Happiness – Page 21 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Holiday Stress and Why You Don’t Need It, Featuring a Beer Drinking Baby

“Jen, if this needle goes past here, you’re fired. Does that make you feel stressed at all? Does it? Jen? Are you sure? Jen? Does it? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?” – IT Crowd

Playing triangle in a band is something a Jamaican won’t do, mon. It stresses them out to be responsible for every ting.

There is a love/hate relationship with the Holidays. By the Holidays, I really mean Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve – and not any of the other 107 holidays in November or 69 holidays in December our crack Wilder research team was able to find with one Google® search. There are (really) days like National Cookie Day on December 4, International Ninja Day on December 5, and National Salesperson Day on December 13. National Salesperson Day? I’m not buying that one.

One reason we love the Holidays is how we looked forward to them when we were kids. The Holidays meant, at the minimum, time off from school. In the American Dream Household®, there was time for snowmen, sledding, and mugs of hot chocolate while we sang Christmas carols for our neighbors. On top of all of that, there was the smell of turkey on Thanksgiving, the tantalizing secrets of the wrapped mysteries under the Christmas tree, and the miracle of pulling Uncle Vern’s finger.

Okay, our neighbors had concertina wire and watch towers, so we couldn’t get within a quarter mile of their houses without the password. I’m sure we would have belted out a few Christmas carols if they hadn’t fired those warning shots.

I did accomplish one thing last Christmas. I won the Netflix® marathon.

As I got older, the hate part of the Holidays begins to show up: stress from bills, stress from dealing with corporate Christmas parties, stress from having to decide which sets of parents get which visits on which days, stress from having to deal with relatives that you’d rather never see again, and stress from hiding the bodies of those relatives you will never see again.

Some people get hit so badly with this stress that they actually panic. And panic can be a serious mental illness, not carefree and happy go lucky like the ones I have. But I gave up on being upset at Christmas years ago.

I’ve learned the secret: I don’t care.

I will say, the FBI looked more competent in Die Hard than they have for the last three years . . . .

Okay, that’s not entirely true, I do care. But I choose what I care about. And I choose what I don’t care about.

You see, the old line that “Aging is a matter of mind. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter,” slightly modified, applies here as well. I’ll customize it a bit: “Holidays: If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

I think the biggest problem that most people have is high standards. High standards are a gateway to constant disappointment. If your life is wrapped around making the holiday perfect, then you’ll stress yourself out by trying to make the holiday perfect. And then? When you fail to achieve perfection? Your stress will increase that much more. Your stress might then turn from disappointment to depression, which I admire, because that shows real dedication that you don’t seen in those millennial kids nowadays.

As bad as that quest for perfection is, it can be even worse than that – often people want to view perfection not through their own standards, but through the views of other people. Now, on top of trying to meet your standards, you have to imagine what the standards of other people might be, and try to figure out how to meet those as well. It’s why Bill Clinton doesn’t do threesomes – if he wanted to disappoint two people at the same time, he could have just taken Hillary out for dinner.

Bill was especially disappointed when Hillary lost because he realized he wouldn’t get a fresh batch of interns.

However, you can make the conscious choice to not choose perfection. What happens if you don’t care if the turkey isn’t perfect? What happens if you don’t care if other people are upset?

Well, nothing.

Certainly, there’s something on my list above from bills to parties to relatives that is (or was) on your list. Me? Sure, I’ve had a disappointment or two, and yes, I’ve gotten stressed a time or two. But not recently.

If you’re feeling stressed at the holidays, the Internet will tell you to do lots of things. The top five tips (really!) on one particular site?

Take a walk in the sunlight.
Smell citrus.
Take yet another walk. (Yes, it was item one, and also item three.)
Take a supplement.
Squeeze between your thumb and forefinger.

Yes. These will all certainly help – help a journalist on a deadline come up with a “unique” take on holiday stress. I’ll admit, out of the 27 or so tips, there were some good ones. But when “Take a whiff of citrus” is in your top two ideas for dealing with stress? That’s almost as bad an idea as when they decided to put an “s” in lisp.

A journalist, an anthropologist, and a philosopher walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Hey Anderson, still no job?”

Between now and the New Year, we’ll probably not get farther than 90 miles from the house, and that will be to celebrate Penultimate Day (Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust). We’ll spend time with people we like, and not people we have to spend time with.

Might there be some stress? Sure. That happens. But only if I want it to.

34 Random Thoughts About The Economy, Money, and Jobs

“Well, Saddam owed us money.” – Arrested Development

Maybe I should get more sleep.

It’s nearly Thanksgiving, and the next few weeks will be busy. Now that The Boy is off at college and no longer engaged in half a dozen activities, we’re down to just having to chase Pugsley around. Not so busy that there won’t be a full slate of posts – those are planned for the next few weeks, barring a change based on current events or me being distracted by shiny objects.

Today, though, I thought I’d change it up a bit, so here are a few random thoughts on business, economics, and wealth.

The last economic crash was about a housing bubble. The next economic crash will be about our “everything” bubble where money flows faster to chase smaller and smaller returns.
The biggest thing to crash after the next bubble pops will be money. It’s never fun when the value of money drops to zero, since having a little inflation is like being a little pregnant – not much happens at the beginning, but by the end everyone is yelling and screaming and covered in blood.
The next economic crash will be the biggest in our lives.
Or not. I’ve been wrong before.
But I still think 2025 will be interesting.
Most jobs don’t require thinking nowadays – they are a set of procedures and rules based on the lowest common denominator employee. The best jobs like this are at the DMV, which at least allow you to be mean and unpleasant, plus government benefits.
Jobs that don’t require thinking can be paid at the lowest possible wage. If you’re lucky enough to be hired at Old MacDonald’s farm, I hope you can rise to the C-I-E-I-O position, but you’ll have to be out standing in your field.
Businesses that do things immorally don’t automatically fail because they do things immorally – many immoral and even evil businesses flourish. It’s only in the movies that the good guys always win.
When I gave career advice to The Boy, I advised him to build expertise and skills in things that couldn’t be done over the Internet or by an outsourced employee working in a country where the native language consists only of vowels, grunts, and humming noises but yet has 355 terms for “waddle”.
Always be worth more to your company than your company is paying you.
“What have you done for me lately?” is a good and fair question from any boss.
The second mouse gets the cheese in the trap. No, I’m not going first.
If it’s choosing between money and honor, choose honor. The bills might be more difficult to pay, but at least you can look yourself in the mirror. Until the power company cuts the electricity.
Seriously though, choose honor.
It’s the risk that you don’t take that you’ll regret. But you only hear successful people say that.
Never build a business on what you love, since no one cares about medieval Norse poetry. Build a business on what you do that other people love and will pay for. You’ll learn to love it.
Capitalism works great to allocate spoils in an expanding market. Capitalism fails in a contracting one. There’s nothing easy about the transition.
Being short of money and optimistic about the future is better than having lots of cash and being pessimistic.
Money can’t make you happy, but you can avoid most of life’s miseries by having a few hundred thousand dollars. Not every one of life’s miseries, but most of them.
Whenever anyone says it’s not about the money, it’s really about the money.
Whenever anyone says cost is no object, you can expect that statement to be proven false once the estimates arrive. Make them pay in advance.
The reward for work well done is more work. This is actually a pretty good deal – we tend to buy video games built around this same premise.
The rewards aren’t linear – the closer to the top, the greater the rewards. But you have to fight the big boss at the end before you retire.
Great bosses are rarer than you might imagine. Most bosses are okay. Some are awful.
The worst kind of boss is a weak boss. They will praise you when you don’t deserve it and sell you out when you don’t.
Teamwork makes it easy to blame someone else.
In America, when two men meet, they ask “What do you do?” Too often we equate ourselves with “what we do,” while forgetting we get to choose who we are. Unless you’re Johnny Depp, in which case you are stuck being Johnny Depp.
If you find yourself dreading the alarm clock and not wanting to go to work you go anyway. It’s your job. If it’s too much? Find another job or retire.
True story: a friend of mine had a sister that decided to retire one day when she was about 30. She was shocked when the checks stopped coming, she seemed to think that when you retired, the company had to keep paying you. I think she’s a Bernie® voter now.
Me? I’m trying to start thinking about retirement before my boss starts thinking about my retirement.
When I was first hired into a job, I heard a statistic that 70% of a typical workday for a typical employee was unproductive. I was shocked that the figure was so high.
Now, after working for years, I’m shocked that the figure is so low. I tried to come up with jokes about lazy people, but they just won’t work.
Meetings often happen just because they’re on the schedule. Look like you’re paying attention and don’t sleep, no matter how quickly it makes the meeting go.
I had a friend who worked at the Unemployment Department who got fired. He still had to show up the next day.

