A "Can Do" Attitude Gets Things Done
"We like to think if you need something done to your vehicle, we can do it."
- Kim Sturgeon, owner of Renous Automotive Repair (New Brunswick, Canada)
Kim is what we call a "can do" kind of person. Not much stops him.
Bear with me, this isn't a "thanks for the great car repair" kind of story.
Like the cleaning ladies of old who refused to clean ovens (too many strong chemicals) or windows (too much dangerous climbing without any safety harness), Kim and his mechanics will not repair your tires or do bodywork or paint your car. He will claim it's because they don't have the equipment. I'm pretty sure it's because they find such activities boring. They thrive on challenges.
I went into his shop to pay him for two recent repairs. One a simple cigarette lighter (accessory plug) repair so I could use the plug to power my GPS and MP3 player. The other more complicated because it involved a coloured spaghetti mess of wires behind a car radio that was draining the car battery every night due to a short, plus I wanted the radio changed to a different one. Most repair shops steer away from electrical repairs because they can be anything but straightforward. Not Kim and his boys.
The repairs and changes were done, but Kim was nowhere to be found when I went in. He had gone to Bangor, Maine, to pick up a part he couldn't locate in his own home province. He not only left the Canadian province where he has his shop, he left the country to get a part in the United States because a customer needed his vehicle repaired faster than it would take to have the part shipped by courier.
The chief mechanic told me the cars were ready to roll and how much it would cost. Twenty-five dollars. For two electrical repairs and a change of radio. Canadian Tire, the main supplier of automotive parts and supplies and repairs in Canada, charges more than twice as much as Kim per hour. Most dealers charge more than three times as much for "authorized" repairs. And they take twice as long as Kim to get the job done. I tucked a twenty and a five into the mechanic's pocket as he continued to work on a transmission he had just removed from a stake truck.
Last year I needed an engine replaced in one of my cars. Kim spent a good part of an afternoon phoning every wrecking yard he knew to find one. The following day I drove my trailer to Fredericton to pick up the engine he found. The day after that I drove my newly refitted car home. Kim takes little time making repairs to cars and trucks because he only has a small lot to store them.
He has people bring their vehicle repairs to him from all over the region. Every morning his lot is full, few remain by late afternoon. People count on Kim to do a job right, honestly, fairly and fast. For Kim that means a lot of business because dependable repair shops, sadly, are hard to find. People like his approach to business.
Oh, that drive to Bangor, Maine? About five hours of driving each way. In heavy rain the whole day (I know, I drove for four hours in it myself). Kim drove his full sized pickup truck, the one with the standard stick shift on the floor, on his right side. His right arm is paralyzed from an accident a few years ago on his snowmobile. He drives and shifts with his left. Better than most other drivers on the road.
Kim can do.
His approach to a problem is not "Can I solve this problem?" For him it's "How can I solve this problem?" It works.
You can do, too. It's all a matter of attitude. And perseverance. And, in Kim's case, using his head when he doesn't have two hands that work. He always has a problem solved in his head before his hand or his mechanics go to work.
Can do. At Kim's garage, smiles are free too. He gives a few with each repair job. People like that as well.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to know all the needs children have to develop to lead a balanced life, not just their intellectual needs.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Have We Created Societies of Social Welfare Bums?
Have We Created Societies of Social Welfare Bums?
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love the greater the jealousy.
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
- Robert Heinlein, American writer (1907-1988)
What do love and jealousy have to do with welfare? A great deal, as you will learn. First let me note that the two paragraphs that comprise the quote come from different sources by Heinlein.
Let's lead off with a big idea, though one you should find comfort with. We have people for whom someone or some people other than themselves takes priority over their own best interests. And we have people who, when all distractions are stripped away, have their own best interests of primary importance.
Doesn't everyone give importance to their own best interests? Of course, it's how we survive. Doesn't everyone have to put the interests of others ahead of their own sometimes? Yes, but in the case of our self-first group, putting the interests of others ahead of their own may indeed be in their own bests interests. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Take the example of a highly paid executive who makes a sizable donation to charity right before the end of income tax season. By no small coincidence the amount of the donation happens to lower his income below a threshold, putting him into a lower tax bracket. In the end he is money in pocket and he receives acclaim for his donations. Is that bad? No, most of us would do it if we could. But that person can't claim to have the best interests of others ahead of his own if he will benefit financially from the donation. His own wallet counts first.
