Purpose – Page 17 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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.

Why Character Just Might Be A Better Indicator Of Marriage Stability Than What Her Butt Looks Like

“Just because you are a character doesn’t mean that you have character.” – Pulp Fiction

When the bugman began to hate . . .

There was a time after She Who Will Not Be Named was forever banished from Stately Wilder Manor, but before I met The Mrs. Yes, your host, the John Wilder was single. Can you believe I didn’t beat the ladies off with a stick? I mean, the restraining order and all . . . well . . . the less said about that the better.

There was one particular woman who had caught my attention. One evening, I introduced her to my friend who I’ll call Jim, mainly because his name is Jim. Oops – I think I’ve said too much. Now everyone will know who he is. If only Jim weren’t such a rare name!

“What did you think?” I asked Jim.

Ever the good friend, Jim said, and this is an exact quote: “What do you two have in common besides your eyes and her butt?”

They say that for a statement to really hurt, it has to be true. Jim had delivered the Atomic Wedgie of Truth®. He was, of course, correct. And you should be so lucky to have friends that will tell you the truth as bluntly and completely as Jim. The relationship between the woman’s butt and my eyes ended soon thereafter.

A friend of mine went to the hospital because of a wedgie – sadly, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 dorkiness.

Not only is character important in dating, it was pretty important to a company I worked for once upon a time: I was one of the employees lucky enough to be trained in behavior-based interviewing. The basic idea of behavior-based interviewing is that people, like the official results of Jeffery Epstein’s autopsy, don’t change very much. Therefore, the best way to get an actual prediction of the candidate’s future behavior is to understand the candidate’s past behavior. Then we were taught how to interview so they would share relevant situations so we could understand the candidate really well.

If the interview technique is done right, it doesn’t feel like an interview, it feels like casual conversation.

I was horrible in my first few interviews, as in scaring the candidate because he thought the company hired robotic androids that only appeared to be human. Thankfully, there was a feedback system from the candidates, and my boss gave me some tips based on it. He told me that it was okay to blink and breathe while conducting an interview, and that wouldn’t be perceived by the candidate as weakness. I took a risk that he was right, and the candidates stopped shaking so much during the interviews. I guess staring unblinkingly directly into their eyes nonstop during the interview is a bit creepy, so I allowed myself no fewer than three blinks per minute.

I really messed up this interview. They asked me if I was a people person. I answered, “Yes! I am a people! Or is they go great with mustard a better answer?”

But if you do anything several hundred times, you can get pretty good at it unless you’re Nicholas Cage acting in a movie. It (really) did bug the candidates that I could take notes without looking down at my notepad. It’s not a great superpower, but I decided to keep that quirk going, since it was a sign of dominance that I could use to weed out the weak. And I eventually ended up interviewing hundreds of new graduate applicants – heck, I even used the behavior-based interviewing techniques on The Mrs. the night we met to see if she had any of the character, um, difficulties that led to the untimely departure of She Who Will Not Be Named.

The Mrs. didn’t have those flaws.

So, on one blind date the girl said she was a huge country fan. Me: “Well, I like Russia, too.”

The thing that surprised me the most was that interviewees would tell me the most incredible things – like how they’d lied to people. How they’d stolen from their employer. How much they felt the world was out to get them. By the way, if you lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 1998 and never figured out who shaved your pig, dyed it blue, and dressed it like Dolly Parton, I think I might know the guy that did it. Don’t worry – he told me it was mostly consensual. Except for the perfume.

The interviewing system was based almost entirely around character. The company I was working for considered good character the most important factor in what constituted a good employee. More than once I heard, “You can teach a good person to do their job, but you can’t teach a bad person to be good,” from my boss. Then he’d shake his head and look at me with a sad, defeated expression on his face. Of course I didn’t blink. I had to show him the respect due the alpha of the pack.

But there were employees who actually possessed good character there, too. As an example, one employee I know was attempting to find some financial information that was relevant to his job. Somehow in working through the company computer network he stumbled upon the check writing software.

Thankfully the money is headed her way from that Nigerian prince.

Yes. My friend found the software that would have allowed him to write himself a check for $50,000,000. No human would have seen the check – it would have been printed on company check stock, signed with a dot-matrix signature, popped in the mail, and delivered directly to my friend’s house. The company had billions (really) in the bank. It wouldn’t have been immediately caught.

My friend called me over and showed it to me. It was a moment I was in awe. This company had huge piles of money in various bank accounts. I realized that just a few keystrokes could end up making my friend an overnight millionaire, at least until the audit found a few missing millions. In a situation that would tempt some people, my friend calmly picked up the phone, called accounting, and let them know they had a really big problem. And he didn’t do it from a beach in Brazil while sipping some drink that comes with an umbrella. But not flaming. That’s for tourists.

That’s good character.

Climate science has taught us that science demands seriousness.

The company actually had a list of traits they were looking for. What did they consider good character? Humility was on the list, as was honesty and a few other things people generally think are representative of virtue, as I wrote about Kardashians, Hairy Bikinis, Elvis, Wealth, and Virtue. There are a lot of things that change about people, but absent a significant psychological event (and sometimes not even then), their character doesn’t change.

That brings me to this statement: the most important part of parenting is helping to build character. I think I’ve established that character is important, so when is it important?

I think that the primary focus of parenthood is guiding children through one critical age range: middle school, from the ages of around 11 to, say, 14. Did you go to grade school with someone who was pretty cool, only to watch them become a complete dirtbag in high school? I know I did, and the time that they went downhill was in middle school.

The ages of 11 to 14 are where kids are first practicing at being adults, and are in the process of crystallizing the character that will define them for the rest of their lives. They’re understanding being really hurt and rejected for the first time, how to deal with defeat. What love is. What their values are. How to deal with victory. They’re understanding what true friendship and loyalty really is. They’re finally (thankfully) understanding what deodorant is, though generally just a few weeks too late.

Knowing how to relate to Pugsley is everything.

And they’re deciding if they want to reject virtue and turn to the Dark Side© evil. Sorry, but Disney® has trademarked that phrase, along with all jokes related to mice, intellectual property abuse, and and ducks. And, yes, I understand that some percentage, say 70%, of character is flat-out genetic in nature. There are families of dirtbags that have been dirtbags for 100 years. If you think about it, you’ll know who I’m talking about.

