Cynically Yours

January 8, 2026January 8, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“Hi. My name is Rilaly, and I’m a cynic.”

I’m in recovery, which as any alcoholic will tell you is a stage in a process of trying to deprive ourselves of something we used to really enjoy. I never set out to enjoy ruining someone’s optimistic joy, but it felt so right to blast someone out of the water for saying something so nice about a person, place, or thing, and I felt sophisticated and intelligent when I that stupid and sanctimonious grin off their face. It wasn’t an emotional compulsion that drove me to do it, or medical, it was rhetorical. It was an adjective to describe the act of doing it, and a question with no answer.

**“Don’t you just hate happy people?”**

Very few people actually drop that line, but how many of us think it? Being right and wrong isn’t the primary driver of the cynic. We just want to put a chink in the silly narratives naive people have believed for so long. Most cynics would tell you that’s a bunch of bilge. “It’s all about facts, and if you can’t see that, you’re naive. Science and Math. That’s what we rely on.” But what if we’re wrong? What if the optimists could provide incontrovertible evidence of our errors, what would we say? We smile a chagrined smile and walk away, saving our ammunition for another day, because if we learn how to sing the song, we can never be truly wrong.

“Cynicism is not necessarily equal to or greater than intelligence,” is the mantra we cynics use in our sessions. “It’s camouflage we use to conceal what we don’t know.”

I loved that phrase until fellow cynic, Julie Anne, obnoxiously argued that, “We need to remember that just because it’s negative doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.”

Did you have to reread that last line? I know I did, rather I had to ask Julie Anne to repeat it as if I didn’t hear it the first time. It’s one of those down-the-stairs comments that doesn’t land until we’re walking away from it and into someone with that stupid grin on their face. When we run into that happy person who believes in things, they say things like, “I believe most people are good, until they prove me wrong.” Yow! Kabang! We hit them with our best shot, and we hit them with something negative that isn’t “necessarily true.” The argument about whether people are generally good or evil is difficult to prove, of course, but our certitude often relies on what appeals to us most, which basically proves Julie Anne’s assessment.

We all start out naive. We believe our parents are good people and excellent stewards and beacons, until they prove us wrong. We believe our teachers have our best interests in mind, until we learn that “Everything they taught us in school was wrong!” Cynicism almost feels like evolution at a certain point, until even the most optimistic learn to frame their optimistic beliefs with proper qualifiers, like, “I’m not saying the world doesn’t suck, but …” It’s their way of trying to express themselves without everyone dogpiling them with synonyms of naive, and there’s nothing worse than being called naive.

Several individuals saved us from the dreadful indignity of that embarrassing label by introducing us to the comfy confines of cynicism. Once we gave this idea that ‘everyone is awful’ a test drive, we discovered no one would ever be able to call us a fool again. It’s foolproof. It might not necessarily be true, as Julie Anne would remind us, but being wrong is far better than being foolish.

We reserve the term fool for people who believe in people, places, and things. Once we became cynical, we joined in on the laughter directed at believers. “How could they actually believe in something like that?” we asked our fellow cynics. We felt like we finally belonged. We found it much safer to believe most people are full of crud, and everyone from our parents to religious people to world leaders, and the most virtuous and honorable are probably a bunch of hypocrites who go home and beat their wives … when they aren’t our cheating on them (cue the laughter). “Imagine being them,” we say to conclude our laughter with the laughers, “believing that most people have the best intentions.” The comfy confines of cynicism aren’t limited to laughter and a sense of belonging, as it can provide a compelling sense of spiritual fulfillment when we learn how the world works, the real world.

The way the world works is so overwhelming and confusing when we’re young that it becomes our life’s mission to try to understand it. Our friends, and our unsafe, adult entertainment comedies taught us delicious decoders that we couldn’t wait to use them on those who don’t know. When we eventually crossed the sootstone arch (as opposed to the pearly gates of the optimistic believers) into the real world, we realized that if donned cynical camouflage it concealed what we don’t know, and we couldn’t wait for our peers to recognize how prepared we were. Our curtain raiser was directed at The Big Guys, because The Big Guys are honored, respected, and admirable, and their teardown was much more valuable to those in the know.

