We live in a work-centric society.
So profoundly work-centric that, before asking how you are, people ask what you are.

And what you are always means the same thing:
— What do you do for a living?
— What did you study?
— What are you going to work as?

How you feel is irrelevant.
Which is why the question “How are you?” is almost always answered with a courteous lie:
“Very well, thank you.”

In this society, there are three great groups.

The first:
Those who have never worked six hours a day for a continuous month
because they were born exceedingly wealthy.
They are admired by some, envied by others,
and forgiven by everyone.

The second:
Those who have never worked six hours a day for a continuous month
because they were born desperately poor.
They are neither admired nor envied.
They are invisible…
or worse: inconvenient.

And the third group is us.
The rest of us.
Those who do work.
Those who hold the scenery upright.

As the eight-hour workday begins to fracture,
I shall use six hours a day as a reasonable average.
Six hours of life surrendered each day.
Six hours multiplied by months.
By years.
By decades.

And here emerges the central paradox of the work-centric society:
the two groups who do not work are permitted everything.
They may be brilliant geniuses
or profoundly mediocre.
They may think, speak, rant, create, fail.

But the group that does work…
is permitted almost nothing.

It is convenient — rather like pest control —
that this vast group think as little as possible.
And if it thinks, that it speaks little.
And if it speaks, that it does so quietly.

This is why football — or soccer — in much of the world,
the NBA, the NFL and the MLB in the United States,
rugby and cricket in countries once colonised by England,
function as the first restraint
against the most dangerous risk to power structures:
thinking…
and saying what one thinks.

If that proves insufficient, religion follows.
And if prayer fails,
we fill your home with alcohol
or your pockets with drugs.

Thus it becomes clear why speaking in platitudes is so well regarded,
and why refusing to do so is so poorly received.

As an antidote, this podcast exists.
Manual of the Lucid Misfit was designed to articulate the discomforts of ordinary life,
so that being the black sheep of the family
or of the neighbourhood
is not such a solitary experience.

Social gatherings — physical or virtual —
are the finest laboratory in which to verify all of this.
As long as we speak of the predictable, everything flows.
But let someone mention an uncomfortable subject,
and the gathering implodes,
while those who dared to speak
are symbolically crucified.

I am increasingly convinced that political allegiance
is chosen like a football club.
In childhood.
And never changed.

Gender can be changed.
Religion as well.
But the club… never.

In countries ruled by the round ball,
one’s club is a prenatal identity.

The football divide is as irreconcilable
as left and right,
as the Grammy winners of 2026,
anti-vaxxers,
climate-change deniers,
flat-earthers,
and those who listen to music other than our own.

And I am increasingly certain of something even more unsettling:
at any moment now, there will be an official presentation
of at least one superior non-human race.

I do not know whether it comes from beyond the planet
or from deep layers of time.
But it exists.
From pre-Adamic eras.

A race that has always accompanied human evolution
and has already designed a communication agenda
so that, when it appears,
it does not overly impress
either those who never worked six hours a day
or those of us who did.

The author offers more than 13,000 posts drawn from his personal history on his blog, freely accessible at http://pablomera.blogspot.com

And he invites listeners to write to him at tromp@hotmail.com.]

Football (soccer) remains one of the last true sanctuaries of meritocracy.

There, no narrative can save you. It does not matter whether the best team wins or loses, because if you are poor… you do not play. If you are unfit for purpose… you watch from the sidelines.

No solemnity can conceal a mistake, no title can excuse mediocrity. The body speaks. And it speaks plainly.

The same applies to other sports, regardless of the size or shape of the ball, but football is the king.

What happens in political power is altogether different. And not only there.

Society accepts authorities even when merit is absent, because power—once accumulated—ceases to be a tool and becomes an object of worship. It no longer matters whether actions are good, bad, or indifferent. Power itself becomes unquestionable.

Family. Work. Government.

The setting is irrelevant: it is always easier to adapt to harmful, unjust, or downright deranged rules than to pause and challenge them.

I am still struck— by that peculiar solemnity imposed in certain circles with a single purpose: to invalidate any question or to disguise the absence of merit.

That shameful excess of reverence. Almost choreographed. Particularly visible in some academic hierarchies and in certain religious groups that no longer venerate ideas, but themselves. A reverence bordering on the militarised.

Sixty-six years ago, in his brief and razor-sharp text “Borges and I,” Jorge Luis Borges quoted Spinoza: “Everything desires to persist in its own being; the stone eternally wishes to be stone, and the tiger, a tiger.”