As I mentioned before, I even used the techniques I learned from interviewing in the blind date that eventually netted The Mrs. When I finally took The Mrs. over to meet Jim and his family, Jim approved. “You guys seem great for each other.”

Perhaps Seneca, writing back in 60 AD or so (back when your Momma was just 50 years old), said it best:

Each person acquires their own character, but their official roles are designated by chance. You should invite some to your table because they are deserving, others because they may come to deserve it.”

When you are evaluating people to be your friend, your mate, or your employee, character is primary. Great butts are secondary, in the end.

Get it? Butts? In the end?

I kill me.

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.

Zen and the Art of Marshmallows, Delayed Gratification, Soviet Tanks, and Russian Motorcycles

“Look, the marshmallows aren’t even toasting! They remain a comfortable sixty-eight degrees!” – The Tick

Come on, we know that the real villain in Stranger Things™ should have been Stay Puft®.

Once upon a time when I was a five-year-old Wilder, my kindergarten teacher gave me a marshmallow. “Johnny, if you can wait five minutes before eating that marshmallow, I’ll give you a second marshmallow, and you can enjoy them both.” The teacher then walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

I thought furiously. This must be some sort of trap, with stakes that high. I looked around for cameras. Aha! There they were, disguised cleverly as a new box of chalk and a pencil sharpener. They’re monitoring me, just as I suspected. Little did they know, I had anticipated this entire scenario when I had debriefed my friend Thomas A. Anderson* (known on the Dark Web® as Neo™) the previous day.

Also? Keanu never ages – he saves that for the picture in his attic. He looked the same in kindergarten as he does today.

With effort, I slowed the beating of my heart using a technique I had learned from Master Ginsu® during the years I had spent training in Tibet to be a Fake Purse Ninja©**. I had trained. I was ready for this.

Very slowly and subtly I pulled a second marshmallow from the front pocket of my Tough Skins® jeans from Sears©. I put it in my palm. Quick as a cobra, I then reached out for the marshmallow the teacher had left, but only appeared to leave it there on the plate. In reality, I had swapped out the marshmallow on the plate for the one I’d brought in my pocket.

In a practiced move, I pretended to pick my nose while in reality I was eating the marshmallow the teacher had left to tempt me, leaving the imposter I’d brought from home in its place. I felt the rush of the sugars dissolving in my mouth. Now I could finally understand what Spot was trying to tell Dick and Jane. The fools!

But I shook my head to clear it of these deep thoughts. I had finished my surreptitious swap just in time – I heard the footsteps in the hall outside the room, and saw the two dark shadows under the door, letting me know that the teacher was looming like a monster that had slowly slithered out of the bowels of the Earth and decided to go into elementary education. My heart, despite all of the training began to race again. The door knob turned.

Who knew it was that easy?

The teacher had another marshmallow, and started to place it next to my cleverly replaced fake. She stopped. She picked up my marshmallow, the one that had brought from home that had been sitting in my pocket for six hours before I made the swap, and studied it.

“Oh, Johnny. This is gross. There is lint in this marshmallow. And bits of string. And, is that a BB? This won’t do, this won’t do at all.” Drat. I never counted on the relative filth of my pockets giving me away.

I had been caught. I knew that this would go in my Permanent Record. Ruined! And all at the age of five. Perhaps I could salvage my defeat and defect to the Soviet Union so I could be closer to Bernie Sanders?

Before I could go to Plan B and steal an F-15E from the nearby airbase and leave the country at Mach 2.5 my teacher continued, “No, this won’t do at all. Let me get you a fresh marshmallow.” She left the room and came back with two clean, pristine, marshmallows.

It also felt like this when I swapped our baby for a baby with a better jawline at the hospital just after “Pugsley” was born. Those nurses hardly ever look away.

Success. And she never knew what hit her, which would make this the perfect crime. I ate the second and third marshmallows.

Maybe I overthink these situations?

Nah.

I left the school and then a helicopter exploded behind me as I got into the school bus for the trip home, because that just looks really cool. And I didn’t even look back.

Okay, absolutely none of that was true, except the exploding helicopter.

But what is true is that a Scientist did a study where they gave a four or five-year-old a marshmallow and promised them a second marshmallow if they didn’t eat the first. They then followed these kids for 40 years. Yes. 40 years. Here’s a (LINK). Turns out that those kids that waited for the second marshmallow had higher SAT scores, were skinnier, drank less, got stoned less, generally dealt well with stress and had a lot of friends.

The best way to win an argument with your wife is if it never happened. Enough vodka works, too. Does that make this the “Ketamine Maru” scenario?

To be clear: they never gave me the marshmallow test, because I would have completely Kobayashi Maru’d*** it. Besides, they were too busy taking knives away from me. Yes. In kindergarten. That’s how you spell freedom.

The concept of the marshmallow test is that the ability to delay gratification is good, and leads to better life outcomes. We see this all of the time – the ant and the grasshopper was a famous fable – the ants work all summer while the grasshopper goes to meth parties. Then winter hits, the ants start to party, but the grasshopper is left all tweaked out, tapping at the window of the anthill. The ant party then intensifies to drown out the tapping and then everyone cheers when the grasshopper finally shows the good sense to just die already.

Ahhh, Darwinian fables. They skipped over the part where the ants eat the grasshopper’s frozen corpse.

There is a balance that defines a struggle between now and the future. If you’re skewed too far to the now, you can certainly bet that all of your decisions will be made without regard to the consequences. I want the marshmallow now, dangit! The teacher might not bring me a second marshmallow. There might not even be a second marshmallow. Heck, the teacher might not even come back and I’ll be stuck in this room forever.

For most of my life, I’ve lived the “marshmallow later” life. I think the biggest example of this is that I buy life insurance. On my life. I use money that I could use to pay for buying a vintage Soviet T-34 tank (I found one for sale in Poland) and spend it on life insurance. Okay, $60 a month won’t buy a vintage Soviet T-34 tank from Poland, but you get the picture.

But for the rest of this post, I’ll use (sometimes) Marshmallow to refer to future orientation, and Anti-Marshmallow to refer to “eat it now” orientation.

It’s a project car, honey. The guy who sold it to me swore it was one owner.

Future orientation is spending money on something that pays off ONLY IF YOU ARE DEAD. You will never, ever in your life receive a dime from your own life insurance, unless you have a comically complicated plot to fake your own death. Yet, if you’re like me, you pay for it so your family can have the best tier of Internet service after you die, because after all, YouTube® isn’t going to watch itself. In my mind, life insurance is the ultimate Marshmallow test.

