ornoth

I can’t help but point out the huge contradiction between the fictional stories we humans tell each other—which all end happily ever after—and the reality of our lives, which must invariably come to an unhappy end.

This won’t be the most joyful article you read today. It’s been lingering in my outbox for a while, as I struggled with whether sharing my feelings was worth the negative reaction they might elicit from readers. But I think it’s an important point to talk about, so I’m posting it as-is, despite my trepidation about whether anyone shares these thoughts and feelings or not.

Over the past year, I spent some time exposing myself to mainstream entertainment media: movies, television, and so forth. As I did so, I couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast between my life and the lives of the characters depicted on the screen.

In that constructed world, happy endings aren’t just the norm; they are nearly inevitable. The romantic lead winds up overcoming all obstacles, conquering their foes, winning their love interest, and living out a long life. You have to search awfully hard to find a lasting tragic outcome in mainstream media. As a society, we seem unwilling to acknowledge that sometimes—oftentimes—things just don’t work out.

Even the bad things that happen along the way: in the stories we tell one another, they’re heavily foreshadowed, or else they’re somehow “deserved”. There aren’t any surprises: nothing bad ever happens purely by blind chance, and there are absolutely no unjust outcomes. No matter what the challenge, you can bet it is temporary and that the protagonist will overcome it in the end.

While I was observing all these media messages, the protagonist in my real-world life was beset with problems. Biking home from work one day, I was hit by a car that ran a stop sign, and had to foot all the medical and bike repair bills myself because American law simply doesn’t protect cyclists.

On the way home another night, I had a solo bike crash that resulted in a mild concussion. But more severe were the injuries inflicted at the hospital, where a botched IV left me with a foot-long hematoma and an elbow that wouldn’t move for six weeks.

Not long after, I was diagnosed with a painful gall bladder, and had to radically change my diet while waiting two months to undergo surgery to remove it. Following the surgery, my symptoms came right back.

Next, after taking my cat to the vet, he had a mysterious reaction to the routine vaccinations, and the young, healthy pet that I expected to enjoy for many more years was suddenly and unexpectedly dead.

Since all of this happened while I was out of work, it left me struggling with unplanned financial pressures.

While living this discouraging reality, the preponderance of “happily ever after” stories on television seemed amazingly artifical. Although I wouldn’t pretend to assert that life is nothing more than suffering, it’s pretty clear that suffering happens to all of us. And some kinds of suffering will stay with us until the end of our lives.

When you think in terms of happy endings, in the real world nobody dies happy. Some people may accept its inevitability better than others, and some live long enough to welcome it. But in general, people who realize they are dying must be pretty profoundly unhappy about it. In the book of our lives, when we reach the final chapter, we all suffer our ultimate loss. In the real world—the one we live in—the hero always dies, and in all of history not one person has been born who lived “happily ever after”.

Whether it happens tonight or a few years from now, our lives inevitably end. We mourn the tragedy of someone who dies young, saying it was “before their time”, as if there were some cosmic sense of justice overseeing our lives rather than a blind roll of the dice. As a child, I was given an early lesson in that fallacy when my older sister—recently married and a new mother—died at age 21.

Even more tragic is the gradual decline and infirmity that inevitably comes with old age: having to somehow find the inner strength to be okay giving up everything we’ve ever been, seen, done, or enjoyed. As our future dwindles to months—to days—the grand story that we spent our entire lives constructing must end, and in a manner I would describe as “unhappily”.

So what is the point of my persistently rubbing this in your face? Is it just so that I can be a smug pessimist? Not really. It’s more that I felt a need to provide a more realistic counterpoint to the ridiculously fanatstic stories we’re indundated with by modern media.

I think it’s incredibly important that we acknowledge that we will die. While most people try to avoid thinking about death, for me it is a vital, pressing reminder to derive maximum joy out of each moment of every day. My intention here is actually constructive, rather than nihilistic: I encourage everyone to live and pursue their happiness with wisdom and insight that derives from that sense of urgency.

And another huge reason for this post—perhaps surprisingly—is to offer some collective sympathy. You and me and everyone we know: we are all in the same unfortunate position. Our lives—the beautiful epics we’ve worked so hard to construct—will end as tragedies. There will be no happy endings. As such, I offer everyone my sympathy and understanding and fellowship. Being alive and also being aware of the inevitability and proximity of death: this is a difficult, unpleasant, anxiety-ridden state, but one that we all share in common.

Believe me, I feel for you.

