I used to watch The Jerry Springer Show.

I’d have done it ironically, but this was before irony permeated the cultural landscape, in the days before artisanal beanies, baristas, and microbrews.

I did it for less honorable reasons: to feel better about myself.

Because no matter what I had going on, at least I wasn’t getting a chair thrown at me for cheating on my sister with my cousin’s best friend at my uncle’s family reunion.

It’s the sitcom scene where two guys are using the bathroom and one says that no matter how bad it gets, at least he’s not the guy putting the sanitary cakes in the urinals.

The response?

“Yeah, but who does that guy think about?”

In both cases the quest for validation looks outward.

Instead of looking inward, I measure my happiness/contentment/sense of fulfillment by some metric that can be summed up as “at least I’m not them”.

Until life takes a turn, and we are them.

Or closer to them than us.

And all we can do about that chair is duck.