Now let's take the example of a parent who loads his adolescent son with electronic toys and gadgetry, so much so that the boy spends much of his time at home alone playing with the games. Admirable, huh? Except when you realize that the parent has thereby relieved himself of the parental obligation of interacting with the child, of teaching life lessons to the child while conveying the benefits of a close relationship between parent and child. That's what parents are supposed to do, what they have done throughout human history. The parent avoids that. That puts his own interests ahead of those of his son, no matter how he appeases his conscience by telling himself how good a father he was to give his son so much, more than he had as a child.
Another example, this time from the other group, might be the businessman who takes time out of his work week to mentor school kids--or even one child--so that the children have examples of good role models other than their own parent(s). Many other adults belong to service organizations in their communities where they volunteer many hours each year to benefit certain groups or individuals with needs they can't otherwise meet. They help, others benefit.
We have one group who loves themselves first, another who loves others more. You likely know many of each type. You may even have friends of both types. "Love" may be a strong word for people for whom love is, essentially, a business arrangement.
To put this into clearer perspective, let's take an extreme example of a life crisis. Let's say a natural catastrophe such as a hurricane or tornado destroys one or more distribution centres for electricity in your area. It will take weeks, maybe months, before power is restored to your home and every other home, business, factory, recreation hall and other gathering place within 500 kilometres of where you live.
At crisis times, we all need allies. It's the time when everyone should pull together. In this scenario, which group of people would you rather have as your allies, the self-interested ones or the ones who willingly share and think of others before themselves?
That's easy to answer, you may say. Choose the group who will help you most. That extreme example was only to give perspective. Life is filled with all kinds of situations of a less critical nature in which we could use help from others. You might have a flat tire on the freeway and your cell phone battery is dead. If someone were to stop to help you, which group would you expect the helper to come from?
Some people can't make it in life. For many reasons, they have fallen into a pit of problems from which they can't extract themselves. They lose their job, can't pay their mortgage, get hassled by credit card companies, and so on. No matter what they do, they can't manage to put their ducks in line.
We have welfare (also known as social assistance) to help them. But for how long? If they do not have the necessary work skills, attitude and work ethic to get and hold a job, it could be years before they can pay their way in life again, if ever. Somehow they didn't get what they needed while they were in school, including life skills that could help them to survive in times of crisis.
They often live in the poorest quality of housing, maybe it reeks of the urine of past occupants or harbours cockroaches or has plumbing that works only sporadically. Or all of the aforementioned. It's not pleasant to be inside, especially in summer, so they sit outside with their beverage of choice, often beer.
That's where they are when some people see them and complain that "we pay our taxes so these people can sit around home all day and drink beer." Have you ever heard one of those complainers express a desire to change places with those welfare "whores" they despise? If life is so easy for welfare recipients, why would more people not want to change places with them?
We have many people in our society who, for a variety of reasons (none of them pleasant), must spend many years in prison. The prisons allow the inmates to work, for which they receive a little money (a dollar a day, for example) they can use to buy small treats for themselves. They often have access to libraries and classes to upgrade their education. And they can watch television.
Setting aside the discussion of the mood we might expect prisoners to be in (remember, they must associate with staff members who are outsiders to them) if we kept them confined full time in mind-numbing violence-inducing cells, we have people who condemn prisons for being places of luxury. "It's a great life and we pay for it!" Have you ever heard one person who seriously would trade places with a prisoner for any given period of time? Of course not. They know life is not luxurious or comfy in prison, no matter what they say.
Some people want to help those confined to prisons. Some want to help those who are stuck on welfare because they can't figure out how to dig themselves out of it. Some want to throw a lifeline to people who have lost their jobs or whose homes have been lost to fire. Or people whose life mates have walked out, leaving them alone enough to want to end their lives. Or people of an age they should retire because their health is not so good, but they can't because they have lost their life savings to some scam or stock market downturn.
They are the helpers. They are the "liberals" who want to "help out every freeloader who can't be bothered to work enough to earn a proper living." Even though not one of the self-first complainers would ever offer to change places with a person with a problem, they condemn those who would help. Because helping others does not help themselves and they are always more important than any others.
Those helpers are the ones you want as allies in a crisis. Ironically, the helpers will, in a crisis, help even the most self-interested lamers.
Returning now to our opening quote from Heinlein about love and jealousy, does it become obvious to you which group of people are likely to become jealous and which more apt to love others?