**“I heard the rumors, Danny,” Andrew Wood once wrote in a song called Mr. Danny Boy.**

After hearing that song, I did some research on Mr. Danny Boy, and I discovered it was about a man named Mr. Danny Thomas, who was considered one of the most honorable, admirable, and virtuous men who ever lived. I believed those rumors, because who wouldn’t? The naive wouldn’t. We all have our lists of the most admirable who’ve ever lived, but what did your list include? Was Danny Thomas on your list?

As with every characteristic, there’s a battle to be the most. We want to be the funniest, the richest, the strongest, and the best-looking. We may not strive to be the most cynical in the same vein, but we strive for the most sophisticated in our knowledge. And what do cynics do when we encounter their competition? They don’t strive to be more cynical, they call their fellow cynic out.

When we relentlessly go after a Big Guy, for example, some cynic will seek to diminish our “Most cynical” crown with the joke, “You just hate that guy, just admit it. The guy could cure cancer, and you’d still have a problem with him.” That guy, in this particular scenario, is Amos Muzyad Yaqoob Kairouz, (aka Mr. Danny Thomas). All right, he didn’t cure cancer, but the incredible strides that man made in his life were largely unimaginable before he started in. He founded St. Jude’s Hospital, which has a documented history of making a significant dent in the number of children who suffer from, and die, from cancer.

When I hear that, my cynical side immediately rears his ugly head and says, “Ok, but Danny Thomas was an actor, and a celebrity. He dealt in a world of make-believe, so I’m guessing he didn’t actually found St. Jude’s Hospital. He didn’t found it in the way we normally associate an individual founding a hospital. He was probably a celebrity figurehead who attached his name to a process that was already in place but needed the type of funding a celebrity can attract by attaching his name to the founding.”

Every celebrity seeks to show the public “another side” that displays the idea that they are well-rounded, sympathetic, empathetic, and heroically altruistic. In my humble opinion, that level of cynicism achieves a decent scorecard in most cases, but not here. Records state that Mr. Danny Thomas was actually a hands-on founder of St. Jude’s Hospital. Records state that St. Jude’s came into existence because Danny Thomas willed it into existence through decades of personal labor, fundraising, organizing, and strategic decision‑making. Records also indicate that Mr. Thomas involvement was not just some celebrity endorsement or involving a some sort of superficial or symbolic attachment. Records state that when it came to the founding of St. Jude’s Hospital, Danny Thomas was the man.

The next thing we cynics say, to appear smarter and more sophisticated in the way the real world works, in a way the average joe never will is, “Well then he probably found a way to turn this founding into some sort of money-making venture.” Or, “He probably profited off it in someway we’ll never know.” Again, we might be able to say that about most celebrity-backed ventures, as even the most charitable celebrities get paid administrative fees for handling the various activities of the hospital, for speaking engagements on behalf of the charity, they get paid to travel to and from, and/or some “other expenses” that aren’t illegal but they’re dubious bullet points that the dubious-minded can recite when that debate arrives. Again, not here. There’s no credible evidence — none — that Danny Thomas ever profited from St. Jude’s in anyway. Every historical record, nonprofit filing, and investigative report shows the same thing: he founded the hospital, built its fundraising arm, and spent decades raising money for it without ever taking a salary or receiving any financial benefits for those efforts.

Some records suggest St. Jude’s Hospital has helped save or ease the suffering of hundreds of thousands of children through direct treatment, and millions more through research that raised global survival rates. I’ve performed searches through search engines, and AI, asking for holes in this narrative. I’ve asked AI to approach the narrative regarding Danny Thomas founding St. Jude’s Hospital from a cynical perspective and provide for me information that a skeptic could latch onto when they’re seeking to know the real story behind Danny Thomas and St. Jude’s hospital, and AI can find no holes.

Yet, if you were alive during the early 90s after Mr. Danny Thomas died, and commentators were largely immune from character defamation lawsuits, you heard the rumors from standup comedians, shock jocks on the radio, and/or the cynical grapevine that grew from the fertilizer they created. Even if those rumors had any basis in fact—which they didn’t, according to every substantial news source, historical document, and/or any source that we might call substantive—the product of those rumors made substantial philanthropic and altruistic efforts and commitments to try to help children survive their fight against cancer.

“He wasn’t all that virtuous, let me tell you something,” those hanging from the cynical grapevine yelled with glee. “Let me tell you something ...”