Dare To Live Your Life And Scarring My Children For Life

“Now it was serious: a double-dog-dare. What else was there but a triple dare you? And then, the coup de grace of all dares, the sinister triple-dog-dare.” – A Christmas Story

Which is more daring, a pebble or a stick? The pebble: it’s a little boulder.

Almost 2,500 years ago, Thucydides said, “luck favors the daring.” Thucydides is dead, so, really, what did he know anyway? But part of being young is being daring – it’s on the label. There are so many things that you know, especially things that aren’t so. Life hasn’t yet given you curve balls and unexpected experiences

The lessons that you can learn from unexpected experiences can be helpful ones. The first lesson I was ever taught in high school chemistry lab was: “cold glass looks exactly like hot glass.” The second lesson was “never trust a naked man selling slightly used sulfuric acid, you can never tell where the acid has been.”

But the biggest loss is when we let one bad experience create fear in our lives. Let me explain: One time when we were getting firewood back when we lived in Alaska, Five Year Old The Boy was tromping in the forest. While jumping up and down on a little hill (five year old kids do that), The Boy managed to stir up a group of wasps that had burrowed into the ground there. All of them, and I mean all of them, came out of the nest and swarmed The Boy like Japanese jets on Godzilla©, all while The Boy flapped his arms like Greta Thunberg™ on tweaking on meth.

I would pay money to watch Greta in Marine boot camp – I’m sure the D.I. would nicely tell her, “As soon as you’re done getting your beauty sleep, princess, GET OFF OF MY OBSTACLE COURSE!”

After The Boy yelled “How dare you!” at the wasps, they left, because that technique always works. The Mrs. and I calmed him down, and treated the bites. The experience, however, was enough that The Boy was pretty scared of wasps – and there were a lot of them in Fairbanks that year.

So, one day after we had moved to Texas, we were in the backyard and just like in a cartoon, a beautiful butterfly had flown right up to The Boy.

“What is it?” There were butterflies in Alaska, but none that was as amazing as this one.

“It’s a butterfly,” I responded. His eyes lit up as he smiled at the colorful, delicate wings. “They bite,” I added. I had, of course, forgotten about The Boy being surrounded by wasps like ice weasels on a cheese wheel. The Boy had not.

The Boy ran into the house, screaming. The Mrs., who had observed every second, was not pleased.

Yes. This really happened. I made my son run screaming from a butterfly, so you know I had “Father of the Year” pretty much in the bag after that back in 2007.

SJW means Social Justice Wasp? Hmm. Wasps have about the same temperament as Antifa©, but at least the wasps have jobs.

But there are many things in life where the first experience wasn’t great, but like The Boy’s fear of butterflies, you’ve learned the wrong lesson if you avoid butterflies because of wasps. Mark Twain said it well:

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well, but also she will never sit on a cold one anymore.

Twain had to work out – he was constantly on the run later on in his life after assassinating Abraham Lincoln. He also never wore shirts – he didn’t believe in concealed weapons.

Receivers in the game of football have to have a short memory – after coming across the middle, being hit by a linebacker at a combined velocity of 40 miles per hour, you’d never run another route again if you kept that in mind. They even have a phrase that describes receivers who are jittery – they say they are “hearing footsteps” – they’re more concerned about being hit than playing the game.

And me – I had to have a short memory as well. I’ve heard that Samuel Johnson said that a second marriage “is the triumph of hope over experience,” and that’s right. It is. And if I had spent too much time overthinking it? I’d never have married The Mrs.

Hmm. Dr. Lechter Says. New feature?

I think the key is optimism and a sense of confidence that the future will be okay. I think that’s why older folks sometimes stop taking risks – they’ve had such a large number of experiences that they can see sixteen ways something that can go wrong. A teenager learning to drive, however, sees no way to lose. It’s only after experience that caution comes into play.

When was the last time you gave up an opportunity because you felt that it was too risky? When was the last time you decided not to take a vacation because the last one was bad? The minute you stop living in your life, taking risks, and knowing that the future will take care of itself, you’re dead even if you’re still breathing.

I think that most of the mistakes people make is in not being bold enough. There is an advantage to trying, especially trying things you don’t know how to do. Mark Twain said it well:

There are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world. No, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before. He doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him. He does the thing he ought not to do and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.

So, in your life, you have one shot. Do you want to regret not doing something in twenty years? Come on – join me. Convince all the grade school kids that butterflies bite. Bonus points if you convince them that butterflies produce deadly poisons*.

This may be the most Australian picture ever, but I’ll defer to Adam (LINK) and Tom (LINK).

*Not applicable in Australia, where literally everything wants to kill you, and even ladybugs can leap seven feet and have venom-tipped spikes for legs.

Bonus unrelated content – JP on Epstein:

Regrets? Don’t Regret Anything, Unless You Want Me To Slap You When You Are Old.

“Nothing leaves alive.” – Dreamcatcher

See, now Darth Vader® has no regrets. Except for being in Episode III.

I’ve never written anything before that made me want to go to a hospice and slap a bunch of old dying people, but this particular post led me there. I’ll explain. It’s okay, it’ll all make sense in the end. I’m a trained professional.

I have made many mistakes in my life. Most of them I don’t remember – they were small and didn’t have any consequences, or at least any consequences I’ve seen yet.

Then there were some slightly larger mistakes – let’s call them medium size mistakes. There have been consequences to these. Again, medium-sized mistakes most often lead to medium-sized consequences. A scar here (carve away from your thumb, not towards it), a stock gone to zero there (thanks a lot, Enron®) and one really bad car trade when I was 24 . . . medium-sized. Medium-sized mistakes are big enough for a big sting, but whatever permanent impacts there might be aren’t immediately fatal.

The biggest ones – I won’t give a laundry list of those. Most of those were where either passion, inexperience, a momentary lapse of character or judgement, or (worst of all) when all three contributed to a mistake. Some mistakes lasted longer, some were short. But all stung. The biggest include a marriage that led to divorce, underestimating a sociopathic boss, and wearing that white dress to my little sister’s wedding. I mean, I look fabulous in it, but some brides just have to be the center of attention. Also a bit weird because she wasn’t really my sister.

Staaaaaart again . . . .

To put it bluntly, I am the author of almost every problem I have. If I didn’t cause the problem, I’m probably complicit in creating the problem or not dealing with the problem.

But I don’t regret it. None of it. Not the victories, certainly, and not the failures.

Why?

Life is a one-shot deal. And life is a ratchet. It only turns one way – we can’t take anything back.

Regret isn’t a one-shot deal, though. If there’s anything that will burn a hole in your soul, it’s regret. Regret never comes alone – it brings guilt along for the ride.

My biggest fear is having a heart attack during a game of charades.

