Is 19 Too Old For Prom?

My date for my junior prom was 20. My date for my senior prom was 21 (same guy). That was a LONG time ago.

Nineteen seems to be an awful young cutoff age. There are plenty of high school students who are 19 in the spring.

Though I am sure the school has specific reasons why they believe this is an important rule, my alma mater allowed each student to bring one outside participant per dance event, with no age restrictions.

I never heard of any problems with attendees over the age of 18. Much of the problems I did hear about involved under age students from visiting schools, probably due to school rivalries and such.

I live in Ontario, Canada, and when I was in high school, it was 5 years (if you wanted to go to university). I was 19 when I graduated.. so 19 definitely wasn't too old for prom. My boyfriend at the time came with me.. he was 21. There was no problem. I don't think the school even asked who you were bringing. You just bought tickets and that was it I think.

"I can’t have older adults there."

Really, she's barely an adult. And 18 is legally an "adult" too, so that argument goes out the window. What about chaperones?

And how easily their relationship is dismissed, it's rude. "We understand he is a great young man, and he can bring any one of the 2,100 other students to the prom."

I don't understand the logic behind more and more school rules.

Yes, a 19 year old child is too old. They are mentally no more advanced and have only attained the right to vote and maybe legally smoke. It's dangerous to allow someone with no appreciable differences to associate with others of like kind.

My high school allowed anyone 20 and under to go. That rule being because 21+ plus people could legally obtain alcohol. I do not understand this 19 year old thing. Our rule was basically so we could bring people who had graduated ahead of us. This is stupid.

Another fine example of the american motto "you don't need common sense when you have rules"

Every time I hear, "If we do it for one, we have to do it for everybody", I cringe. Since when? Where is that law? There are exceptions/waivers for just about everything. When is life fair? Where is this level playing field?

Well, if that was the existing rule, then what's the problem? If a rule is applied uniformly, then I don't have a problem with it, either suck it up or don't go to the prom, or go with someone else, you have options.

Of course the rule is B.S. anyway, just in place to make people think that their kids are safer than if anyone can attend the prom. Like anyone over 18 is a threat to anyone under 18 and it can never be the other way around. Some of the worst things I've ever seen people do was in high school.

@ Splint Chesthair:
So your point is: Yes the rule is stupid, but don't complain about it?
Thanks for proving my previous point!

Hell, when I was in high school, one of the students was a repeat grader and was 21yo.
Cutting the age off at 19 is ridiculous as I'm sure they have a few students who are that old.

I'd rather stick needles in my eyes than go to a prom.

Am I the only one that read the headline as "Is 19 to old for porn?"

When I went to my prom I brought a friend as my date who was 2 years my senior. I was 17 and he was 19 I believe and my school had no problem with it. Then 2 years later I was dating a guy who was one year younger than me but 2 years behind me in school so I was 19 and he was 18. His school had no problem with me attending a high school prom. In fact I went to all of his high school dances with him that year.

I don't see why this school has a problem.

Of course the vast majority of high-school girls will be dating men in their 20s. There are some interesting reasons for that, but none that any girl wants to hear. I don't know why they can't see it for themselves. It's all in the pages of Strauss' The Game or in the instructional videos for The Mystery Method.

Young girls and women assert that older men are more mature (as mature as they are). But this isn't true. Older people can be weaker in ego, more apt to set their immediate desires and concerns aside for the delayed-gratification. That may amount to maturity, but it is also what makes a successful psychopath. Being able to refrain from acting on egotistical striving does not put an end to egotistical striving, it just sets up a buffer for delayed-gratification.

With that said, the girl in the scenario is not as mature as she can imagine. Her egotistical desires are predominant in the whole rationalization. In-fact, there is never any other reason for engaging in an intimate relationship with another human being except ego. We want to be loved. Which isn't love.

My date at my senior prom was my on again/off again boyfriend, who was 26. Nobody batted an eye. We'd started dating while I was working for him when I was 16 and he was 25. I thought it was great at the time...when I got to be closer to 25, I realized how awful it was.