If you have a mate who is jealous, now you know why. That mate is not someone who would lay down their life for you in an emergency, no matter if you would for them or not.
Study your friends, workmates and neighbours and you will see which are the selfish ones and which the generous helpers. Some love themselves first and foremost, some love others more.
Remember, you will eventually have a crisis in your own life. Cultivate the helpers now so that they will support you when you need them. That's what friends do, though they serve much different functions most of the time.
The old saying goes: to make a friend you need first to be a friend. If you want to have a helping kind of person as a friend, you will need to make friendly gestures to that person first if they are not already your friend.
In other words, help someone else now who needs your help. That person needs a friend now and will be your friend later when you need him or her. Maybe. The ones who become friends will far outweigh in benefits to you those who take what you give and forget about you.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to raise their children to be helpers, to be able to make friends, to be self sufficient yet comfortable with interdependence.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love the greater the jealousy.
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
- Robert Heinlein, American writer (1907-1988)
What do love and jealousy have to do with welfare? A great deal, as you will learn. First let me note that the two paragraphs that comprise the quote come from different sources by Heinlein.
Let's lead off with a big idea, though one you should find comfort with. We have people for whom someone or some people other than themselves takes priority over their own best interests. And we have people who, when all distractions are stripped away, have their own best interests of primary importance.
Doesn't everyone give importance to their own best interests? Of course, it's how we survive. Doesn't everyone have to put the interests of others ahead of their own sometimes? Yes, but in the case of our self-first group, putting the interests of others ahead of their own may indeed be in their own bests interests. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Take the example of a highly paid executive who makes a sizable donation to charity right before the end of income tax season. By no small coincidence the amount of the donation happens to lower his income below a threshold, putting him into a lower tax bracket. In the end he is money in pocket and he receives acclaim for his donations. Is that bad? No, most of us would do it if we could. But that person can't claim to have the best interests of others ahead of his own if he will benefit financially from the donation. His own wallet counts first.
Now let's take the example of a parent who loads his adolescent son with electronic toys and gadgetry, so much so that the boy spends much of his time at home alone playing with the games. Admirable, huh? Except when you realize that the parent has thereby relieved himself of the parental obligation of interacting with the child, of teaching life lessons to the child while conveying the benefits of a close relationship between parent and child. That's what parents are supposed to do, what they have done throughout human history. The parent avoids that. That puts his own interests ahead of those of his son, no matter how he appeases his conscience by telling himself how good a father he was to give his son so much, more than he had as a child.
Another example, this time from the other group, might be the businessman who takes time out of his work week to mentor school kids--or even one child--so that the children have examples of good role models other than their own parent(s). Many other adults belong to service organizations in their communities where they volunteer many hours each year to benefit certain groups or individuals with needs they can't otherwise meet. They help, others benefit.
We have one group who loves themselves first, another who loves others more. You likely know many of each type. You may even have friends of both types. "Love" may be a strong word for people for whom love is, essentially, a business arrangement.
To put this into clearer perspective, let's take an extreme example of a life crisis. Let's say a natural catastrophe such as a hurricane or tornado destroys one or more distribution centres for electricity in your area. It will take weeks, maybe months, before power is restored to your home and every other home, business, factory, recreation hall and other gathering place within 500 kilometres of where you live.
At crisis times, we all need allies. It's the time when everyone should pull together. In this scenario, which group of people would you rather have as your allies, the self-interested ones or the ones who willingly share and think of others before themselves?
That's easy to answer, you may say. Choose the group who will help you most. That extreme example was only to give perspective. Life is filled with all kinds of situations of a less critical nature in which we could use help from others. You might have a flat tire on the freeway and your cell phone battery is dead. If someone were to stop to help you, which group would you expect the helper to come from?
Some people can't make it in life. For many reasons, they have fallen into a pit of problems from which they can't extract themselves. They lose their job, can't pay their mortgage, get hassled by credit card companies, and so on. No matter what they do, they can't manage to put their ducks in line.
We have welfare (also known as social assistance) to help them. But for how long? If they do not have the necessary work skills, attitude and work ethic to get and hold a job, it could be years before they can pay their way in life again, if ever. Somehow they didn't get what they needed while they were in school, including life skills that could help them to survive in times of crisis.
They often live in the poorest quality of housing, maybe it reeks of the urine of past occupants or harbours cockroaches or has plumbing that works only sporadically. Or all of the aforementioned. It's not pleasant to be inside, especially in summer, so they sit outside with their beverage of choice, often beer.