“But Danny Thomas’s goal,” we should’ve said but didn’t, “was to help kids suffering from cancer.”

“I know, but I just can’t stand it when someone thinks they’re all high and mighty.”

“Fair enough, but what does it say about you that you prefer to focus on the rumors as opposed to his considerable effort and commitments to help kids fight cancer?”

“I see the world in black and white,” is the preferred mantra of the cynic. “I can’t help it, I’m a facts-oriented person.”

I know that line, because I lived with it for so many decades that I will forever be in remission, but I’m trying. I’m trying to see some light in the darkness of the cozy comfort of cynicism. I’m also trying to learn that “Just because it’s negative doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true,” but it just feels so facts-oriented to believe the worst of humanity, until they prove me wrong.

If I Could Just Have a Moment

May 19, 2012March 20, 2016 Rilaly2 Comments

I was sitting at an ice cream parlor having a moment with my Brother and his two boys. I remembered how my Brother and I sat at this very ice cream shop with our Dad when we were the boys’ age. I remembered how special those moments were to me at the time. My Dad had just passed at that point, so my memory may have been a little romanticized, but I didn’t care at that moment. I just enjoyed the tranquil moment for what it was, and what it used to be for us. I wanted this to be a moment for me and my Brother, but I also wanted this to be a moment that the boys would look back on with the same fondness I had. I wanted this moment to be as beautiful as the moments I had in the past, so they could be moments we looked back on in the future.

If we were all in a science fiction movie, and I had the ability to transport in time, I may have shut down the system with all of the simultaneous time leaps I was working through. The rapid leaps through time may have combined with all of the memories to cause a foreign substance to congeal in my brain until an embolism set off warning signals in the programmers’ algorithm, and forced them take me off the grid for my well-being.

We are always manufacturing memories for good and evil in the past, present and future. We recall a time when Missy McNasty said something awful to us. We remember how that comment ruined a future moment we had with Patty Pleasantpants, and how that could’ve been a beautiful moment the two of us shared, frolicking through the aftermath of used cups and popcorn boxes of a minor league hockey match. Missy wouldn’t allow us to enjoy that moment with her previous comment. It just ruined the mood for us, and it ruined that moment. We wish we could go back in the past and tell Missy what an equally awful person she was, so the next time we frolic with Patty we can laugh, and be happy, and have a great and memorable moment. Plus, we think if we could start confronting Missy types more often, we could be happier people in general.

The idea that we consult our memory for mood is a construct that we devise for ourselves in the present. We normally love frolicking through used cups and popcorn boxes of a minor league hockey match, but for some reason we can’t enjoy that moment in time. We know that we shouldn’t let Missy’s comments get to us like we do, but we can’t help it. We can’t enjoy happy moments when we decide that we’re going to be miserable.

You read that correctly, we decide to be miserable and happy based upon the memories we decide to construct at the time. If we decide were going to be happy today, we will construct good memories that allow us to be happy. If we decide that we’re going to be in a bad mood today, regardless how much fun we’re having, we’ll construct the bad memories that we need to create to support the bad mood we’ve decided to be in. We select memories that we’re going to construct. It’s a tough concept to grasp, and we normally use the term “selective memory” as a pejorative to describe someone that puts everyone else in a bad light while casting themselves in a favorable light, but if recent findings in psychology are correct, we all have selective memory.

In the paragraph above, I originally used the word ‘consult’ more often than I should’ve when writing about how we select memories, for it’s an incorrect term to describe how we remember. When we remember we don’t consult a memory bank, so much as we construct one…on the fly…regardless of the moment we’re in. We’re in total control of what we think, regardless what we think.

The incorrect word ‘consult’ also gives the image of one going to a video vault to find a specific memory, or going to a file on a hard drive. Memory is selective in a sense, but it is a selective in the sense that we reconstruct memory rather than reproduce it. At the hockey match, we see someone who is wearing a David Bowie T-shirt, this reminds us of Missy McNasty, the David Bowie fan. We can’t help but think about the awful thing she said to us, and we’re in a bad mood. You were not in control of that memory, because it was right there in front of us. To this degree, you’re not in charge of what triggers memory, but you are in total control of the construction team of your brain that puts the memory together.