Preparing for disasters is another Marshmallow test (Be Prep-ared) that over 90% of your neighbors don’t do at all. Sticking to a diet is another (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water) that’s not real popular. I will admit that I buy my share of silly crap on the Internet. I have several hobbies worth of kits and tools and stuff ready to build when I retire, and that’s Anti-Marshmallow behavior, but the only real hassle with them is finding a great place to store them until I’ve got the time to mess with them, what with the basement being full of ants, grasshoppers, and empty ketamine argument winning bottles.

A few weeks back I made a joke, “I could either spend it on me now, or spend it on an extra box of Depends® when I’m 90.” If one were to truly be Marshmallow, one would always pick the future comfort, over the comfort of today. But life is a balance. If all you do is pick the future, you become the janitor who worked 80 hour weeks for 80 years cleaning schools to leave Harvard® an extra $20 million to turn liberal rich kids into CNN® anchors.

If you become completely Anti-Marshmallow, well, you’re broke. Those are two extremes. Maybe this time you want Moderation?

Last week I mentioned that Moderation is for Monks, and Adam Piggott, Gentleman Adventurer added some great thoughts. You can read it here, and you should (LINK), in fact you should be reading him daily. Anyone who says, “Be the very best bastard that you can be,” is worth your time.

And he says moderation is good – moderation in having a cigar, and not the box. Splitting a bottle of wine with your wife on Friday, but not on all days ending in the letter y. And that’s Discipline, which is very Marshmallow. But is Discipline moderate in 2019 when the motto of the Western world is if it feels good, do it? Probably not.

But yet, there’s a time to be Marshmallow, and a time to be (at least a bit) Anti-Marshmallow. Maybe a T-34 is overkill – I don’t live anywhere near Kursk****. But maybe, just maybe, I should get a Ural®. The Mrs. has already signed off on it and said “You should get that. It looks cool.” To Marshmallow or to not to Marshmallow. I guess to be Marshmallow, at some point you have to eat the marshmallows. Otherwise Harvard© will.

I hear Elon Musk is including anti-gravity as a new Tesla® feature. If I bought a Ural®, I’d skip the Russians and the machine gun, because the Russians would drink all my booze and then invade Colorado only to be thrown back by a plucky school Spanish club.*****

Me? I don’t like marshmallows all that much. Except on ‘smores®. And then I roast mine slowly to get the full mushy goodness without it turning into something that looks like a cat caught at Hiroshima.

Which, I guess is the Marshmallow way to eat marshmallows.

*The Matrix. Too bad they never made a sequel to that movie.

**Bowfinger. If you haven’t seen it, you’re dead to me. Yes, it’s that funny.

***Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan. Really? Please tell me you already knew this one.

****Sort of like Burning Man®, but for tanks. 1943.

*****Nope. You can figure this one out.

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.

Red Flag Laws, or, How To Repeal The Second Amendment Soviet-Style Without A Pesky Vote

“Now, you see all these red flags? Trouble spots. Southeastern Asia. The Caribbean. The Congo. I’ll give you one guess as to who’s responsible.” – Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine

I look much better after I’ve had a cup of coffee. And after I’ve found my axe.

I know that you, gentle reader, have thoughts about guns that are probably pretty similar to mine, so I’d like to take you on a short walk through history, specifically the history of politics and psychiatry. I promise, it will make more sense than the lyrics to the Manfred Mann song Blinded by the Light. What the hell is a go-cart Mozart, and why is he checking out the weather chart, anyway?

The history of psychiatry is tied directly to the political.

I have seen a person suffering from schizophrenia to such a degree that they were sure that MTV® video stars were stealing songs directly from their brain and that they were also a surgeon who regularly performed operations on world leaders and stored their organs in the freezer for safe keeping.

If no one has ever told you that there are human organs belonging to world leaders in their fridge in a completely matter-of-fact “would you like a glass of water” voice, well, all I can tell you is that my first thought was one of complete disbelief that I had heard them right. Yes, I asked for them to repeat that statement. Twice.

I walked over and checked their freezer. Thankfully the only things in it were some frozen pizzas and ancient ice cubes. I assure you I was talking to their shrink that afternoon and they were involuntarily committed by 5PM. They were helped, and after being put on some appropriately industrial levels of anti-psychotic medication, did okay enough to be released back into the wild. As long as they stayed on their meds.

I know that there are actually crazy people that really need help.

But I also know this: psychiatry is still the most politically abused medical profession.

Okay, if Depp isn’t crazy, why does he keep starring in movies like this?

Examples of political abuse of psychiatry? There are many. When I mentioned this topic to The Mrs., she immediately said, “the Soviet Union.” And that’s the example I thought of first, too. The Soviets systematically used diagnosis of psychological disorders such as “philosophical intoxication” and “sluggish schizophrenia” to put people who didn’t like Marxism into mental institutions. And, no, those diagnoses aren’t lame jokes – those were really Soviet-era diagnoses.

How many were caught up in the psychological gulags?

We really don’t know since those records are still secret, but in 1978 at least 4.5 million Soviet citizens were listed as having mental health problems. In 1988, perhaps thinking that they might face their own version of Soviet Nuremburg Trials for Crimes Against Humanity, Soviet leaders had over 800,000 thousand patients removed from the list of the mentally ill. Paperwork error, surely?

Okay, with all those red flags, how did they not see the collapse of communism coming?

Did the Soviets condemn thousands with false diagnosis? Nearly certainly. Hundreds of thousands? Very likely.

Millions?

Probably. Think of it, millions of people falsely diagnosed with a mental illness due to political beliefs and sent to asylums and work camps. Certainly some were executed.

The Soviets allowed ownership of smoothbore weapons for hunting. Except when they didn’t. Which was most of the time. Oh, and the definition of sweet summer child is: a person who doesn’t know the hardships of winter, often used when someone has no experience with a particular (stressful) thing, which may describe a generation that rhymes with perennial.

Okay, it was just the Soviet Union, right?

No. Cuba did the same thing. There is evidence that China is still doing it, and likely on scale similar to that of the Soviet Union. Thankfully the World Psychiatric Association took the lead in investigations. Oh, they didn’t? The World Psychiatric Association pretty much ignored it and said that people associated with Falun Gong are nuts and that putting them in asylums run by the state security apparatus (not the medical directorate) was perfectly normal?