If I were to dig more deeply into those feelings – regret and guilt are just ways that fear manifests itself. Fear of . . . what? Regret is a fear that the consequences of your choices or actions will impact you negatively, and cannot be changed. Here is a list of some of the common regrets from people on their deathbed (from a former palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware, and, yes, I spelled that right – blame her parents, not me):

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
“I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
“I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

Even a quick look at this list tells me one simple thing: regret is for losers. I have never seen a whinier pack of self-serving weakness since I last watched a Democratic presidential debate. Everything, absolutely everything on this “top five” list is just, well, sad.

Me? I’m still holding out hope for a pyramid.

Would you like to go to your grave worrying about any of those things? I can’t imagine doing it. I refuse to let regret rule me. And I refuse to let any decision I made twenty years ago rule me. Hell, I refuse to let any decision I made last week rule me, except for choosing that convenience store egg/muffin sandwich – I don’t need to explain why. Deal with the consequences? Certainly. But regret? No.

Let’s go down the “top five” list:

Not living a life “true to yourself”? I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life. I was talking with a guy the other day who quit his job because his boss asked him to do something illegal. That’s being true to yourself – he walked away without a paycheck but with his values and beliefs intact. If you’re not being true to yourself, you’re either weak or flighty. The good news? Anyone who reads this blog is neither.

Wishing you hadn’t “worked so hard”? That’s also nonsense. A soul thrives on doing good work that matters. Doing good work excellently is hard. The Mrs. teaches, and works hard at it – I can see from her talking about her students, talking about the ones who learned and improved, the ones who keep coming back to her classroom to report on their lives that her work matters. Working hard at work that matters is what makes us the best humans we can be. If you think you worked too hard, you weren’t doing anything worth doing. The good news? Change now. You have an entire lifetime to fix that mistake.

I got fired from the calendar factory. They get really mad when you take a day off.

Didn’t have the “courage to express my feelings”? Wow. This is the weakest on the list, so far. Number one: do you have feelings that matter? Most feelings are stupid – and I have stupid feelings, too. Thankfully, I’m not a five year old – I am at least twelve. I get to examine my feelings and reject those that don’t reflect my values, my virtue, my beliefs. I get to choose. If I feel slighted by something silly or petty? I get to choose to understand what a fool I’m being and ignore that feeling. Again, if you don’t express your feelings, that’s not always a bad thing. Your feelings are often stupid.

I’m sorry that “staying in touch with your friends” was so hard. But it’s really not. The people you care about, that care about you, are there. They always have been, they always will be. I don’t Facebook® much – why? I call my friends, on an actual phone. I text my friends. Am I often the one that calls first? Sure. Do we develop different lives, does life pull us away for a while? Do hundreds or thousands of miles separate us? Maybe. But I make quite a few phone calls. And mostly my friends pick up. Sure, it’s true that the biggest miracle Jesus exhibited in the Bible was having 12 11 close friends (thanks, Judas) after the age of thirty – but you just need a few – a few that will have your back. A few you can share with.

Also, as a single guy it was easy to make friends. Lots of girls I asked out wanted to be friends.

Seriously – number five on the list is a wish for “letting themselves be happier.” Happy is easy (All You Will Ever Need To Read About How To Be Happy* (*Most of the Time)), being significant is hard. It requires hard work while being true to yourself. It requires expressing those feelings that your virtue allows to exist. Friends? The good ones will be with you forever, and you can restart your conversations with the slightest hint of time passing, even if you haven’t talked regularly in a decade, if they’re true friends.

I’ve never thought about going to a hospice and slapping someone, but this list made me want to do it. I know, I know, it’s too late for them. And this is the list of people who had regrets. People like me? I don’t have a single regret at this moment of my life. Not one. In a hospice, I hope I’d be the, “Regrets? No. More clam chowder, please,” guy.

The Boy made me some fake ramen noodles this summer – it was an impasta.

To be clear – it’s not that I don’t care. It’s not that I’m not blameless. It’s not that I was always right. Not one of those things is true. But I have done the most important thing I can think of: When I do something I regret, I’ve changed myself so that I won’t (Clintoncide, John Bolton’s Waifu, and October Market Crashes: Knock on Wood) do that thing again. I cannot change the past. But if I have learned, if I can help others not make the same mistakes while not repeating my own mistake? Like an algebra teacher for the soul, I have taken something negative and turned it into something positive. The bonus is I get to end the dreams of high school freshmen in the process.

And I’m not planning on having any regrets tomorrow. If you have regrets? Fix them now or recognize them for the dead weight they are and cut them loose.

The alternative? Trust me, you don’t want to have me chasing you down in a hospice and slapping you silly.

BONUS SOUP MEME! I made too much soup meme by accident. Enjoy.

Bad Bosses, Part 2: Action Heroes, Guns, and Explosions

“Your boss is a woman? Now this is a strange bank.” – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

In order to dress for success they tell you to dress for the job you want, not the job you have. So I found out where my boss shopped for clothes. I’d see what they wore, and then wear the exact same outfit the next day. My boss at the time, Marji, thought that was just a little weird since horizontal stripes weren’t at all flattering on me.

It’s both a blessing and a curse to get to the end of writing your post and finding . . . it’s too long. It’s a blessing because if I can break it into two posts, hey, I’ve already got my next post written, which might get me to bed by 2AM instead of the usual. The curse part is that the post has to have a natural break between part one and part two – thankfully this one did. The other curse part is that I actually look forward to writing a post – and the one I had planned for Friday will have to wait a week. But it’s gonna be funny. Part 1 is here: Bad Bosses, Part I, Including Garfield as Written by H.P. Lovecraft, and part 2 is below.

It’s been my experience that all good bosses look the same, since they are all clones of me, or at least the “me” in that first performance review (JW note: it was described in the last post, and it was a really good performance review). And I’ve had plenty of bosses in my career – in one two-year period I went through five bosses, and I am averaging a new boss every sixteen months over the years of my career.

Based on my experiences, the traits of good bosses that I’ve had are listed below. Good bosses are:

Concerned about doing their duty for their company. They display loyalty – they do their job.
Good at setting clear expectations on behavior and expected work outcome. You know what you’re supposed to be doing.
Never smelling of grilled onions.
Able to create an environment where honest questions are encouraged.
Good at providing the tools, time, and space the employee needs to get work done.
Available to do children’s magic shows for birthday parties.
Honest with employees, and give clear feedback meant to help them improve.
Quick to recognize that mayonnaise is not a French musical instrument.
Courageous – the truth is the truth, and they’ll share that up and down the line and damn the consequences.
Reluctant hold a knife to the secretary’s administrative assistant’s neck.
Genuinely concerned about the employee.
Treat people (generally) fairly.

It’s always a shame when you have a great boss and he breaks a leg and has to be put down.

There are times I’ve managed to screw up most of the rules I’ve listed above when I was a boss – that’s why I was able to list them off the top of my head – you remember your mistakes. But you learn from them, too: One of the biggest compliments I got was when I was leaving a job for a new company. The Chief Operating Officer came in to say goodbye and told me, “I hope you’re going to be supervising people at your new job.” Maybe he wanted the new company I was leaving to join to fail, but I took it that he appreciated my efforts to learn and be better as a boss and wanted to pass that legacy on to other companies through people like me. You’re right. He wanted me to mess up that other company.

I imagine this every time I walk into work and use the remote to lock the doors to my car without looking.

Notice I didn’t mention charisma as a requirement to be a good boss. You don’t need to be an Elon Musk to be a great boss – and I’ve heard he’s not a particularly good boss unless you’re his weed dealer. Notice that I didn’t mention intelligence – in some instances really high intelligence works against you as a supervisor since it can make it more difficult for you to communicate well. Would I rather have a smart boss or an honest one? Would I rather have a smart boss or a courageous one? Would I rather have a smart boss or one that didn’t constantly smell of grilled onions?

