FlexRex: Fictional Blogger

A misanthrope is someone who dislikes people in general. It is not the dislike of individual human beings, but rather dislike of the features shared by all humanity throughout place and time, including oneself.

In my experience, it seems such people gravitate towards occupations where they can either be A) isolated from people or B) get paid to screw with people. And if they're really into it, many of them seemingly aspire to become physisicians.

Flex officing can be an ideal environment for the misanthrope. Through the wonderfully impersonal nature of email, the misanthrope can turn nearly every communication into a lock of trust by expressing contempt, distrust, and loathing for anyone not not directly addressed.

Writers don't like to label themselves as misanthropes. Instead, they are more comfortable giving their characters misanthropic qualities. ln fact, let's take a look at an analysis of the Misanthrope guy in the Molière play of the same name.

"The Misanthrope, Alceste, impersonated by the author himself, was a character wholly new to the stage, and, unlike the central figure in other plays from the same pen, is intended to enjoy at least our respect, and even a certain measure of sympathy."

Ok, this is familiar.

"High and noble in nature, he is alienated from the world by its want of heart, its insincerities, its more or less veiled falsehood, its hypocrisies of complaisance, its thousand petty foibles."

Ouch.

"His practice is at least equal to his theory; contempt for the harmless hypocrisies of every-day life, however, does not prevent him from becoming the slave of a woman in whom they are fully represented, the sprightly, accomplished, heartless coquette Célimène."

Sounds like my eX.

"He is conscious of his folly even as he gives way to it the most, and it is upon the conflict in his case between head and heart, terminating in the predominance of the former, that the interest of the play chiefly depends."

So then dear reader, I guess you could stop reading this blog from here on. You already know the ending.