We stopped dating around the time I was 20 and he was 29. Then he took up with a 15-year-old...and I realized that we'd stopped dating b/c I'd "aged out" of his preferred partner age range.

Dude was messed up.

@Ryan S
"In-fact, there is never any other reason for engaging in an intimate relationship with another human being except ego. We want to be loved. Which isn't love."

You can support that point all you like with philosophical musings, but blanket statements like that violate the single cause fallacy. It is a fallacious oversimplification to say that anything as complex as human behaviour has only one possible cause.

"Of course the rule is B.S. anyway"

School is B.S. It's not the real world. They make up their own rules. What's to discuss even?

"Am I the only one that read the headline as "Is 19 to old for porn?"

Nope.

So what happens to the seniors who turn 19 before the prom? Are they not allowed to go? Or are we supposed to believe that they never have any seniors who turn 19 or 20 before they graduate? Really??

@Jesss

The cause here is fundamental. In order to be a conscious entity you must consider yourself to be some-one inhabiting an environment and the process by which this comes about is one of attachment, or phenomenal intentionality relations, depending on how "academic" and convoluted you want the description to be. The ego is defined according to ones standing in relation to other objects, and the most gratifying of all ego-attachments is "love", or the kind of adoration and preoccupation that masquerades as love.

You can try to describe this in terms of neurochemicals like phenethylamine, oxytocin, noradrenaline or dopamine, but those are merely constituents of what is already subsumed under the term "love". There is, in-fact, a single cause for everything we experience and that is the ego. It is the functional attachment to objects as an identity. The differentiation of objects and attachment to objects for purposes of identification is one and the same process.

In the final analysis there is only one universal cause to all things, no separation exists at the smallest scale between objects, just one causal continuum or unravelling of events. So, while many divisive people claim there cannot be a single cause, as a matter of fact there is only ever one cause. But I understand this is difficult to see after spending a lifetime learning how to discriminate.

What happens with the human mind can be described a multiplicity of ways, all of which are mere descriptors. One of these ways is with quantum super-position. Cosmologists speculate that the early universe was in a state of quantum superposition.

A quantum superposition is a state within which square-circles exist, there is no continuity, contingency or definition in this state. There is no definitive 'thing' in existence. Everything is in a superposition, all things exist and do not exist simultaneously, a state which is totally outside of the scope of human experience.

When quantum decoherence occurs the values of intersecting waves are added to each other. If the value at one point of one wave is +4v and intersects with another wave whose value at that point is -4v, the sum will be +0v. And it is +0v that will manifest in the decohered state.

Likewise, the mind is in a superposition which collapses into a coherent state consisting of definitive 'things'. At the center of this decohered phenomenal model is the self, which stands in relation to all else in the phenomenal model. It is not possible to be someone-experiencing-themselves-as-a-conscious-entity without the self residing within the decohered model. The self is that central to the phenomenal model, so much so that when "self-esteem" is threatened it threatens to wreck the whole phenomenal model and sent the individual into paranoid insanity.

Perhaps all of our "mental illnesses" could be better treated with the understanding that the self needs to find itself at the center of a coherent phenomenal model, and it needs to find an identity for itself in the objects presented. The self, is mere perspectivalness which gains concretion in it's relations with other things. In other words, the self is a perspective on the differentiated objects of the world but has no other reference to the real world.

This is essentially the concerted theorizing of Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi (See: A Universe of Consciousness) and Thomas Metzinger (See: Being No One and The Ego Tunnel). Neuroscientists and a Neurophilosopher respectively.

Love is a force driving this action toward reproduction. We identify with another in what we call love, but the act is consumptive as it consumes the other for ones own identity. This is the common form of love which stands in contrast to unconditional love within which the lover does not depend on the other for identity and is therefor never personally hurt by the actions or beliefs of that other. Personal hurt comes in when the self identifies with the loved-object and this type of love is best described as the consumption of some object-dilineated for the purposes of identity. And this manifests as the feeling of being loved or having worth.