Most of the time, the cause of a really bad boss is due to their fear, namely fear of getting fired or fear of missing a promotion or fear of missing a rung on the corporate ladder. If that were to happen? He couldn’t afford to pay for the “hot stone massages” his wife was getting from Günter, her “masseuse.” However, sometimes you get bosses that are so strange they remind you of Cousin Eddie®:

One boss I had actually lived in his office, as in slept there every night five or six nights a week. He claimed to be a member of a biker gang, and told stories of holding a person upside down from a bridge as the gang gently convinced him to be out of state so he couldn’t testify at an upcoming trial. He told about buying a girlfriend a “little car” to convince her to have an abortion. And the time he broke a bottle to use as a weapon because “The Indian” was trying to knife him.

This might not be a completely faithful adaptation from the original story.

And as a boss, whenever I needed help, or a risky event was about to occur, you could count on him to be three states away. As bad bosses go, he wasn’t horrible, since after I convinced him that if I looked bad, he looked bad, he had my back when we talked to corporate. Working for him was a really weird nine months. Normally I throw in a joke or an exaggeration in my descriptions – but in describing this boss? Nope. That all happened.

To be clear, with the exceptions listed above, almost all of the rest of my bosses have been great people who were of good character and really interested in helping me develop as a person and as an employee. But where all good bosses are similar, bad bosses are often unique:

The Seagull – The Seagull is a boss that gets a new job every year or two. Why? Because he flies in, makes a mess, and stays until he’s kicked out. Miller was a Seagull. Keep good notes for the aftermath.
The Shadow – Whenever anything important happens, they’re gone. Whenever you have a question? They deflect. Literally, it’s like not having a boss at all, or at least a boss that will make a decision. You will have a boss if one of your choices goes wrong, however, because the Shadow will quickly (and correctly) point out that he never told you to do such a thing!
The Burnout – The Burnout peaked twenty years ago, and is mad and bitter. His back hurts. You make too much money. He wants to retire, but has to wait another year for Medicare™ to kick in. Until then? He wants to inflict as much pain as possible on the office because he wants everyone to hurt as much as his back does.
Captain Ahab – Captain Ahab is great because he has a vision. Companies love Captain Ahab leaders because they become obsessed with obtaining a vision. The upside? Your mission is clear, Ahab makes sure you have everything you need. And you will work 80 hours a week to accomplish it. These aren’t 80 hour weeks of playing Minesweeper®, no, every minute is fully used because (Spoiler Alert) that Moby Dick isn’t gonna spear itself. Ahab doesn’t care about your family, at least during work hours.

He then tried to hypnotize the people in the meeting using a pocket watch. The work was rough – 90 hour weeks for months on end, but we got free coffee and he’d buy us catered dinner if we had to work past 9pm. On a Saturday.

The Sphinx – You’re always guessing. The Shadow won’t give you any sort of answer, but The Sphinx won’t tell you what he wants, but you can be sure that The Sphinx will tell you if it’s wrong. Generally loudly and when other people are around.
The Politician – The Politician cares about only one thing – does it look good? If it looks good and is immoral or illegal? Who cares? The Politician is most commonly heard saying “perception is reality.” The Politician always dresses carefully – almost as good as his boss. The Politician seeks constant movement. They can avoid being blamed for messes they make, but will loudly point out the mess they inherited in their new job. Your value to a Politician begins and ends with you being useful to them. Otherwise? You don’t exist.

Your defense if you have a bad boss in almost every case if you want to keep your job is the same: do your best at work. Work hard, and don’t break the rules or the law. Be nice. And if it sucks too much? Get a new one.

While traditionally thought of as a good boss, Washington had a few buttons you didn’t want to press, although he did light up Ye Olde Twitter® to piss of Adams: “King George . . . Washington. Verily that soundeth goode.”

One other note: if every boss working at a company is a Bad Boss, one of two things is going on:

The Bad Boss is what they really want. Unless you can make it work, you have to leave. Sooner or later, the messes a Bad Boss makes will stick to you.
It may be you. I know that there have been times in my career when my attitude wasn’t optimal. It’s probably the boss. But always leave room and examine that the real problem isn’t you.

Okay, I’m now officially sick of Mack the Knife. But I still don’t feel bad. And if you’d like to share a bad boss below, feel free.

Moderation* is for Monks (*and Ruffles)

“Xerxes dispatches his monsters from half the world away. They’re clumsy beasts, and the piled Persian dead are slippery.” – 300

That may be a slippery slope. But it’s a tasty slippery slope.

When I was about 19, I was browsing around a new bookstore that had just opened in the college town where I went to school. The bookstore had an inventory of about sixteen books, and lasted just about that sixteen weeks before it went out of business. They did, however, have one book out of the sixteen that caught my eye. I picked it up – The Notebooks of Lazarus Long by Robert Heinlein. It was beautifully illustrated. I flipped randomly through it, and as I recall one of the first quotations I found was:

“Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.”

When I was in college, I used toothpaste for spackle because I didn’t know spackle existed – not a square foot of wall in my house wasn’t covered in paneling. Live and learn, though my dorm room smelled minty-fresh when I checked out.

I bought the book.

Several of the quotes from that book have been mentioned before in previous posts by your ‘umble ‘ost, especially:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

The age of 19 is a powerful time to introduce ideas to a mind – new ones tend to burn in deeply, especially those that resonate with your belief system.

But, “Moderation is for monks”? What do I do with that? Is that a formula for hedonism, a nerdy version of YOLO or The Lie of Living Your Best Life (now including cookies)? Taken entirely out of context, it could be interpreted to mean just that. Party on!

I can’t even remotely support that interpretation, however. When taken into proper context, specifically with the second quote, it means nothing of the sort. You can’t be a human that’s capable of doing half of those things on the list if you’re not a person of substance, a person who has devoted their life to learning and service, or John Wick.

John Wick kills about 77 people in the first movie because he’s sad they killed his dog, which is more than I’ve killed all year. I guess that’s just how Keanu grieves.

Moderation may be for monks, but Heinlein wasn’t telling us to party. He was telling us that we only get one shot at life, so we have to live it to the fullest. He’s telling us that there’s danger in compromise. Here’s another quote that gets us closer, from Karate Kid:

Daniel-san, must talk. Walk on road, hmm? Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later, get squish just like grape. Here, karate, same thing. Either you karate do “yes”, or karate do “no”. You karate do “guess so”, just like grape. Understand?

Thankfully Mr. Miyagi wasn’t from Sweden – then he’d only know Ikea®-do.

There’s a danger to compromise. The path to freedom as practiced by the Founding Fathers® isn’t a path of tolerance to deviation. The path to freedom is rigorous. It requires honest and probing self-analysis. Once the self-analysis is done, the solution immediately presents itself. For a real solution, the truth is required – lies are comforting, but never lead to solutions.

Taking an inventory of where your reality is versus where your standards are is important. We all fall short of our standards from time to time, but if you do it long enough, falling short becomes your new standard. The only solution, and I mean only solution is to avoid moderation. If you’ve failed, the “moderate” behavior that got you there isn’t the “moderate” behavior that will get you out of the situation.

Just as the path to freedom doesn’t include tolerance for tyranny, the path to good health doesn’t include tolerance for Snickers® bars every fifteen minutes. On the flip side, going for a half-hour without downing the bag of Ruffles® on the table doesn’t solve your health problems – it’s only the very smallest of steps.

There are no shortcuts.

Okay, tubing down that waterfall might be a short cut. Not a positive one, mind you . . .

For me, avoiding moderation is key – your mileage may vary. But from what I’ve seen, most people who quit smoking, quit smoking. They don’t slow down – they stop. It’s a radical choice. I’ll share my problem a problem that this girl I knew (she’s from Canada, you wouldn’t know her) had. I started out with the keto diet (several years ago) and started getting great success. I was in a time and place where it was possible to follow the diet exactly. After a while, I started reading that people took a day off. So I took a day off.

