient Rome, where women in their 40s or 50s, basically women whose children grew up and left home, have some sort of an identity crisis because some biological switch flips, and they no longer see themselves as mothers, and start figuring out who they actually are. They first look at their husband, and if his role was merely to provide and protect as part of bringing up children, she decides she has no use for him any more and divorces him. Then they start looking for the meaning of their lives and get into activism, politics, religion, spirituality, philosophy; essentially, they are having a female version of the mid-life crisis, and it seems to be a biological thing. Also, it seems to trigger only if a woman is financially in a position to be independent, which usually means the upper societal classes. Poor people can’t afford the luxury of that kind; they need to stick together and figure out how to pay the bills and get food on the table.

The reason why this was so interesting to me is that it provided an elegant explanation for a phenomenon I encountered – older women, always some kind of upper middle class, who think of themselves as accomplished, esteemed, basically better than others and occupying a higher societal tier, who for some reason got into spirituality, and of course, since they are so awesome, they automatically assume they have a good understanding of it all. They eventually intersect with me, I see that they are a vacuous non-person with a super inflated sense of self-worth, and I summarily dismiss them. Then they have an ego inflammation and proceed to tell all who would listen to them how I’m no good, which suits me just fine, because if anyone would believe them, they’re an idiot and I don’t want them to have a good opinion of me anyway.

It’s kind of funny – I found an algorithm for “spiritual” Karens. 🙂