In the book, You are Not so Smart David McRaney gives the analogy that memories are equivalent to a bucket full of Legos. We select the individual pieces from the bucket to create the product that we want to create at any given moment. We decide to locate the individual Lego pieces we want to create a memory that provides us either satisfaction or sorrow, depending on the mood we want to be in at any given moment.

This isn’t to say that all memories are incorrect, but they can be influenced. If memories were files from a hard drive that we simply had to locate, we would never be incorrect once we located them. If memories were videos from a video vault, we couldn’t enhance a memory to be happy and undress a memory to be sad. When we construct the same memory two different ways, depending on our mood, it should be obvious to us that we’re constructing these memories on the fly, but we usually qualify our minor errors by saying, “Well, that’s just how I remember it.”

How many of us have heard a friend recount a moment we’ve shared with them, and those memories run contrary to how we remember them? How many of us have believed that that friend was lying? “He knows how it happened,” we tell a third party. “He just knows that how it really happened makes him look like a fool.” How many of us have confronted that friend, only to find that they were genuinely shocked at the manner in which we remember things? It happens all the time, and some of the times they’re not purposely lying. They’ve just constructed their memory to keep them happy in their world. It may be delusional, but it happens to us more often than we might think.

Talking heads often speak of a narrative that a politician creates for the voters. The narrative that the politician creates is the story of what happened as they see it, or as they want you to see it. The narrative usually contains a grain of truth to it, for if it didn’t we would locate all the Lego pieces in our bucket that refutes everything the politician said. A smart politician, with a smart team of advisers and speech writers, will assemble a narrative, that has just enough truth to get us nodding our heads in agreement with what they’ve done in the past. They will then add a wrinkle to the narrative that enhances our memory and in doing so they add a memory to our Lego bucket when it comes time to vote. They will then repeat that enhanced narrative so often that it creates a construct in our brain that is almost impossible to defeat by those who remember things differently. With politicians, and their narratives, we all have selective memories. If it is a politician that we favor, we decide to remember the past in the light the politician provides, but if don’t favor them we may construct a memory that runs counter to everything the politician tries to tell us. As McRaney says throughout his book, we’re not as smart as we think we are when it comes to our memory. Memories can be influenced, manipulated, refuted, and changed entirely.

I couldn’t get over what a pleasant day I was having at that ice cream parlor with my Brother and his boys. I had all my memory constructs lined up in a fashion that made me happy. If I had died right then and there, it would’ve taken a coroner a week to pry the smile off my face. I remembered laughing with my Brother and my Dad, as I laughed with my Brother and his boys. I remembered a sense of being rewarded for being good when I was eating ice cream as a boy. I remembered how long it took my Brother to finish his ice cream cone and how that started a cavalcade of jokes about how long it took my Brother to complete anything. The day was shaping up to be a memorable one that I thought I could call upon if I was ever feeling down, when one of the kids started to act up.

He started screaming for no reason. He started rough housing with his younger brother, he started disobeying his Dad and talking back. He started screaming for more ice cream, and he did anything and everything he could to be unruly. I would’ve never done such a thing. My Dad would’ve tanned my hide. Especially in public, I thought. I would’ve been more respectful to those around me, I thought. How dare he ruin this perfect moment was my first thought. He’s ruined our moment, my moment, and I was angry at him for that.

Until, I started taking a more realistic look at my past. I started to remember that I was just as unruly as my nephew at his age, in this very same ice cream parlor. I remembered being bored, just sitting there, while the adults tried enjoy a moment of tranquility. My juvenile mind had been racing at a hundred miles an hour trying to create excitement for myself, and I wanted more ice cream, and I started rough housing with my younger brother just to make something happen. When I got in trouble for doing it, I started to mouth off, until a screaming match ensued, and my Dad marched us out of the place angrily. I ruined that moment, just like my nephew ruined this moment.

I was no different than him at his age. We both suffered from the oldest boy syndrome of seeking attention by selfishly trying to entertain ourselves by being naughty and unruly during the slow moments, with no respect for the others around us who are trying to enjoy a moment of tranquility at an ice cream parlor. Prior to my nephew’s outburst, I had been constructing a narrative of the pleasant moments of my life that were, in retrospect, not as pleasant as I wanted to remember them being.