A day became a day and the previous evening. Which became Friday evening to Saturday evening. Which became Friday until Monday morning. Yes, I’m admitting that I allowed the slippery slope in that girl from Canada allowed the slippery slope in.

Thankfully we’re all out of Ruffles® and chewing gum tonight.

For me, moderation didn’t work on that diet – moderation led to failure, and that’s what Heinlein was talking about. If you have a goal, don’t pursue it half-heartedly – pursue it with everything you have. Moderation really is for monks.

Success, Luck, and Sexy Bill Gates

“Seriously, I don’t get it. What, do you shoot luck lasers out your eyes? It’s just hard to picture. And certainly not very cinematic.” – Deadpool 2

Yup. I sure feel that way when I accidentally tell the ticket taker “I love you, too” after she says, “Enjoy the movie.”

One novel I recall reading back when I was in a kid in junior high was Ringworld by Larry Niven. Niven’s fiction has always been great because when he thinks about a subject, he thinks about that subject deeply, and spins off great ideas faster than a nudist nursemaid on nitrates.

In the case of Ringworld, the main idea was about taking all the matter in a solar system and putting a big ring around it. This would have about three million times the surface area of Earth, so if you were kinda bored and needed a weekend project to add a little bit of space to your place, building a ringworld might give you enough room so you didn’t need to rent one of those 8×10 storage units. That might save you $30 a month!

I’ll warn you, if your gym teacher makes you do a lap, it might take several hundred thousand years.

Another view of the Ringworld in motion.

Outside of that huge idea of building solar-system-scale structures, Niven had a dozen others in just that one book (and he did it in other books, too) that made it especially mind bending for a young teenager to read. One of the ideas was about luck.

In the future that Larry Niven had constructed, parents were limited to the number of children they could have, but you could have an extra child if you won a lottery. Teela Brown’s parents won that lottery, and so on – for five generations. In this case, Niven speculated that there might be a gene that made you lucky, and her character was brought into the novel with that genetically-based luck as her superpower, which helped move the plot along in an interesting way.

I hear religious cannibals only eat Catholics on Friday.

The idea (like a lot of Niven’s other ideas) stuck with me for a while. I know that there are people who think that the concept of “luck” is magical thinking. Me? I think that to discard luck as a concept in a Universe as vast as ours describes an unwarranted degree of certainty about how things really work. In fact, when talking with people, I often say, “I’m the luckiest person you know.” I really think that I am a pretty lucky fellow. Some would even call me a jolly. And good.

“He is lucky who realizes that luck is the point where preparation meets opportunity,” was an unattributed saying in a 1912 edition of The Youth’s Companion. That’s a great definition, and it is one that firmly puts you in control of your destiny – most “overnight sensations” work, very hard, for years before success hits. It’s a concept I sell to my kids frequently because the last thing I want is to allow them, for a single second, to feel like they’re victims of life. That gives them an excuse not to perform – and they’ll need to pay for my nursing home, and I want them to be able to afford one with pole dancers.

But we need to face an unpleasant truth: like Teela Brown, some people are just luckier than others.

Can you back that up, John Wilder? Yes, yes I can.

People are born with different abilities – attractiveness, speed, strength, intelligence, cunning. It’s only on rare occasions that a rogue like me is born with all four. Er, five.
Many crucial events in history have swung on luck – Lee’s invasion of Maryland was stopped at Antietam in 1862 because a corporal of the 27^th Indiana Volunteers found Lee’s invasion plans in an envelope wrapped around three cigars.
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because his bacterial slide was accidently infected with a fungus – a penicillin producing fungus.

Talent is normally distributed – it follows a bell curve – most people have average talent, while some have amazing talent. Most people (in the looks department) aren’t 10’s – they’re 5’s, which is, after all, average. But variable amounts of talent don’t account for the huge differences in success some people see. Bill Gates wasn’t the smartest man born in 1955. Bill Gates wasn’t the hardest working man born in 1955. Bill Gates wasn’t the man born in 1955 with the richest dad.

Virus free is good too, Bill.

But Bill Gates was smart, hardworking, and had a rich dad. And he developed a good system. But he was also the guy who was in the right place at the right time to help create the personal computer business. The luckiest moment of Bill Gates’ life? When IBM© was negotiating with Bill for DOS© for their PCs, and the CEO of IBM said, “Oh, is that Mary Gates’ boy’s company?” Turns out the CEO of IBM® was on the board of the United Way™ with Bill’s mom.

Lucky.

Luck plays a role in your life. If you’re born well, that’s a good start. If you pick the right major at the right time? That’s another step on the way. Get associated with the right things at work? A business that is just the right one at just the right time? Soon enough you’re the CEO.

Lucky Charms® are also part of a complete breakfast, but then again so is a spoon, which is also inedible.

I’m not saying that the CEO is unworthy, but I do think that those who rise to the top should understand that there’s a role for luck as well. Scientific American (LINK) even has an article where a mathematical simulation of talent plus luck equals the creation of the unequal distribution of outcomes we see in the world today where vast amounts of wealth are owned by a small number of people.

Is an unequal distribution an unfair outcome? No, mainly because people make the individual choices that lead them to their fates – very few people are forced to their position in life. If I had made several different choices in my life, could I have been the CEO of a major company? With luck, sure. But I’m sure that whoever got the job is doing fine, as am I, plus I don’t have to live in a big city and wear a tie more than once a year.

And what about lucky breaks that go way beyond probability?

Yup, I think those happen, too. But that’s a future post. If you’re lucky.

Kids, Parents, and Happiness (Plus Orphan Jokes)

“Yeah, but I don’t think anybody would adopt me at this advanced development stage that I’m in.” – The Red Green Show

That’s not true. But I do know that the favorite beer of orphans is Fosters®.

My brother was an only child*. I kid. But he was the only kid in the house when I showed up. And by showed up, I mean when I was adopted – I was, I think, four years old at the time. Of course, this was after the whole virgin birth thing and then being found as a three day old baby by the headwaters of the Odense River in Denmark by Pharaoh’s Mom. But I was just too much for Denmark to handle. And too much for Head Start to handle – they kicked me out (really).

I actually remember the day I first called my adoptive mother “Mom.” As I recall, it was in some utterly mundane sentence, such as “Okay, Mom,” just after the court finalized the adoption. I can even remember my tension while waiting to see how she would react. Would she be upset and cry? Would a whirling orchestral theme surround us as she took me in her arms and wept with joy to have a new son? Would she . . . tell me not to call her Mom?

None of those things happened. She just said, “Alright,” and continued as if I had called her Mom a hundred thousand times before and that me calling her Mom was the most normal thing in the world for four year old John Wilder to do.

Mom probably picked the right reaction since we were so poor that we couldn’t afford a live-in orchestra at our house. I often wondered, was Ma Wilder as tense about that moment as I was? I know she was tense a year later when she was explaining to the doctor over the phone that I ate all of her birth control pills. Man, that was the nastiest tasting candy ever. But the pills had a side effect – I’ve never been pregnant, which I hear is a thing guys can do now.

One day I was asked by a stranger if I was adopted. Me: “Yes, what gave me away?” Stranger: “Your parents.”

The advantage of being an outsider dropped into a fully functioning family is that I was able to see a set of customs that were new to me, like having regular meals. The ordinary day-to-day web of family life was there to see, but it was also there to be disturbed and observed by the alien dropped in the midst of the ranch-style Area 51.

Families have customs, even when they don’t know that they do. One of the first customs I noticed was when I went to bed, the last thing anyone in the house said to me was, “see you tomorrow.”

For some reason, four or five year-old me found that an odd thing to say. It wasn’t good night. It wasn’t good bye. “See you tomorrow.” I found it oddly comforting, a promise that I really would see them tomorrow. That may sound odd to you, but it’s a thing that I really thought about as I stared up at the ceiling from my bed. It was, I thought, the nicest thing anyone could have said.