One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest . . . and if you haven’t see the movie, you should, it’s a lighthearted comedy and perfect for a first date.

Okay, that’s just China. Thankfully this would never happen in the United States.

Oh, it did?

Sure. In the 1920’s dissidents (like one who protested the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti) were put into asylums. In the 1960’s members of the American Psychological Association smeared presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in the press by diagnosing him. But that wasn’t political, right?

Thankfully it isn’t happening now.

Oh, in 2012 a whistleblower with the NYPD was railroaded on mental health? Ouch. But New York is corrupt.

It would never happen based on political motives, right?

Dinesh D’Souza, author and filmmaker on the Right was convicted of a crime based on giving too much money to a political campaign. He admitted he was wrong. The Federal Judge involved in the case sentenced D’Souza not only to prison, he sentenced D’Souza to years of mental health counselling despite a licensed psychologist saying that D’Souza was just fine mentally.

So, yes. Psychiatry is a political weapon. It’s not like the Left has sentenced political opponents to chemotherapy, but I hear that they’re working on it.

Yes, this is a common sense way to use psychiatry!

This corrupt branch of medicine is the background of the Red Flag Laws.

The idea is that we’ll create laws to remove rights from people without due process, with the presumption that individuals should lose a right guaranteed by the Constitution®. A single accuser, with no evidence can result in gun confiscation to a law-abiding citizen. Sadly this already happens – people with contested domestic restraining orders (a standard tactic in divorces nowadays) lose their rights, although I’ve heard of people fighting these orders and winning – at least there is a pretense at due process.

The claim that the ability to strip people of rights won’t be abused is laughable. In every country that’s been infected by psychiatry, it has been twisted to meet political ends. Yes, there are crazy people. I’ve seen one as I related above. And, if you did a brain scan, there is a physical basis for schizophrenia. It’s real. It is a medical condition. But remember, these are the same psychiatrists that would diagnose me as nuts if I believed I was be five years older than I really am, but are perfectly fine with children younger than the age of five claiming they are a different sex than their genetics have made them.

Po-tay-to, Po-gender reassignment surgery for children is normal-to.

Furthermore, the medical profession as a whole is maybe a bit, well, mental*. In one study it was claimed that 50% of female doctors could be diagnosed with a mental disease. I wonder again why my ex didn’t take up medicine? (*Aesop LINK excluded, unless pimp-slapping in the comments section is classified as a mental disorder.)

Oh, and psychologists have nearly the highest rates of suicide of any profession. Yes, any profession, including the people who make balloon animals in Mauschwitz Disneyland® for chubby children with hands sticky from chocolate ice cream. Perfectly stable. And this is also the same profession whose international governing body (WPA) was just fine with political repression in the name of psychiatry.

Besides being oppressive, the Red Flag laws would not have helped in latest shootings – these people lawfully and legally got their rifles. But they will form the basis for taking away guns for . . .

Conspiracy Theories – Believing anything other than the Official Narrative® will become a basis for exclusion of lawful firearms ownership, despite the fact that throughout history, many conspiracy theories have been proven true. Google® MKULTRA. That happened. But the FBI® is now warning that you are a danger if you don’t believe the Official Narrative©.
Antisocial Behavior – Ever not want to hang around people? You’re antisocial, and that’s dangerous, citizen. No AR for you!
Websites Visited – Going to unapproved sites? Thinking unapproved thoughts? Glockblock™!
Comments Made When You Were 16 – Wow, did you really say that maybe the Crusades weren’t all bad? No pew-pew for you, hater.
Not Believing in the Easter Bunny Socialism – Well, I think I covered that above.

The irony is this will have the impact of keeping people away from mental health professionals. This will keep people from seeking help when they’re a little depressed, because the consequences of having a “health record” might prevent them from future opportunity – the only safe way to live life would be to stay away from health professionals – and not answer certain questions your M.D. might have for you with a polite BFYTW when asked why you’re not answering. Oh, but that probably puts you on the antisocial list.

Texas may or may not be your cup of tea, but they certainly got some things right once upon a time.

Psychiatry is on pretty iffy ground in many cases already. As an experiment, a group of doctors sent people to a psychiatrist with one symptom – they heard a voice. No other symptom. They were perfectly normal, mentally healthy people. In one case, the person was committed to a mental health facility (as I recall) for several weeks with zero symptoms. I tried to look it up, but, surprise, most Google® searches right now link commitment to . . . violence. Even that’s not a comfortable thought.

Soviet mental health nurse. Not shown: tenth guard, who is now an inmate.

The single scariest thing to me is watching a human mind erode – what was once a rational human disappears. It’s what makes (to me) zombies scary. They look like humans. They used to be a normal human. But that rational human being is now gone, replaced by someone who has no real tie to reality while the external form remains.

I realize that there is a time and a place for psychiatric care.

But psychiatrists are already owned by the Left. The Left sees you as crazy already. The Left views your dissent from their agenda as a mental disorder, one punishable by death, if need be.

I’ll leave the last word to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who is really pictured above while in the gulag: “I’ll take Solzhenitsyn on Gun Control for $1000, Alex. Oh, look – the Daily Double®!”

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [They] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If . . . if . . . we didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation . . . . We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Defeating My Biggest Enemy: Me, Complete with Hairy Kardashians and Video Games.

“I noticed earlier the hyperdrive motivator has been damaged. It’s impossible to go to lightspeed!” – The Empire Strikes Back™

Nah, I got an A. Got a perfect score on the final, plus I got to watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate during winter break.

Ever think you could accomplish more? You can. Read on. It’s okay, I’m a trained professional.

When I was in college I took a course called Probability and Statistics, or as we referred to it at the time, Sadistics. During one lecture the instructor told the class a story about how a graduate student working on his Ph.D. was late to a class – so late that he’d missed the start of the lecture. The student saw two math problems on the blackboard. Thinking they were homework problems, he copied them down, and spent the weekend working on them. They were a little harder than usual, but he managed to finish them.

On Monday he returned to class, and showed the instructor his results. Turns out that the problems weren’t homework: these were two unproven theorems in statistics; unproven theorems that George Dantzig (the student) finished because he had no idea that they were too hard for him to do.

In Dantzig’s own words:

“A year later, when I began to worry about a thesis topic, [his teacher] just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems up in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis.”

At least he didn’t have to shag the professor, baby.

