Warning! This is a rather long and monotonous and random and robotic and .......but I do eventually get to the point. 

‘Dreams only come true for Disney characters and rich people’. That was my life mantra!

I lived my life devoid of all conscious emotions and actions and thoughts. Life was just happening to me and I was obediently showing up everyday for the next chapter. 

What that means is...living like a robot. Allowed to carry out those few programmes I was conditioned to. 

• Conditioned to look forward to the weekend, then conditioned to feel depressed that Monday is here, which means I have to get my depressed butt to work (somewhere during the programming process, days got labelled as the happy days to look forward to and the evil days we couldn’t wait to be over, like Mondays. Think about how many potentially great Mondays we’ve been cheated out of!) 
  

• Conditioned to gossip about what a loser so & so is but equally conditioned to act like so & so’s best friend when in the company of so & so. Conditioned to keep my mouth shut if an intelligent thought occurs to me. Conditioned to complain about all the things I don’t have as I gorge on pizza, blackberry in one hand, i pad in the other, watching a Christian Aid advertisement. 
  

• Conditioned to always be suspicious of others intent and that adults are always right and that we need to watch the news on an hourly basis to keep up to date with all the rapes, murders and news on the recession. 
  

• Conditioned to use phrases like, 
  

       ‘knowing my luck I’ll never get that’
       ‘Life’s a bitch’
       ‘No pain no gain’
       ‘Good things don’t last’

• Conditioned to take my anger and frustration out on friends and family because I’m conditioned to believe that you accept the cards you’re dealt and have you noticed, they’re always the crap ones? 
  

• Conditioned to to believe that dreams only come true in Disney movies and also conditioned to believe that Walt Disney is a Prat for creating talking teapots! 
  

• Conditioned to think that life is a succession of random events, somehow happening to you, which are controlled by the master puppeteer. The judgemental man (feminists would disagree) that some say is white, others say is black, some say brown and some even say blue. But the point is, this man/woman is a loving, omnipresent being that will kill all of us through natural disasters, so he doesn’t have to sit on the judging panel, along with Satan, Joker, Batman and for good measure, Minnie Mouse, to decide who passed through the audition stages to get into the knock out round of, ‘final chance for heaven’.
  

• I was conditioned to believe a belief that was once a belief, originating from a belief. 
  

• Conditioned to think that life prepares us to pay our bills and conditioned with epic proportions of fear that each Govt’ official is armed with an electrified cattle prod that will be used if we default on payments. 
  

• I was conditioned to believe that I needed a degree, a masters degree, a Phd and an ABCD to succeed in life, otherwise the only jobs available would be toilet cleaner, bin man or burger flipper. To make matters worse, before the degree lecture, I had just been conditioned by a teacher that I was a dumb ass and so I better get a head start on the burger flipping. 
  

• I was also conditioned to believe that you couldn’t be happy all of the time, it was simply a statistical impossibility. Out of 100%, we could hope to be happy for 20% of the time and out of the remaining 80% we could choose from sadness, anger, jealousy. 
  

• I was conditioned to believe that nobody in the history of jobs has ever liked their job so just shut up and get on with it, bar all those that do actually like their job, they’re all Disney characters or members of the Illuminati. 
  

• I was conditioned to fear failure, for failure is the habit of failures. Fear embarrasment, fear expressing myself, fear new experiences, fear strangers and generally fear the world. 
  

Until.....one day my brain metaphorically exploded as I chomped on a Refresher. It was in that moment it occurred to me that we had become a race of whining, lifeless, predictable, limp robots and even our owners were getting bored of us. And by owners I mean that consciousness that lives inside of each of us that is a boundless magician but it wants to separate itself ASAP from this lump of skin it has been given responsibility of. 

But, the greatest realisation was that life is so simple and so sweet and so much fun but we’ve covered all of that sweetness with artificial complication and drama. So I gave in my resignation to the robot mill. 

And so, the book was born, a commentary on how pathetic us folk can be in such a bodacious universe! And you’ll even find some tips on how to uncover the sweetness.