A recent visit to the international restaurant chain Texas Roadhouse got me thinking about the evergreen topic of corporate insensitivity.

Throughout the chain, the staff are required to do a country music line dance at least once per hour they work. That’s pretty demeaning in my eyes, but secondary to something else that wigged me out even more.

And that is this: the waitstaff—who are of course being paid well below minimum wage—are required to wear tee shirts that say “I ♥ my job!”

I haven’t known many waitpersons who truly loved their jobs. In fact, most of them were waiting tables because they were trying to keep their heads above water financially and didn’t have any other marketable skills. I can’t imagine many of them would agree with the sentiment expressed by the corporate sloganeering that Texas Roadhouse employees are forced to wear.

Aside from being an intensely new low in demeaning the working class, the thing that irks me here is the amazing myopia or hubris of a corporation that thinks it has the right to assert an individual’s personal opinion and display that opinion publicly. It’s a violation of the employee’s privacy and the separation of one’s work life from one’s personal life.

There’s no meaningful legal difference between those tee shirts and a company putting out a television commercial that shows photographs of employees claiming that they voted for a particular political party or that they support a particular political position. And it’s a very short road from there to requiring that employees look, speak, act, buy, and vote according to the corporation’s demands.

Lest you think that’s a ridiculous assertion, consider that many employers already expect that employees will promote the company’s marketing efforts in social media by using their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts.

What gets lost amidst all this corporate interference in people’s personal lives is that employment is a mutual agreement which is supposed to be in both parties’ interest, and that corporations should both ask and compensate employees for their sacrifices.

In the past, we saw how the labor market changed when corporations transitioned from a lifetime employment model to employment at will. When the corporate world unilaterally decided that company loyalty to the employee was outmoded, they eventually learned that they could no longer assume they would receive the same level of employee loyalty to the company in return. In short, loyalty—like everything else in the employer-employee relationship—is a two-way street.

Now that companies are finding new ways to assert control over their employees’ personal lives, they need to realize that if the company expects to intrude on an employee’s personal life, they also need to make room for the full reality of that employee’s personal life.

Unfortunately, that’s something most companies have yet to learn. I have a friend who is a software engineer. When his company asked its staff for ideas about how employees could further promote the company, he suggested that the best way he could contribute would be to post to a company-sponsored engineering blog, where he could discuss the technical details of some of the innovative work his team had done, giving the company some free credibility in the engineering community.

Needless to say, corporate leadership didn’t want anything to do with promoting the skills and reputation of its engineering team, for fear of losing them to other employers. As a result, my friend’s willingness to promote corporate marketing efforts on his personal Facebook and Twitter accounts—as well as his overall sense of loyalty to the company—have both been correspondingly lowered. Edit: And a few months later, he left the company.

Employment is a transaction which is supposed to be equitable and of mutual benefit. The perpetual efforts of corporations to wrest every last ounce of value from their employees, usually without offering fair compensation, has impact on employee loyalty and retention that is obvious, but which most companies utterly fail to consider.

Texas Roadhouse’s requirement that waitstaff wear tee shirts that say “I ♥ my job!” doesn’t make me want to work there. In fact, quite the opposite: I’m moved to deep sympathy for their staff, who have to work in such a demeaning and humiliating environment created by their overbearing and insensitive employer.

Back on 1/13, I read the book "Conversations with God", which Inna had given me. I thought I should include my reaction here. The book had an interesting premise, but it was also very repetitive and not exactly written for someone like me. However, I did find nine substantive concepts to take away. They were:

Act out of your highest thought, not fear.
Judge based on your own ideas, thoughts, and experiences, rather than what you're told or what you're expected to do.
Control your "story" and what you tell others you are, because those do create, establish, and limit what they think of you.
Fairness and justice are based wholly on judgementalism. If we are not supposed to judge others, fairness and justice are inappropriate behaviors.
Similarly, you should try to live your life without expectations, because they create judgementalism.
There is no meaning to life but to experience life itself.
Both relationships and any setbacks in your life are opportunities to demonstrate your self-improvement.
I should spend more time thinking about the attributes of the person I'd like to be.
One way to reverse bad behaviors is to first act differently, the way you imagine you might act if your motivations were different. Then change how you think about those actions. Then change your motivating thought, which will cement the behavioral changes you've been mimicking.

The book kept my attention. It wasn't anywhere near "transformational", but it had some good thoughts that I'd like to incorporate into my daily life. Just nothing radical.

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