The original line wasn’t “I’ll be back,” it was “See you tomorrow.” Everyone in the test audience just said, “awwww.”

“See you tomorrow.” Perhaps it was the impermanence that I’d experienced in my life up until then – being adopted represented at least the fourth major living arrangement change I’d experienced since I was born – but the simple stability implied in those words made me happy as I snuggled under the covers on a warm winter night.

Please don’t think that I ever felt alienated by my adopted family, but it was certainly recognized that I was an alien – a shock of blond hair and freckles in a family of brunettes. It was like I was the actor hired to punch up a sitcom and dropped into the season 12 opening episode with no backstory. Again, I was always treated as a regular cast member, and not a recurring guest star.

My family loved me ferociously, and showed it on a regular basis – not only did Pop Wilder give me his name, he also sat and watched every football practice, came to every varsity football game and nearly every varsity wrestling match, and sacrificed years of his life worrying about me.

Kids need families. Even odd kids like me.

And kids help families.

I’m still the odd one, but that’s okay – sometimes I discover new things – such as not liking the taste of raw fish heads.

A recent study out of Europe (LINK), where I thought even saying the words “family” or “child” was considered a hate crime found that married couples with kids were happier than married couples without kids. But there was a catch – the kids needed to have moved out of the house for the parents to be happier.

Why is that?

As a parent who has one kid in the house and some already gone, I can understand that. Raising a kid is tough:

It’s long hours when they’re sick.
It’s home surgery that brings to mind a Civil War surgeon performing an amputation.
It’s being covered in vomit that smells like formula while watching a parade on a 95°F day.
It’s getting a call that they backed the pickup into the lunch lady’s car. Parked car. Not moving parked car. In broad daylight.
It’s learning how to yell loudly enough so they can hear you explain why you’re choking them.

Seven year old kids don’t think it’s funny AT ALL when you tell them that you’re going to have to amputate their arm when they complain about a splinter.

But those are the dark sides. There are the positive sides:

Seeing your child go from C’s to A’s because they finally figured it out.
Seeing your kid finally “get it” and perform better than they ever thought they could at a sport.
Watching them solve a problem – by themselves.
Getting a text from them on a random day – just because they wanted to send you a text.
Seeing them become competent at being an adult.
Hearing them tell you that, “I’m doing it, and it’s none of your business,” when they make a decision.
Having them pick a very nice nursing home for you because you love them so very, very, very much. (I’m hoping they’re reading this when I’m 103 and drooling.)

The research indicated** childless people are happier than people with kids. Until the kids move out. Then the people with kids are happier. From the list above, I can see that. From my perspective, children are like incredibly cute parasites until about age 9. They cost a lot of money, they take up a huge amount of time, and they’re less intelligent than a basset hound who agreed to be on Dancing with the Stars.

Sure, some big headaches come as kids get older. And around middle school is when the final battle for their soul takes place. From experience, with my daughters it was one type of battle (“you’re ruining my life”). With boys it is quite another (“I was supposed to do what?”). None of the battles are easy, but they represent the last stage, the last opportunity for a major influence. After that, it’s nothing but minor course corrections until they move out.

I love Pugsley, who is the last chick in our nest. But I derive a lot of satisfaction from the Wilders who are out in the world – I love seeing them change and grow. I love seeing them accomplish things. And I love late night calls where they ask for earnest advice. I certainly may have given Alia S. Wilder a bit of a hard time in The Lie of Living Your Best Life (now including cookies) and Financial Advisers, Christianity, and Elon Musk’s Hair, but she has displayed a great independence, and has owned her mistakes without blaming others.

But in one way the study is wrong. Tonight, when Pugsley went to bed, he said, “See you tomorrow.” I won’t hear that after he moves out, and I’ll miss that beautiful sentiment. But it will also be their responsibility when they (or their kids) back into the parked lunch lady car.

*For all of you wondering why my brother’s name is also John Wilder? Is it a joke? No, he and I have, in real life, the same first name: John. Really. The adoption explains it. John was born before me, so he had the name first. I was old enough that they weren’t exactly gonna start calling me by a whole different name after my fourth living arrangement in four years. Heck, that might have messed me up enough so I would have gotten a doctorate in social sciences. Thankfully, they already called my brother John by his middle name (Velociraptor, or his nickname “Screech”) before I showed up.

This was in the library at my house – I found it one day, and my parents claimed to have no idea where it came from. Perhaps it was left on the shelf by the Lady of the Lake™ to prepare me for my writing career as John Wilder so I could save the United States? Or maybe they forgot when they got it, since the book was over 25 years old when I found it. One of the two. I’m betting on the Aquatic Tart®.

**Research in social sciences is a problem that we face in society as a whole. It appears that social science research is better than flipping a quarter, but not a lot better than flipping a coin. Where scientists tried to duplicate the findings of a social science study, they could only do it about 65% of the time. Sure, that’s slightly better than just guessing, and probably what you would expect with people who kept going to college so they could get a doctorate instead of following their true calling in the food service industry and then figured out how to use government grant money for gluten free locovore vegan tacos while they study how the patriarchy influenced and controlled t-shirt design in 1978. Don’t forget, these stories are also reported by journalism school graduates. Journalism school is for rich kids who aren’t smart enough to qualify to get into Yale Law® or even Maria’s Authentic Taqueria and Law School®.

All You Will Ever Need To Read About How To Be Happy* (*Most of the Time)

“Happy premise number three: even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won’t.” – Bowfinger

This is a common phrase when something goes wrong around Stately Wilder Mansion™. After the cussing is over, I mean.

I’m travelling for business again this week. The upside to business travel is that it allows me to break my normal routine. I almost feel guilty. Almost. The work this week is light, and my travel has been fun, the food has been great, and the work I am doing has given me a lot of new ideas to think about, and I like that. My toenails also seem to grow faster when I’m on the road but might be imagination. Or, maybe it’s my feet shrinking?

The other advantage being on the road is that it breaks routines. In this case, I found myself eating at the bar at Applechilies®. Eating at the bar makes sense when you’re travelling alone: it seems a bit less pathetic, and you can talk to the bartender if it’s not too busy on a Tuesday night by Interstate 3.14 in Upper Midwestia. This night, the bartender was a young lady of about 22, I’m guessing. We talked a bit. As often happens to me when I meet a stranger, (I have no idea why) pretty soon she was pouring out her entire life story. Seriously.

For the record, as far as you know I only had one drink.

I’ll skip the really wild parts, since the point relevant to this post is that she had dropped out of college.

“That’s fine, and you shouldn’t go to college just to go to college. What is it that you want to do, though?” That question seemed to be really tough for her. And it is a big question, but as I’ve noted again and again, people fail most often because they don’t act on their dreams, not because they can’t achieve them.

After some considerable thought, she answered. “I guess . . . I guess I just want to be happy.”

“Happy? Is that all? Happy is the easiest thing,” I replied.

And it is. Being happy is so easy to achieve it is almost trivial. Note: being happy every minute of every day is impossible. Bad things happen. Professors put your computer program up on the screen to show what not to do. Your pants split at the crotch during a presentation. You walk into a glass door going to a party with people you just met and you get McDonald’s® Hot Mustard© sauce all over the door in a big yellow blob about chest high. Oh, did I say you? Those were all me. And the computer program did do what I intended it to do, though I was surprised it did bring down a mainframe. I guess infinite loops are powerful things.

Remember, no matter what they say, failure is an option.

Warning: this advice probably won’t work for people who are clinically depressed because their brain chemistry is all messed up. That’s wiring that this advice probably won’t fix – they need to see a doctor.

But I learned to be happy when I was relatively young. It’s wickedly effective. As an example, one company I was working for was experiencing huge financial difficulties. Everyone was working to make sure the business stayed open. I was, too, but I wasn’t letting it get me down. I had a new son (The Boy) and was pretty happy at home even though the bank account wasn’t all that full.