That’s a pretty good story, especially because it’s true and a great example of how much you can achieve when you’re too stupid to know that what you’re doing is impossible. It’s also a very good story to tell the boss the next time you’re late for a meeting at work, because his reaction will likely allow you time for independent exploration of all the employment opportunities this great nation has to offer.

So how do people sabotage themselves so they don’t achieve all that they could? How do they turn themselves into their own worst enemy? Today I’ll present three reasons. There are more, but what do I look like, a budget Tony Robbins?

I was wondering why that seminar only cost $14.98.

I think the worst is negative inner dialogue.

Ever make a mistake? Ever beat yourself up about it? Yeah, me too. But what I noticed is that when I beat myself up, I used to say things to myself that were meaner than any person had ever said to me in real life. Notice I said “used to” – I simply don’t put up with it any more. When I sense that inner beat down coming, I just shut it down.

If your best friend who has your best interests at heart wouldn’t say it to you, why would you say it to yourself?

Recently I read about a research study that indicated that you had more impact when motivating yourself if you encouraged yourself in the third person. Saying to yourself, “You’ve got this, John,” is much more powerful than, “I can do this.” Why? I have my guesses – it’s probably that you don’t want to fail when you’ve got some other person involved, so you dig that much deeper.

If that’s the case, how much more damaging is beating yourself up verbally in the third person? “I’m stupid,” versus “you’re stupid.” Think about it – and I advise you not to put up with your nonsense. Shut it down.

Yes, this happened.

Negative inner dialogue doesn’t help me, especially since whatever mistake I made was generally not even noticed by others. I hate to break this to you, but outside of your family, you’re less important than you think. People don’t notice the things you do all that much, and if they do? They don’t remember.

That may seem like a downer, but it’s really the opposite. It’s freedom, and another reason not to beat yourself up.

Next on the list? Belief that your goal is impossible.

Well, it isn’t possible, until you actually do it. Nobody had solved Dantzig’s theorems until he solved them. Heck, the Kardashians are too dumb to know they shouldn’t have hundreds of millions of dollars despite an utter lack anything resembling talent or a redeeming feature. Oh, unless you count their copious amounts of body hair. And I wouldn’t advise that you count their body hair, since that would take far too long. Plus? You’d get Kardashian grease all over you.

This is right before the hair covers them entirely in a protective cocoon so they can become giant genderless moth people.

I’ll note that nearly every time I was given an assignment that seemed impossible at work, I managed to crack the problem. What was off was my definition of impossible. I eventually ended up working for a boss that pushed me even farther. Nine times out of ten, he gambled and won. The tenth time? They fired him. Don’t feel bad for him – his severance package was about $2 million.

Finally, there’s not giving it all you’ve got.

This one is insidious. Here’s my example: in my career (the one that pays the bills, not this one) I’ve accomplished most things that I’ve ever wanted to do and have a whole batch of odd stories that I’ll maybe get around to telling someday. Does this mean that I aimed too low, that I didn’t push hard enough? Nah, I don’t think so. I’ve seen what some of the people at the top had to do to get there, and I like sleeping well.

It’s tough at the top. Everything is a tradeoff.

But here I can push myself, and sleep well. So, I write. I give that all that I’ve got, especially once I understood that I’d never get better unless I really pushed myself. And I can see results. I had a post that related to one I’d written back in 2017 that I was thinking of linking to. I pulled up the old post. I read it.

What made me happiest about the old post is: I’m better now than I was in 2017 – a lot better. How much better will I be if I keep pushing it, keep focusing on it for 20 hours a week for another decade? I have no idea. But we’ll see.

But I had my own George Dantzig moment before I ever heard his story:

I was in high school and a friend came over to my place. He and I sat down to play some video games, since we didn’t have a car. He went first. Normally on my first guy I’d score 10,000 or so. But my friend scored 50,000. I was amazed – I had no idea it was possible. So, my first guy up? 50,000 points. This was my best score ever.

I know – it looks exactly like a scene from The Empire Strikes Back©. But, trust me, this is really a video game.

What had been missing was belief. Seeing my friend play with no higher a skill level than I had do five times better than my best ever score flipped a switch. I believed. I could perform better than I ever thought possible.

But right now, it’s time:

Time to believe in yourself. Time to believe that your goal is possible. Time to work harder.

Go on, you’ve got this.

Inspiration, Attitude, and Funeral Jokes

“I’m simply seeking to inspire mankind to all that is intended.” – Constantine

See the lengths I will go to in order to deliver top-quality humor three times a week?

Sometimes you find treasures in odd places. Back in 2007, I was working a nightmare job. The days were hectic, filled with emergency after emergency, wailing, and general disarray. And then I had to commute to work. Okay, home life was generally pretty good, but work really was a nightmare. One positive thing I did, though, was clip and print things that I found to be inspiring. No, not a lot of clippings like I’d finally found the missing connection between the Rothschild family and why there are no purple M&M’s®. No, when I found these quotes there were just a few – maybe less than a dozen.

Here’s one of the quotes I found in the clippings:

“If you have a guy with all the survival training in the world who has a negative attitude and a guy who doesn’t have a clue but has a positive attitude, I guarantee you that the guy with a positive attitude is coming out of the woods alive. Simple as that.” – Gordon Smith, Retired Green Beret Command Sergeant Major

Training, preparation, skill and Ruffles® are all wonderful things. I recommend them all, especially if they are cheddar-flavored. The quote above, however, exactly mirrors my own feelings and experience. Stated bluntly:

Attitude matters.

I don’t have that tie, though, and haven’t worn one regularly since ‘08.

I’m a long time reader of Scott Adams dating back into the mid-1990’s. He’s most famous for Dilbert, but he has written books and blogged for decades about everything from management to life skills to persuasion. Daily, Scott Adams writes his goals 15 times (LINK). Why 15? I don’t know. But Adams has reported that it produces amazing results for him, and he’s lived a pretty amazing life. It might also have something to do with him being a genius who works really hard and tries lots of things. Nah. He must be a beneficiary of the structural capitalist patriarchy and the reason people love Dilbert is only due to white privilege. That explains everything, if you’re in Congress.

How the goal writing produces results is probably unimportant – in my opinion the most likely idea is that if you’re focused on a goal, you’ll notice connections, clues or opportunities that would normally pass you by. The focus on the goal, the attitude that you can achieve something great changes the way you look at every aspect of your day. I know that when I believe I can succeed, I seem to keep finding ways to actually make it happen.