What is Love?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiaR6i0mj_8&feature=channel_video_title

The End of Evangelion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDnvy4_rGzA

@Ryan S,

You say the argument depends on how convoluted you want it to be. Judging by your long, inconcise answer filled with non-sequiters, I can only assume you prefer your arguments to be as convoluted as possible.

your argument makes multiple assumptions than cannot be proven scientifically e.g. the existence of the ego (as you interpret it), that determinism can be deduced to "one universal cause to all things". If this were the case, how can you say that you can isolate with such confidence exactly what that one cause is? What came before and therfore influences the ego? Evolution? The formation of the Earth? The big bang?

If you intend your conclusion to be a philosphical argument then that's fine, but you cannot use philosophical reasoning to come to a scientific conclusion.

@Jessss

See, but of course it isn't "scientifically" demonstrable. Science is a limited field of inquiry, limited entirely to the appearance of definite objects with prescribed identities. What I'm talking about is that action which precludes all scientific endeavour, whereby identity and objectifiability are granted to differentiated objects. It is totally outside of the scope of science and science completely takes it for granted without due consideration.

Cogito ergo sum; I think therefor I am. - Rene Descartes'

In-case you haven't had the chance to study Descarte's meditations on the first philosophy. I'll summerize his findings; there is only one thing that Rene could never doubt, he found he could doubt all else, except this; I AM.

"ego" is Latin for "I". Sure, there is no scientific evidence that "I" exist, but why would "I" need such evidence? What would "I" do with it?

You have referred to your-self this way as well, so clearly you accept the existence of your own ego.

Don't fall for the fallacious belief that science has all the answers or could provide all the answers, or that there is no certainty outside of the lab. That's all hogwash. The scientific method was derived by Christians, Muslims and Jews for the purposes of studying "God's works". Because only the works of God can be studied empirically, whereas the "hidden truths" must be inferred rationally.

Put in other terms, the epistemology of science is ever-changing, with new requirement and limitations constantly being added. Karl Popper's falsifiability criteria is not nearly as aged as the first model of optics as rendered by Ibn al-Haytham (A muslim scholar credited with siring the scientific method).

Science will never be able to tell "you" that "you" exist or not, it's not within it's scope, which is why we still need philosophy. And philosophy, particularly epistemology (the study of knowledge) will always underpin and provide the basis for scientific inquiry.

@Jessss

I can isolate the "one" cause this way.

A thing is what it is
A thing is not what it isn't
The identity of any particular thing is relative to what it is not.
All things are interdependent for their identity. (This is known as co-dependent origination, though I prefer terms like lateral causation.)
All things are One
There is only One cause.

We have this ability to pluck out differences and ascribe different names, focusing on the differences and discriminating as such, we suffer from a chronic simultanagnosia in which we fail to perceive all these elements as components of a whole. Never-the-less, there is only One with the appearance of a multitude. E Unum Pluribus

I guess what I'm trying to avoid here is talking about the organizational structure of the human brain, or even artificial neural networks to reverse engineer "objectivity". I'm kind of hoping you'll just see and understand what I'm talking about.

Related links:
Prat?tyasamutp?da (co-dependent origination)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da

Advaita Vedanta (non-duality)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_vedanta

Simultanagnosia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultanagnosia

So, like, one of my references was to some work by Tononi and Edelman and you might find their paper on integrated information interesting because it explains on the cellular/functional level how consciousness as a whole is coded and has as a requirment the duality of thought and self-other.

Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto, Giulio Tononi
Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin

http://www.biolbull.org/cgi/content/full/215/3/216

@Ryan S,

"Don't fall for the fallacious belief that science has all the answers or could provide all the answers, or that there is no certainty outside of the lab."
If that's how you think scientists think, you don't know science. One of the most fundamental principles of science is the knowledge that we don't know everything - hence the scientific endevour to answer questions. There are some things that can't be measured, but in this case the scientific thing to do is to say "we don't know". Sure we can speculate, but until and if we ever find a way to measure such abstract constructs, we cannot know.

That isn't to say that abstract constructs can't be measured indirectly. Psychologists have excelled at developing indirect, scientific measures such as memory, intelligence, and yes - various manifestations relating to the concept of the self (personality, self esteem, and many more).

