I forgot my coinage “metannoying” until need brought it back to memory.

This magical word transforms something infuriating and alienating into something properly comical.

Metannoying is what happens to a soul when it experiences its first comprehensive conversion (metanoia) and it wakes up into the center of a new world as an all-intuiting sage and starts babbling crypic oracularity as if nobody has ever heard such profundity. “No, no! You’ve been saying things you don’t really understand. Hear me and heed my meaning well, for I am the knower of unsayable knowing, who can refill these words with my overflowing wisdom,” and so on and on and on.

Sadly I know this phenomenon inside-out from firsthand experience. I, myself, was the most metannoying person who ever lived for at least five years, until I toned it down with felt irony and humor. Then I became maybe second or third most metannoying person until… — I don’t know… – until I die, maybe? But competition is heating up. The youngsters have rediscovered mysticism, and they know All like only the freshest convert can. So if you’re a seeker of wisdom, go fetch your little golden wisdom cup and get ready to drink deep. Here comes the deluge.

I estimate it will take cheerfully forbearing at least a generation and a half of metannoying youth to pay down my debt to the cosmos. But I think I’ll do as much of that forbearing from a distance. This is a slower route to solvency, but it is what I can afford.