It might seem that it’s magic, writing down what you want 15 times a day and having coincidences show up that lead you to your goal. But, perhaps, the magic is just in you – seeing farther and deeper than you normally would is the magic. Having a goal changes you. Having the attitude that you can achieve your goal changes you so you can see the path more clearly.

As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”

I guess it wasn’t just college papers Creepy Joe plagiarized . . .

We’ve all been around negative people. I’ve had to work with them. I’ve had to manage them, and once I even had to work for one – he was my first supervisor after I graduated college. There was nothing that was good that ever happened to or around him. He’d had a leg injury and was now stuck at a desk job when he really, really hated desk jobs. Enter: happy, enthusiastic, wisecracking, young college graduate (still with hair at that time). I think he wanted to tie me up in a burlap sack weighted down with stones and toss me in the pond behind the office. Frankly, I can see why.

This clip is super short, and from the Clint Eastwood movie Kelly’s Heroes. Haven’t seen Kelly’s Heroes? You have your weekend assignment – it’s from back when movies were fun and not remakes.

Negative People:

Exhaust me.
Don’t accomplish much.
Take the last cup of coffee without making more.
Tend to make themselves a victim of whatever happened to them.
Infect the entire team with negativity and sometimes herpes.
Seem to get energy from talking about their pain and how the world is unfair to them.
Shoot down bad ideas. And good ideas. Any ideas, really.
Find a dark cloud in every silver lining.

I had a professor in college who had one piece of advice for me: “Keep smiling, John.” I took his advice. For most of my life, I’ve kept smiling. Even on bad days at work, I’ve kept a good attitude because most of the time, circumstances don’t care if you’re mad at them. The circumstances continue to exist just the same.

Not everyone agrees with me. On one particular job I actually received feedback that I was too cheerful. I guess being a mortician isn’t a job for everyone.

Okay, I’ve never worked as a mortician, but one of my bosses really did tell me I was too cheerful. But if I could be a mortician that hired Terminators®? I wouldn’t call that a dead-end job.

In most things in life I expect good outcomes, and generally I get them. That’s not unique to me. Throughout the history of humanity most times and most days have been good. Has there been war as long as we can look back into history? Yes. We’ve been fighting each other even before we were fully human. I imagine, though, we’ve been telling each other fart jokes for just as long. The human race has watched sunsets over the Arctic, the Serengeti, and the Atlantic and had pretty good days. An iPhone® isn’t required, but without an endless stream of Disney® live-action remakes, is life really worth living?

Nah, I like making them.

I won’t say that on my worst day there was a bright spot. The worst day of my life just sucked from 2pm until I finally fell asleep in bed. Honestly, it wasn’t much better the next day, but there were a few bright spots showed up. And more the next. And every day since then has been better than that day.

I mentioned magic above, and magic also happens on my worst days. Every one of my very bad days was the start of the time when my life started to get better, and it seemed the worse it was, the better it would eventually be. My best times have come from my worst times. One example was my divorce. The reality is that no matter how bad the marriage was, divorce is difficult. But as difficult as it was, it was the start of the next phase in my life, my marriage to The Mrs.

The longer, and the deeper the dark night of the soul, the bigger the positive that’s eventually come out of it for me.

If I ever were to get involved with the funeral industry, I’d tie the shoelaces of the deceased together in the coffin. That way if we ever had a zombie apocalypse, it would be hilarious. See, I even made zombies cheerful.

I spend time thinking about the future, and about dark possibilities not so much because I’m a gloomy guy sitting in the basement – but because it’s fun. However, in thinking about those possibilities I am prepared, at least a little more, for the uncertainty of the future. I’m cheerful, but I can see reality and know that there is danger ahead.

As I read the news I see a specter of a dark foe bent on creating a world that few of us want to see, one built out of fear and control. It’s even scarier because that foe wants you and I to think that it’s winning, so we will give up and it can win by default. Don’t. As long as people long for freedom, as long as we have each other and a dream of a better day where mankind keeps reaching for the stars, we have light. But in this time of seeming darkness, even a small light burns brightly.

If I were to give advice this Friday it’s this: be of good cheer. Be a spark in the darkness to help others. Understand that, until the last moment of your life, you have the ability to change the world for the better, to help create that better future for all of us.

The Roman Emperor, The Navy SEAL, Elizabeth Warren, and Your Future

“You were last seen hiking up Mount Ego.” – Frasier

Jimmy Page could NOT believe it when he found out that Marcus Aurelius would be available as a lead singer.

I know what you’re saying, “John Wilder, how can you be so freakin’ funny three times a week every Monday, Wednesday and Friday?” The answer is simple – my goal to be the funniest person on the Internet, with the exception of those anchors on CNN®. I mean, how do they keep a straight face?

That goal requires work. Really. Oh, sure, “work” includes researching things I’m interested in anyway and (sometimes) drinking a glass of wine or two while I work on punchlines. But I won’t hit publish or stop writing until it’s done. And done means I’m happy as a twit in a toga with a toupee. Speaking of noble noggins in nighties, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (notice that smooth transition?) said:

Don’t let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you. Don’t fill your mind with all the bad things that still might happen. Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself whey it’s so unbearable and can’t be survived.

Whenever I quote him, I remind everyone that Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor of Rome while it was still at the height of its power. This man had the freedom to make decisions on the literal life and death of citizens and non-citizens alike. He was, no joking, the most powerful man in the world.

What’s the fun of telling the Stormtroopers© that “These aren’t the droids® you’re looking for,” when the Stormtroopers™ work for you? It’s like they were thinking, “Okay, play along, the Emperor is doing cosplay again.”

But despite this worldly power, Marcus took the time to write down his personal philosophy. It wasn’t to pass down to posterity, it was for him. His book is called Meditations because these were the things he meditated about on a daily basis. These were the problems and doubts and issues he dealt with in his everyday life.

You can tell this was the first page of Meditations – later on Marcus used glitter pens and stickers. The historians were so happy when the found the key to the little lock on the diary.

When I was younger, I thought that the solution to my problems existed outside of me. I thought that if I could get more power, I could be happy. If you think being more powerful will automatically ease all of your worries and concerns, Marcus Aurelius is proof that power won’t help you in that way.