"The scientific method was derived by Christians, Muslims and Jews for the purposes of studying "God's works". Because only the works of God can be studied empirically, whereas the "hidden truths" must be inferred rationally."
So the archaic way that religious folk once viewed what you are implying are the roots of science way-back-when can be used to make conclusions about science today? The scientific method may have vague roots in ancient history (including sources entirely independent of the Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and for purposes other than studying god's works), however the scientific method as we know it is a relatively modern phenomenon. It didn't even begin to resemble what it does today until the age of enlightenment, with many of the fundamental principles established as late as the 20th century.

Also I would argue that your reasoning from
"All things are interdependent for their identity."
to
"All things are One"
is another non sequitur. The first statement does not imply the second.

What causes us to enter romantic relationships is well within the scope of science to investigate, and has been extensively investigated. so I would argue that while you can speculate philosophically about such causes, you can't just ignore all the scientific evidence that has already been put forward.

And you still didn't answer my question - if there is only one cause, how do you know that that one cause is that "we want to be loved". Why is the one cause not our social learning, or our evolutionary psychological influences, or the big bang for that matter. If there is one cause, how can you be so confident that the one you selected is it?

Oh, I haven't meant to say that "we want to be loved" is the one cause. I was just trying to debunk the myth that there can't be a single cause.

I've read through quite a bit of the scientific literature which has equipped me with knowledge of terms like oxytocin, phenethylamine, norepinephrine, nucleus accumbens, ventral tegmental area and so on and so forth. While this is all useful description, when I talk to others it tends to go over their head. However, I've also realized that it's not necessary, because the term "Love" actually refers to a collection of these processes. It is sufficient just to call it "Love" and tweese apart any qualitative differences in the kinds of love.

For example; There Are No Sides on Youtube does a good job of describing what he calls "Love TM"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS7vVqugs5E&feature=channel_video_title

Also the videos by Menoftheinfinite
When A Man Loves A Woman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34jl6vLP8p8
What is Love
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiaR6i0mj_8
Agape [Unconditional Love]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1J6xINDAvw
Ego, Attachment, Fame
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkEOPHQ8tKM
Sex and Ideality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CKFoaZa2kw
What It Means To Be A Real Man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdoKACVL-YI

Like I say, Erich Fromm wrote The Art of Loving and C.S. Lewis wrote The Four Loves without any of this talk about neurochemicals. All that happens there is you break "Love" into a set of chemicals and when you want to talk about "Love" you have to talk about all these separate chemicals, which is not really necessary for talking about love.

I should add that while I'm attempting to eliminate the requirement for scientific inquiry. The scientific community currently maintains that everything humans do is selfish and love falls into the category of "reciprocal altruism". I scratch your back, you scratch mine. As for love; I see adoration of myself in you and you see adoration of yourself in me.

So what ThereAreNoSides, MenOfTheInfinite, C.S. Lewis, Erich Fromm and others are trying to tell us is that although we may call reciprocal altruism "Love" there is as of yet another "love" which is not reciprocal which they call "Unconditional Love" or Agape. And this means that you love others expecting nothing in return. In-fact, you can expect to get hatred, envy, disapproval and stigma in return.

Because this kind of love doesn't concern itself with how you regard me. If there is something important to tell you, that can save you some suffering, then I ought to say it, even if you hate me for it. Rather than tell you lies such that you adore me.

"I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies." - Pietro Aretino

We don't have this love and we desperately need it. Instead we are caught up on looking good and hearing from each other how good we are, puffing ourselves up with pride. This is delusion. It is the "devil", the ego, as in Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones:

Let me please introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste

So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, have some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse (nicities)
Or I'll lay your soul to waste, mmm yeah

I shouted out,
"Who killed the Kennedy's?"
When after all
It was you and me

Tell me baby, what's my name
Tell me honey, can ya guess my name
Tell me baby, what's my name
I tell you one time, you're to blame

---------

The devil, the ego, currently runs this world, and if you try to be love and if you try to save people from the ego. They will kill you. This is what happened to Socrates and Jesus the Christ. "Science" can't prove this, it can help point you towards it, but that's it. Because we have egos, our egos throw out rationalizations for denying that we have egos. As one said; We don't know how clever the ego is, it created the devil so that it would have an external enemy to blame, and that is a threat to the ego but it is also a creation of the ego.