Yes, this was on my performance review. “Employee is too optimistic and believes that the business will ultimately succeed if we work hard and solve our problems.”

In my performance review I was docked for being too happy. Apparently being angry and pissed off increases profitability? Spoiler, the company survived. Bonus points? It’s at least partially due to some changes I made – while I was in a good mood. I don’t know if they still have the “don’t be happy at work” policy.

But being happy is simple. In order (more or less) here’s what works for me.

Be close to someone – like physically close. Touching them close. Or get a pet. It’s hard for me to have a bad day when I know that someone loves me. People are herd animals (those that aren’t bears) and physical touch works wonders at making people happy. No sex with the pets, no matter how much they’re asking for it.
Have a friend you can call when something good happens to you. For bonus points, have a friend you can call when something awful happens to you – that’s rough, because only a good friend is willing to share in the bad things that happen. If you don’t have friends? Make some. I know that some people say that Jesus’ biggest miracle was having a dozen close friends after the age of 30, but it is possible. And these need to be friends in real life. FaceBook® friends are nice, but it helps to have physically known the friend for the friendship to be solid.
Exercise. Do something: Walk on the treadmill. Go for a run. Lift weights. Run through a cave being chased by a giant stone bowling ball. I’m fairly fanatical about working out every lunch hour to the point I’m a jerk about not skipping it for (nearly) anything – it really improves the quality of my day. There are times I come back from working out and feel awesome and happy for no reason at all. The harder I worked out, the better I feel.
Eat right. Avoid carbs – they screw with your emotions, especially in quantity. Don’t eat too much. Yes, I’m still fasting on a weekly basis, and some of my happiest days are while I’m fasting. Besides vegans, who is sad when they’re eating a steak? Eat steak. If you’re a vegan, pretend it’s a bacon, since bacon comes from plants, right? Meat may be murder, but it’s tasty murder that makes you feel good. But I have learned if The Mrs. is eating ice cream straight from the carton to NOT ask how she’s doing.
If you are sad, don’t drink alcohol. It’s a depressant. I refuse to drink on those rare days I’m sad. It helps. You can’t find happiness at the bottom of a beer bottle, because who’s happy when they run out of beer?
Get enough sleep. I advise people to sleep as consistently as possible, especially if they have problems getting to sleep. If you can’t sleep consistent hours, at least get enough sleep even if it’s not the same sleep every night. Since I blog after work, and often after everyone at home has gone to bed, this is the rule where I’m the biggest hypocrite.
As much as possible, avoid crappy people. Sure, everybody has a bad day and needs to share. That’s okay. But if you’re constantly complaining about bad news to your friends? Expect that they won’t pick up when you call, so try to give more than you take.
As much as possible, feel good for other people that have done well. I worked with a guy who put up a bulletin board with stories about how much the CEO of our company made. He called it the “Wall of Shame” since he didn’t think the CEO was worth that much. Me? I want the CEO to make a lot of money, that way my check looks smaller the rent for the place he rents for his mistress.
As much as possible, avoid envy. See above. If something good happens to someone, feel genuine joy for them, even if it didn’t happen to you. Envy is a wasted emotion.
As much as possible, when bad thoughts slip into your brain – sad ones, mean ones, anything Hillary Clinton would think – get them out. Think of something positive, like the fact that you don’t have to drink alone because your cats are alcoholics, or that you can be the person to put the “fun” back in funeral.
Keep things in perspective. Most things you do aren’t memorable to other people, and most mistakes you make will be forgotten in a week, unless you were the guy running the test at Chernobyl, then people just won’t shut up about it.

But you could claim that you were late to work because of a flock of wild teacup poodles.

Scott Adams, of Dilbert® fame has a very similar list – I know because after I talked to the bartender and decided to write this post, he did a video on . . . being happy. He’s in the video below discussing it. Adams is much more of the “people are sacks of chemicals” and he uses that model to make sure that he’s maximizing the brain chemicals that show up when you’re happy. It works for him and he does it without ever attempting to control his thoughts. But if you are someone who drains him of happy because you’re a complete tool? He’ll cut you out of his life. Since he’s a multi-millionaire and more-or-less self-employed, he can do it.

Me? If Ted is a tool at work and I need the job? I have to deal with Ted. Though, honestly I’ve only ever worked with one guy named Ted, and he was super to work with and one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Unlike Scott, I don’t go for the “sacks of chemicals” theory. They do make a difference, but mind matters, too, at least for me. The one time in my life I was profoundly unhappy, I learned to manage my mind first, while finding all the other little tips and tricks of “sacks of chemicals” management more or less independently of Mr. Adams.

I think this was from the pilot of that new series, Breaking Bras®. And you can’t make a mask like that without silicone . . . .

And that’s it. Those are the secrets. Nothing mystical, nothing difficult.

Again, I’m not happy every second of every day, but when I follow just over half the steps above, I’m happy 95% of the day. I have it good. There’s no reason to not enjoy being me.

For 80% of people reading this, happiness is easy. So, choose happiness if you want it, unless there’s a workplace policy at your office, too. In that case? Become a loner, drunk, vegan insomniac that spends your free time at Antifa® meetings. And have another doughnut.

Scholarships to Avoid, and . . . College Isn’t the Best Idea for Everyone

“Now if Eb needs a diploma, he should go to college so he can become a vegetarian.” – Green Acres

Please, calm down. Show me where Bernie tried to touch you.

The Mrs. and I were off to Midwestia State (Home of the Fighting Red-Crested Yaks©) on Saturday to move The Boy into the dorms. The reality is that he had left hours before us and was unpacked by the time we got there and had already managed to flirt with the girl working the dorm desk and lock himself out of his own room for the first time. I saw the look in the eyes of dorm desk girl – “cute, but still a dorky freshman who locks himself out of his room two hours after getting a key.”

I was actually shocked they still had keys – I was expecting that they’d be subjected to retinal checks to get back in their rooms. Until I heard that the floor had a shared bathroom. A co-ed shared bathroom. Imagine being in the midst of a growler when the girl of your dreams drops on by to leave the kids off at the pool? I’ve been married forever, and I like to pretend that’s not something The Mrs. does – at all.

I was surprised. I was unaware that the diet of Deadpool® was entirely comprised of burning tires.

The Mrs. and I were there, really, for The Mrs. and not The Boy at all.

When The Mrs. had talked about The Boy moving away, it had started off with a matter-of-fact statement about “. . . when we drop him off at college.”

I had responded with, “Why would we need to go up there to drop him off? He seems to be perfectly capable of carrying a few boxes to an elevator. It’s not like we’re dropping off Stephen Hawking.” This was, apparently, not the thing to say to a mother getting mentally ready to cope with her eldest son going off to college. It doesn’t help that The Mrs. is also staring down the added mathematical certainty that her youngest child, Pugsley, will likewise be moving out within a handful of years.

She responded with: “Of course we’re going.”

If you can put “icy” into a tone, this one was nearly at absolute zero. I saw the molecules in her exhaled breath stop vibrating as they fell to the carpet and form a nice Ice-9 frost (look it up). I could see that we’d be driving the hours required to get to Midwestia State (Home of the Whimsical Crotch Goblins®) the day the dorms opened.

When I met Stephen Hawking, he told me that there are an infinite number of universes out there, and maybe even one where I was funny. I responded, “Here’s a great joke: Stephen Hawking walked into a bar.” That one really made him mad. Now I have to live in this Universe, where Kardashians aren’t fast food workers.

I can understand how The Mrs. felt. It’s almost always a melancholy time when a child moves out, unless that child is Johnny Depp, in which case his parents were happy to be able to announce to their friends that their house was now aerobics-free as Johnny was now doing Pilates of the Caribbean. I’m sorry. I’ll admit that there were uneasy questions floating through my mind. I thought the questions were about him, but in reality after reflecting, I realized the questions were really about me:

I thought the questions were: “Is he ready? Does he have the tools to go out into the world? Will he make the right judgements?”

