Generally useless

"To generalize is to be an idiot." - William Blake

~

The only accurate general statement I could hope to make is the ridiculously obvious one: All generalizations are inaccurate. The attempt at pseudo-paradox there is likely to be off-putting for readers in a way that negates any power the statement have had otherwise; it reeks of trying too hard to be clever (even though the thought itself came with relative ease, truth be told). Of course, the speculation about how readers would react could very well be construed as a paltry attempt at reverse psychology, where they are only turned off by the notion of me suggesting what turned them off. And the way the sentences in this paragraph keep following this pattern runs the very real risk of losing whatever readers have bothered to stick with it this far.

So the only recourse left available to us at this point is to delve back into the specific, but that throws down the proverbial gauntlet to the reader to decide whether he/she agrees with the details of the example offered.

Honestly, I am as flummoxed as you regarding why this is still going. The only explanation I can offer: I really am as screwed up as you're thinking I am. And now you're thinking that the ploy of self-deprecation is intended to steal the argument (so to speak) in a rather pathetic attempt to elicit some modicum of sympathy, when all I can say about that is if that was my motivation it was unconscious. However, you're not buying that, not merely because you cannot believe me that oblivious to my mind's inner workings but because I've made you dismissive of everything I say by suggesting you're dismissing everything I say.

For the love of all that is decent in the world, please stop reading! I implore you—cease running your eyes over the words in front of you! It's entirely likely that I'll keep on going, caught in a loop of neurotic self-analysis.

No! Don't refute that this is not particularly self-analytical, and that any implicit neurosis is not to blame for the way this continues. There is no point in you trying to render any sort of logical conclusion from this; I assure you that one is not coming, and you would be well-served to limit your expectations now to avoid inevitable disappointment.

Egad! I just did it again. There's little point in apologizing; you wouldn't believe it to be genuine after all these implicit and explicit moments of ostensible manipulation that were nothing more than trying to anticipate your reactions and account for them in how the piece went after that, and which succeeded only in burying itself all the further.

That deprecatingly accurate assessment you found off-putting, but if you're still reading at this point you have expressly ignored direct pleas earlier in the piece, and I doubt either of us can really have much empathy for our combined suffering. This went as it did, and if you're reading this far you stuck with it for reasons about which even I cannot guess. That's on you.

Specifically.