@Ryan S, I think you made an unintentional strawman argument. The topic was what causes people to engage in an intimate/romantic relationship, not what causes/is love. While the two concepts are closely related they are not interchangable.

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
Erich Fromm

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
Thomas Carlyle

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
Wallace Stevens

Okay, Jessss, this is a very elusive concept that I'm trying to share with you. In spiritual traditions it is claimed that people can spend a life-time in spiritual practices without ever becoming enlightened, so-to-speak, which just means they never understand what needs to be understood.

I want to stress that what I'm talking about here precludes all else. What I'm talking about maintains regardless of anything else, it is a requisite for the appearance or apparent existence of anything else.

What I'm talking about is essentially the formation of conscious experience - which necessarily comes before all scientific inquiry and all philosophical prose. It is the bedrock of all existence. There is an old Sufi saying; You can't hold running water in a bucket. The minute you put it in your bucket it stops running. Existence is the same way, if you try to encapsulate it in any system of thought or method of inquiry, you are going to come up short.

Instead what we need to do is reverse engineer existence. We need to begin with what is most incontrovertible and spiral out. All of this work has been done before us, and we merely need to follow the path laid by the great philosophers and prophets. But, we cannot get there quickly or easily, we need to understand beyond all doubt - everything.

We can talk about all kinds of things, but eventually we must realize that all "things" share a common criteria. A thing is demarcated, bounded, finite, limited. Any thing, whatever it is, even if it is just a passing thought, is bounded by what it is not. That which is not bounded, is not limited and extends for eternity. Such a thing does not exist, because if it did, there wouldn't be any-thing else in existence.

With that said, because all things are relative to what they are not, they are all causally bound to each other, thus the entirety of existence is boundless and interdependent. Existence therefor is not a thing, but all things are existent. Existence is a bottomless, limitless everything that cannot be encapsulated in any finite form. Thus, it is often said that existence has no name, or any name for it is misleading and inadequate.

The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao - The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ - The Holy Bible, Exodus 3:14

“As air existing in space goes everywhere and is unlimited, so are all things in me.... I am the Vedic rite, I am the sacrifice, I am food, I am sacred formula, I am immortality, I am also death; also the latent cause and the manifest effect.” - The Baghavad Gita, Chapter XI

Human beings are things, finite in nature, and interdependent on the surrounding environment. Read God. The surrounding environment which we call "nature" in contemporary culture is the I AM THAT I AM, the infinite, immortal God. We do not see it that way because we are finite beings, we have to employ our reason and not our discriminating sensory apparti to discern this.

As we come to be as individual entities we also perceive the world as consisting of individual entities, not perceiving the continuity inherent in them. This separation of mind is said to cause us fear and desire. Now, there is a 'you' to protect, to be embarassed, to feel love and greed, to be envious and spiteful. And all of those emotions can be understood, best, within the context of egotistical individuation.

The desire to be loved is the desire to bring concretion to the self (ego). It is the to give fuel to the delusional notion that you exist independently. Free-Will is another such illusion of independence. Our whole lives are driven by the illusion of our own independence. We define and redefine ourselves in order to stand-out as definite things, as really existing independent things. If everyone is jumping off a bridge, I might not just to be different. This is why counterculture springs up in every generation. It's not "Innovation" it's egotism. We desperately want the approval of others, we want to fit into the herd. It's a strange antagonism, we want to be seen differently, whether feared or revered, but we also want to fit in somewhere, even if it's the villain. Otherwise we do not have an identity, nothing to identify with, no belonging to the tapestry of finite being.

All of this could be described by evolutionary theory and similar results would obtain. The main difference is that evolution sees things in terms of gene propogation which is a flacid tool for explaning a lot of human behavior. It can only explain selflessness, altruism with regards to alpha-male behaviors. But I know, for myself, the possibility of a completely selfless act. The trick is, I'm the only person who knows about it, nobody else knows about it except me, there is no praise or blame coming my way because nobody else even knows.