Sure, Marcus didn’t have to worry about making a mortgage payment or about not getting a tasty chicken sandwich because he showed up at Chick-fil-a® and forgot they were closed on Sundays, but the passage above shows that the decisions of running an empire and planning military campaigns were still overwhelming and stressful. While outwardly Marcus had to be stoic in the sense of a strong Roman emperor, in his book he could share the truth about his worries with himself.

Let’s look at another quote, this one by Navy SEAL Jocko Willink (LINK):

This is what I want you to be afraid of: waking up in six days or six weeks or six years or sixty years and being no closer to your goal . . . . GET UP. AND. GO.

At first glance, these two quotes might seem separated. They certainly are separated in time and pace, not to mention power. Marcus wrote about the present and living through the moment. He spoke of action in the small moment of “now” to allow him to get back to being able to deal with the big picture.

Jocko writes about failing in that future to spur action in today’s small moment of “now.”

Or maybe he identifies as a SEAL?

Two men, writing about the same thing centuries apart, come to the same conclusion through different methods on escaping the paralysis of fear in day-to-day life: action is vital for you to be the best you. You can’t dwell on what might happen if you make a bad decision – but you have to be afraid of the person you’ll be if you don’t take action, or, worse yet, don’t have a goal.

Why don’t we take action? Probably the number one reason is our egos. Egos are fragile things, and ego in many ways is our enemy. Aurelius wrote about getting through the moment, not being crushed by the overwhelming vastness of life. That’s his ego not wanting to be wrong.

I thought we’d have more of moved off to Canada by now?

Willink writes about wasting that future life. That’s his ego avoiding action today because it might fail. Ego wants to, above all things, not fail. Taking yourself into a future where you have failed by not trying is a sneaky way of using your ego to help you improve. Taken to extreme, it’ll make you single-minded. The biggest danger is that you achieve your goal and don’t have another one.

Don’t let your ego drive your life. Most people really don’t care about you, and that’s a good thing.

They don’t remember that your pants split during that presentation in college and you weren’t wearing underwear. At least I hope they still don’t remember that.
They barely remember when you made a fool out of yourself that one time at the party by walking into that glass front door, making you look like a 200 pound sparrow who left a face imprint, complete with Hot Mustard Sauce® that you were dipping Chicken McNuggets© in.
No one remembers that you time travelled into the past and that your high-school age mom tried to put the moves on you after you hit Biff Tannen.

Those that do care about you . . . don’t care about those oddly specific things I listed above. They care about you and want you to feel better. After you do something embarrassing, an inner voice beats you up. That’s your ego. Your ego is insulting you so you don’t embarrass it again. And, I assure you, if anyone said to you the things you tell yourself when you’re feeling guilty or embarrassed and looking in a mirror, you’d cut them out of your life in a minute. Unfortunately, when I tried to cut my ego out, my family stopped me because the electric drill I used couldn’t find it. The ego is kept behind the drywall of your closet, right?

I mean, that’s where the voices come from.

And his shoes didn’t match his purse!

Ask yourself: how does fear of embarrassment or fear of failure drive your behavior? How many things have you avoided because of fear? How many great things did you miss out on because you weren’t willing to take the risk?

Be the best you. Start today. And ignore or make your own use of that inner voice that your ego uses to punish you.

Risk, Vladimir Putin on a Cat, and Death by Playground

â€œI respect what you said, but remember that these men have lands and castles. Â It’s much toÂ risk.â€ – Braveheart

I would say I want a cat I can ride, I’d just settle for one that wears sunglasses and doesnâ€™t buck me off after explosions.

When The Boy was tiny, he was afraid of slides.Â Any slide.Â Short ones.Â Long ones.Â Plastic ones.Â Metal ones.Â Forget tall ones.Â I would stand at the bottom of the slide, waiting for him to slide down.Â Often there was crying and yelling from behind a tear and snot-covered face.Â And The Boy was even worse.Â But there was no real reason for him to have any fear â€“ I was there and the playground equipment met every Federal standard, even the regulations that made sure that the swings were safe for handicapable lesbian migratory waterfowl of size.

Playground equipment was more dangerous back before the dawn of recorded history, when I was in kindergarten.Â At my school, our playground equipment included a merry-go-round that was missing part of the wooden deck (this is true).Â The missing deck part was close to the center, and a kindergartener could stand in there, and could run and push the merry-go-round a LOT faster.Â The downside was if any of us had fallen under the merry-go-round while pushing it up to speed?Â At that point the merry-go-round would become a quite efficient kindergartner decapitation machine.Â Thankfully, we had already gnawed all the lead and asbestos off of the handles so it was safer for the next batch of kids, and the headless zombies were already our mascot at good old Sleepy Hallow Elementary, so a decapitated kid would have been just displaying a very large degree of loyalty.

Donâ€™t fault a kid for being true to his school.

Our school nurse was excellent at re-attaching spines.Â Lots of practice.

We also played with, I kid you not, the dry ice they used for packing the food they shipped to the school.Â The Lunch LadiesÂ® tossed it on the ground behind the kitchen after they unpacked the peas that had DONE NO WRONG before they turned them into the most ghastly smelling split pea soup.Â They had to stop making that soup after the United StatesÂ© ratified the Geneva Conventionâ„¢ against chemical weapons.

Anyway, we had dry ice.Â Let me write that a bit more specifically:

WE WERE KINDERGARTNERS WITH LIMITED SUPERVISION IN POSSESSION OF DRY ICE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Naturally we competed to see who could hold the dry ice in our hands the longest.Â Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, and has a temperature of -109.3 F (which really is -78.5 C).Â The unsurprising answer to â€œHow long can a kindergartner hold dry ice in their hand?â€ is: â€œNot very long.â€

We did much better holding it against each otherâ€™s arms, I liked to hold it until the skin of my classmates turned white.Â To a kindergartner, the pain of other people doesnâ€™t exist, their brain isnâ€™t developed enough for empathy.Â Or maybe I was just a sociopath.Â I will admit that I enjoyed it when the other kindergartners made funny noises.

Okay, Iâ€™m probably a sociopath.

Oh, and I forgot about the high jump pits.Â Weâ€™d crawl between the top foam block and the bottom foam block and then the other kids would jump on the blocks.Â When you have a dozen kindergartners on a foam high jump pit, it pretty effectively blocks out the light in the second layer.Â As well as the air.Â The last time I crawled between them I recall waking up with stars in my eyes after the bell rang and all of the other kids had gone inside.Â Who says near suffocation canâ€™t be a fond memory?