Thus, the tepid become superficial. The self-interested, accommodating. And the cowardly, devoid of dignity.

That perfect cocktail creates the ideal climate for despots, ignoramuses, and manipulators to ascend to the status of authority.

My analogy today crosses cultures. Japan and Spain.

There is a condescension towards the other that wounds. It wounds as much as those Japanese or Spanish series in which a voice-over explains the plot as though the viewer were incapable of understanding it unaided.

That same condescension seeps into everyday life. When that character appears—black suit, round bowler hat— an anime-born stereotype demanding our attention and instructing us what to think and when to applaud.

But not all of us require a voice-over. Some of us still trust our ability to understand, to doubt, and—above all— not to adapt docilely to that which does not deserve respect.

And that is precisely what this manual is about.

You have just listened to the first episode of the third season of The Lucid Misfits Handbook by Pablo Mera— Pablo E. M. G. to the English-speaking world, and simply “Trompo” to those of us who knew him long before the name travelled.

Today, he introduces one of his newest analogies— almost delirious at first glance, yet ultimately revealing itself not to be so.

His podcasts travel the world and are available on all major platforms.

The author offers more than 13,000 posts drawn from his personal history on his blog, freely accessible at http://pablomera.blogspot.com

And he invites listeners to write to him at tromp@hotmail.com.]

How simple it would be, would it not, to remain blissfully unaware of things.

To carry on regardless. To flee into the safe havens of traditional escapisms. Yet alas, such a path is not mine to tread. I lack the capacity to turn a blind eye to what unfolds before me.

Neither do I claim to possess the ultimate truth in all that I think or say. But I am keenly aware of this: we are living through a bellicose moment in history, a time when two major wars rage simultaneously, alongside several lesser conflicts across Africa—wars scarcely mentioned, eclipsed by those deemed greater, louder, and more geopolitically “significant.”

For in both traditions, as taught in their more orthodox forms, pleasure and delight were not to be sought for their own sake. Sacrifice was the path. Pleasure was treated with suspicion. From this sprang the stoic culture that many today proudly embrace, declaring with a certain grim satisfaction: “I am stoic, I can withstand anything.” Yet sooner or later, the mind cracks.And yet, another way of approaching life does exist. I do not speak of naïve notions that “peace and love” are sufficient to mend all wounds.

Rather, I speak of a path distinct from stoicism and perpetual sacrifice. For to limp forward in constant self-pity, never pausing to savour one’s moments of freedom, is profoundly unhealthy. Epicureanism, by contrast, proposed quite the opposite: to seek refined pleasures, serenity of soul, the absence of pain, the exchange of ideas through peaceful dialogue.

A vision wholly opposed to our present, where life seems but an endless battle to be right, to proclaim one’s truth as absolute.…This relentless spirit finds expression in the rigidity of our daily reasoning. Matters must be settled swiftly, in the manner of a social media post—quick, shallow, digestible—because, it is said, there is “no time” to read anything longer.

And in reducing everything thus, one loses the very flavour of life itself. I see a culture that applauds simplism, while sneering at deep analysis. To pause, to think, is no longer in fashion.Here I must mention Fabián C. Barrio, a contemporary Spanish philosopher and writer whose videos on YouTube I find quite excellent.

He suggests that facile praise is often the weapon of the untrustworthy, a means to win our confidence, to manipulate, and ultimately to dispossess us of our own judgement.Of course, we are not all the same, no matter how insistently some argue for a “natural equality.”

We are not. As Dr. HC Ruth Rosental, the distinguished Argentine psychomotor therapist and director of C.E.I.A.C., reminds us in her award-winning book Bullying: “We are not all the same. We are all different.” Each individual is endowed with unique traits. There is no universal formula for sameness.

And finally, I cannot help but recall the so-called Dunning–Kruger effect: those who know least are most convinced that they know the most. That, I daresay, says everything. At such times one is tempted to invoke divine intervention. That well-worn Latin phrase—Deus ex machina—suddenly takes on real meaning. For if all is left in the hands of humankind, nothing, I fear, shall ever change.

☆The author is Pablo Mera, or Pablo E.M.G. to the English-speaking world—though a few old friends still call him “Trompo.” He adores Metallica and Oasis, he is still a rugger at heart, blood type A+, and his podcasts can be found across every platform.

Pablo published over 12,950 posts upon his blog: http://pablomera.blogspot.com.You may write to him at mailto:tromp@hotmail.com