It sounds like those questions were about him, but they’re not. Those questions are really about me. A more truthful way to write them is: “Did I prepare him? Did I teach him enough so that he’ll be competent and safe? Is he a good man?”

The only thing I’m sad about is that he thinks steak tastes like chicken.

I think college is a good idea for The Boy, and I’ll get back to his specifics a bit later after Morpheus is done with him.

But I don’t think college is for everyone, and I think it’s really a horrible idea for some people. I learned this from my association with a youth group. I was discussing the future with one young, bright kid – he was a junior at the time, I think. I asked him what his plans were.

“I’m going to become an electrical lineman.” An electrical lineman is the guy who fixes the big wires on the electrical poles so you can charge your iPad© and watch Netflix® – it’s like a superhero who can chew Copenhagen®. It’s technical work – you have to be smart. It’s physical. And most line failures happen during big storms. So when your power goes out for an hour? It’s a lineman who’s out fixing it in the rain or snow or ice or thunderstorm or temporal rift.

I stopped. I was getting ready to give him my “you need to go to college” speech, but hesitated. This young man had thought about it. He loved being outside. He hated paperwork. He was very smart. The average hourly wage for an electrical lineman is $30 an hour for a journeyman. With overtime, he could be making $100,000+ a year in just a few years and live in an area near Modern Mayberry where most of the nicest houses are available for $200,000 or less.

It was a shockingly (intended) good choice.

Being an electrical lineman also offered some other benefits: it’s not a career that you can do online. You have to physically be there. This is nice, so you don’t have to compete with a two billion or so people in China and India like you might if you were being a computer programmer.

This job has another advantage – it requires just enough certification that it shuts down people who would randomly try it, mainly because no matter how crispy the body is electrical companies hate to pay to have them removed. But the young man in question wouldn’t have to compete with illegal aliens, either.

Being a lineman has a third advantage: it is a basic service that you can’t outsource. You can ship a factory nearly completely overseas – I’ve heard of just this happening – but the electrical infrastructure required to run the United States has to be in, well, the United States.

One final advantage: you can start your own company, buy your own truck, and work the hours you want as a contractor to bigger electrical companies. It’s a business where if you want to be a contractor or an entrepreneur, you can be without too much difficulty investment.

The nice thing about working with kids is they often teach you things, too. The standard advice you give a bright kid with good values is go to college. This is clearly the wrong advice for many kids.

A kid growing up today will face more challenges in employment than any generation in history. Competition will take place in ways that I never had to consider during my career. And this is after automation removed thousands of jobs from factories as machines replaced skilled workers. In this new revolution, expertise from “knowledge workers” will be replaced by algorithms and databases that allow, for instance, computers to diagnose skin cancer at a 95% correct rate, versus an 87% success rate by actual human dermatologists. I know it sounds bad for the human dermatologists, but I got a 0% correct rate since all I would do is look at the picture and say, “ewww, gross.” Let’s see a machine beat that.

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be a doctor.

I’m not sure that there is, in the future, a truly safe job or career to go into, unless we experience Lord Bison’s Deep Fried Econopocalypse® (and if you’re not reading The Bison Prepper, you really should be (LINK)) and then the guy who makes costumes out of leather and football shoulder pads has probably got a good career ahead of him. Owning a scrapbooking store? Maybe not so much.

Okay, I was going for Mad Max Mel, but this works. I hear they worked out their differences and went to Hooters® afterwards. Man, Jesus can put down the wings and Coors Light©.

What are the attributes of a safe job? I mean, assuming Mel Gibson doesn’t show up at your house tomorrow?

Local – If you can’t do it over the Internet, that cuts out billions of people from getting that job.
Certifications Required – A job, like the lineman example, isn’t something that should be done by just anyone – it requires a minimum intellect as well as training and experience. Many medical jobs are similar. I hate the way that we have, in my opinion, over-certified our world. But you can use that to your advantage.
Other Bars to Entry – It used to be that you could give applicants for jobs an IQ test, weed out those that weren’t smart enough, and be fairly sure that you were getting someone who was at least smart enough (or not too smart) for the job. Now? You have to use something that works like an IQ test, like a college degree.
Hard to For A Machine to Do – Blogging. That’s hard for machines, right fellow humans? I have been told that 93.2% of you like to hear that.

But there are ways that even “safe” jobs might be at risk:

Carpenter: Carpentry, in many cases, requires no certification – any illegal aliens have taken many of these jobs in certain areas.
Teacher: Why do we need all of these teachers? We can get a YouTube® lecture up, and have a teaching assistant give the standardized test.
Store Associate: Check out the product features on the Internet – seriously stop. You’re not my supervisor. Leave me alone!
Checkout Clerk: Self-service checkouts are pretty common now. I refuse to use them, period, but I can see that I’m rapidly becoming a minority.
Johnny Depp’s Sinus Cavity Cleaner: Okay, this one is really a safe job.

Okay, I’ll admit, she’d be perfectly acceptable working picking strawberries or in some sort of insect control responsibility.

But there are other problems. I maintain that too many people go to college. In 1959, only about 45% of high school graduates went to college, and only 70% of students graduated from high school. That’s a little less than a third of the US population.

In 2016, 84% graduated from high school, and 70% of those went to college. That’s nearly 60%. If you break down the math, almost twice as many people are going to college as a percentage of people in the United States. There are only two possible conclusions: either people have gotten smarter, or college has gotten easier.

Me? I’m betting that college has gotten easier, since if you poke around a bit you can find that the average grade given to students at Harvard© is an A-. It might just be my opinion, but the only thing competitive about Harvard® might be how much a parent has to pay to get a student accepted.

See, if you build a new building on campus – not a bribe – call it Skank Hoe Hall. But having your skank daughters get in because you’ve bribed a coach? Yeah, that’s a bribe. Allegedly.

I’m pretty sure that the economy has no need of many of these college graduates in any role other than cashiers at Billy Bob’s Wiggle Striptease Hootenanny©. Many of the degrees granted are not really economically valuable – 5% of degrees, for instance, are in “fine or performing arts.” Last time I checked, we here in Modern Mayberry had our quota of mimes filled at our historical demand of zero mimes and there was a bounty on any mime caught within 5000 yards (3 meters) of the county courthouse. There just aren’t very many jobs available in “fine or performing arts” to justify 5% of college students getting a degree in that field. Thankfully, many of them have experience in their true field, food service. I hear that Florida will have a degree in Pre-Barista© next year, so there’s hope yet.

One thing I did note in the hour I spent sifting through the data is that many degrees are more helpful, and, potentially more stable. Health and medical sciences accounted for 10% of graduates, and those jobs are hard to replace with a machine. You have to have people helping people. Robots can diagnose, but at least for now, a doctor has to do the cutting, and a nurse the nursing, until Arnold Schwarzendoctor 2000™ arrives.

That’s a realllllllly long thumb.

I would speculate that we have twice as many people going to college as necessary, and we could replace the expense and time wasted at college for many people simply by allowing employers to give IQ tests. Yes, doctors and nurses need school. But we have approximately 1,000,000% more anthropology degrees than required to maintain our civilization, and an infinite amount of Women’s Gender Studies degree recipients than required.

I advised The Boy on how he could take what he enjoys doing, and turn it into something useful. Don’t compete with billions of people – find ways that you can provide higher value services to people in ways that have to be local and are hard to reproduce. I think he has a pretty good plan.

Given the accelerating pace of change we’ve seen in the last two decades, I imagine that anyone starting a career in 2020 may have to make multiple changes during their life. From what I’ve seen so far, I think The Boy is well prepared for school and the changes that he’ll see in life. I think he’ll do fine. It’s time to let that eagle fly.

Unless it’s Putin’s Eagle.