Playground equipment had evolved to the point when The Boy was a young Wildlingâ„¢ the only way to actually hurt yourself on the equipment would be to take a hot glue gun and affix razor blades to the slide, and my restraining order prevents me from being near hot glue, so thatâ€™s right out.Â A good slide designed in the last 20 years will be scary, but yet cozier than a motherâ€™s womb.Â Word is that a Federal Commission is looking to redesign wombs to meet current safety standards, including encasing the fetus in breathable bubble wrap and removing the word â€œmotherâ€ from association with the word â€œwombâ€ because itâ€™s something-ist (I lost my scorecard) to assume that only women can have wombs.

But returning to the original thought – it was hard to get The Boy to take risks as a kid â€“ I remember how he cried the first time I made him rappel out of a helicopter.Â What a baby!Â Youâ€™d think that it was child abuse making a three year old do that!

Isnâ€™t fear the way to overcome fear?

I kid.Â But The Boy really did plug a speaker directly into a power outlet.Â That made a hell of a noise and tossed out some sparks.Â And was far more dangerous than the plastic four-foot high slide at the park.Â This led me to an observation about The Boy.Â What he thought was safe, was risky.Â What he thought was risky, was safe.

And itâ€™s not just kids that judge risk poorly, adults can suck at it, too.Â Pop Wilder got more afraid of ordinary things as he got older â€“ for example, he became unwilling to even attempt to adjust anything electronic â€“ so he left his lights on continually.Â Again, I kid.Â But if it was more complicated than an on/off switch?Â Nope.Â Not his thing.

He also cut off many life choices due to this fear.Â When everyone with three HTML programmers and a business plan was scheduling Hall and OatesÂ® to do a business kick-off concert and was an instant Internet millionaire back in 1999, Pop was complaining about how much his medicine cost.Â I got online (via a 56k modem) and found that his prescriptions could be had for about 10% of what he was paying.Â Just by changing to GonnaGoBrokeSoonRX.com, we could save him about $1000 a month.

A month.

He wouldnâ€™t do it.Â â€œWell, it might get warm.Â One of these medicines needs to stay cold, and only my pharmacy has the Wee Cuckold Striptease ElvesÂ© that keep it at the right temperature.â€Â So he paid $1000 a month more than he needed to.Â I guess he owed something to the Elves.Â Stupid Elves.

Itâ€™s natural to not want to risk it all.Â Unless youâ€™ve been drinking.

As Iâ€™ve observed you humans my fellow humans for the past few decades, Iâ€™ve discovered that Risk is poorly understood.Â Pop Wilder had fallen victim to what Iâ€™m now calling Wilderâ€™s Rule of Risk: Â What he thought was safe, was risky.Â What he thought was risky, was safe.Â He ended up outliving his savings due to decisions that prioritized â€œsafetyâ€ over even minimal risks.Â He built barriers to action over unreasonable and unlikely fears.

Eyepatches.Â Iâ€™ve always wanted one, or a glass eye that has a snow-globe inside.Â Sadly?Â Two good eyes.

I read the above passages to The Mrs. and she (rightly) noted that the risks Iâ€™ve taken in my life have been measured.Â Iâ€™ve never taken all of my money and put it all on red.Â The career choices Iâ€™ve made have been (generally) ones that led to more money and more security â€“ theyâ€™ve been bets of winning versus winning more.Â And when the stock market goes down?Â I lose very little of my net worth.Â Yay!Â But if the stock market doubles, my wealth doesnâ€™t double.Â Iâ€™m giving up some of the upside in return for the safe.

But did I mention there were really good benefits?

But what am I missing?Â Iâ€™ve won enough with the bets Iâ€™ve made that Iâ€™m playing life with house money now.Â The question is, what if Iâ€™d dreamt bigger?Â What if the subs you had delivered were Wilder JohnsÂ©?Â Or Buffalo Wilder Wingsâ„¢?Â Yeah.Â I do have a list of great ideas that Iâ€™ve had but never acted on.Â Primarily because Iâ€™ve followed a path that led to me being pretty comfortable.Â But is that always really safe?Â Probably not, especially when you look at the big picture, and I recognize that.

Oddly, we often donâ€™t realize on a day-to-day basis that some things in life arenâ€™t risks, theyâ€™re certainties:

Taxes will go up.
Freedoms will disappear. They might come back.Â You might have something to do with that.
Your money will be worth less. Hopefully not worthless in your life.Â But in the long run?
If I described the year 2049 to you in detail, it wonâ€™t be like you think, unless you can imagine life without noses. Noses are so 2022.

So, weâ€™re all going to die!Â Letâ€™s give up.

Never!Â But understand other certainties that may or may not happen in your lifetime.Â Theyâ€™re certain, but their timing isnâ€™t:

The dollar will collapse.
We will run out of economically viable/thermodynamically viable oil. Weâ€™ll never run out of oil, whatâ€™s left will just be too hard or too expensive in dollar or energy terms to harvest.
Star WarsÂ® movies might be good again.
Global WarmingÂ© wonâ€™t doom humanity. Not even close.Â It might flood New York, but probably not in my lifetime, if ever.Â Darn it.
An asteroid will hit George Clooney. A small one.Â (Small asteroid, not a small George Clooney.)

Steinâ€™s Law says:Â If something canâ€™t go on forever, it wonâ€™t.Â Wilderâ€™s Corollary: Â But it might go on so long you canâ€™t make a buck off of it failing.

Seriously, this may be from Risky BusinessÂ®, but Tomâ€™s still four foot three and nearly old enough for Social SecurityÂ©.Â Oh, and he drinks only vegan free range chicken juice.

Life is like Tom Cruise.Â Itâ€™s short.Â Life is also like having sex with a Kardashian.Â Hairy and risky.Â But you have a choice.Â You can be afraid and live in fear.Â You can also live gallantly, and die nobly.

We want to live with certainty.Â We want to, especially when weâ€™re young, and when we are old, avoid risk.Â But we canâ€™t.Â The absence of risk is the absence of life.Â The thrill of the first kiss, the thrill of winning when youâ€™ve bet it all on red, those are life.Â Life is struggle.Â Life is fighting.Â Life is also all about risk.

Step one of living gallantly and nobly?Â Donâ€™t be afraid of risks that arenâ€™t real.

Step two?Â Donâ€™t spend too long in the high jump pit.