Take some money, a large sum, and donate it in someone else's name, and then, don't tell anybody. Resist the urge to make your good deed known, and feel the pain of having to give-up something without getting even praise in return. You'll begin to realize that doing things for the sake of others is not what humans are generally about. If we don't get a pat-on-the-back a hoo-rah, way to go buddy. We just don't do anything.

Love, in whatever form, high-school sweethearts, bed-buddies, life-long romantic partners, doesn't matter, it's all the same bag of tricks. In the final analysis nobody would ever get involved with anyone else if not for recognition of our own selves and our uniqueness. If I was not unique, then why would you love 'me' and not someone else? If we were all the same, love for some-one would be senseless. We want to be loved for who we are, just like everything else we do, it comes back to our selves and our relative and transient existence. We cling to life this way.

Now, I also mentioned to you scientists and academic philosophers who are working on this same kind of theory. If you want to learn more about that approach, check-out Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel. Then, if you feel like getting into it deeper, pick up Metzinger's "Being No One". Being No One is a thorough functional analysis of conscious experience which takes a lot to wrap your head around. One said "The book wouldn't have been so short if it wasn't so long." It is meant for hardcore philosophy, Teh Ego Tunnel is more for layfolk.

Metzinger:

No such thing as "I" or "self" exists in the world: nobody ever had or was a "I".

All that exists are phenomenal "I"s, as they appear in conscious experience.

The phenomenal "I", however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model."

We are systems of ongoing process, we are not individuals, we only maintain a model of individuality. For some reason, these system fail to notice that their model of individuality is just a model, they mistake the model for the real.

This error is part of a broader misconception we have of mixing the representations of reality we have in our mind with reality itself. We regard the mental representation of an object as if it were the object itself.

The reason for this error is that the systems that map and represent for us the world and ourselves are "transparent" as the philosopher George Edward Moore used to call it. We do not see the mental processes that construct for us the representation of reality but see through them. This is the reason why whatever is represented to us is not grasped by us as a representation but as the reality itself.

Ryan S,

I really wish you would stick to the topic without feeling the need to "enlighten" me with your convoluted philosophical musings. I feel I can't have a useful discussion with you if you intend on going off on such tangents. I see this is a habit of yours.

A piece of advice: If you wish to effectively get your point across, conciseness is key. Remember the medium by which you are communicating - a comment section of a blog post. This is not an effective or appropriate platform for such essays.

I apologise if this sounds patronising but know that I truly don't intend for it to be. You are clearly an intellegent person but if you want to really get your point across, you are going to have to work on your communication skills and learn to adapt your message to the medium and audience that you are communicating with. Otherwise you are truly wasting your time.

Jessss,

Ironic! A co-worker of mine just praised me for my clarity and conciseness. He said "You speak clearly and definitively and you usually cover all the ways someone might misperceive you ahead of time."

I'm not saying he is right and you are wrong. I'm just saying its strange that you both criticized me in diametrically opposed ways. Its in the eye of the beholder perhaps.

Yes, people want reality to come to their level. I understand that, I can't bring reality to anyone's level. With risk of sounding nuttier than I already do, I would like to draw on Kabbalah for a traditional representation of what this is like. They insist that it is not reality who has to change, it is you who has to change and what should you change into? Reality! They call this "Equivelance of Form" where form refers to the modus operendi (mode of operation) of reality, which they proclaim to be love. Reality loves all, as the Sufi mystic Rumi said: "And still, after all this time, the Sun has never said to the Earth,
"You owe me."
Look what happens with love like that.
It lights up the sky."

Selfish love gets exactly what it deserves; heartache. All selfishness is rewarded with pain and suffering. But people don't see it, instead they externalize the cause and rally up some support against their perceived enemy.

I don't know if you are a fan of Rudyard Kipling, but his poem If is inspirational to me. Here it is in Typography: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tTeZNfwesg

Incidentally, MenOfTheInfinite philosopher Dan Rowden uploaded a clip addressing egotistical friendships and reality-avoidance strategies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k30RcOpBM-g&feature=channel_video_title