That's where they are when some people see them and complain that "we pay our taxes so these people can sit around home all day and drink beer." Have you ever heard one of those complainers express a desire to change places with those welfare "whores" they despise? If life is so easy for welfare recipients, why would more people not want to change places with them?
We have many people in our society who, for a variety of reasons (none of them pleasant), must spend many years in prison. The prisons allow the inmates to work, for which they receive a little money (a dollar a day, for example) they can use to buy small treats for themselves. They often have access to libraries and classes to upgrade their education. And they can watch television.
Setting aside the discussion of the mood we might expect prisoners to be in (remember, they must associate with staff members who are outsiders to them) if we kept them confined full time in mind-numbing violence-inducing cells, we have people who condemn prisons for being places of luxury. "It's a great life and we pay for it!" Have you ever heard one person who seriously would trade places with a prisoner for any given period of time? Of course not. They know life is not luxurious or comfy in prison, no matter what they say.
Some people want to help those confined to prisons. Some want to help those who are stuck on welfare because they can't figure out how to dig themselves out of it. Some want to throw a lifeline to people who have lost their jobs or whose homes have been lost to fire. Or people whose life mates have walked out, leaving them alone enough to want to end their lives. Or people of an age they should retire because their health is not so good, but they can't because they have lost their life savings to some scam or stock market downturn.
They are the helpers. They are the "liberals" who want to "help out every freeloader who can't be bothered to work enough to earn a proper living." Even though not one of the self-first complainers would ever offer to change places with a person with a problem, they condemn those who would help. Because helping others does not help themselves and they are always more important than any others.
Those helpers are the ones you want as allies in a crisis. Ironically, the helpers will, in a crisis, help even the most self-interested lamers.
Returning now to our opening quote from Heinlein about love and jealousy, does it become obvious to you which group of people are likely to become jealous and which more apt to love others?
If you have a mate who is jealous, now you know why. That mate is not someone who would lay down their life for you in an emergency, no matter if you would for them or not.
Study your friends, workmates and neighbours and you will see which are the selfish ones and which the generous helpers. Some love themselves first and foremost, some love others more.
Remember, you will eventually have a crisis in your own life. Cultivate the helpers now so that they will support you when you need them. That's what friends do, though they serve much different functions most of the time.
The old saying goes: to make a friend you need first to be a friend. If you want to have a helping kind of person as a friend, you will need to make friendly gestures to that person first if they are not already your friend.
In other words, help someone else now who needs your help. That person needs a friend now and will be your friend later when you need him or her. Maybe. The ones who become friends will far outweigh in benefits to you those who take what you give and forget about you.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to raise their children to be helpers, to be able to make friends, to be self sufficient yet comfortable with interdependence.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
What A Relationship Needs To Succeed
What A Relationship Needs To Succeed
"If we were endowed with the same biological mating pattern as the [pair-bonding] goose, there could be no polygamy, no promiscuity, no celibacy, no harems, no group marriage, no trial marriage, and no divorce in any human community in any part of the world." and "The gibbon's 'very low sex drive' is a reminder...[of the fallacy] that pair-bonding is based on sexual attraction."
- Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman, Bantam 1972
The article title refers mostly to male-female relationships, though the first reason could apply to any relationship, including friendships. Let's examine that first reason.
Why so many relationships fail is simply that few people know what makes a relationship work. A large part of that has to do with the fact that living conditions for most people today are so different from those in the past.
In my country, Canada (numbers for the US are similar), a century ago 85 percent of the population lived in the country, in rural areas. That left only 15 percent in cities, despite what we hear and read about lots of people in cities in those days and very little about those who lived "off the land." Those numbers are reversed today.
Today 85 percent of North Americans live in urban areas, have access to everything cities have to offer, but miss out on so much that was good about rural life. Country living is simply not available to most people, for reasons beyond their control. More importantly, what was good about rural life in the past has not been replaced sufficiently by the good of city life today.
In agricultural areas and in areas where most people made their living from resources in the past, people had few enemies. They needed each other. Everyone people knew had value. No one knew when they might find themselves at the side of the road with a broken wagon wheel, homeless (or barnless) because of a fire, in need of someone to fetch the doctor in town but unable to get there for having to look after a sick child, or any of uncountable possible emergencies.
Rural people often needed someone else to help them. They couldn't afford to alienate others they may need to help them one day. Few rural people had money to spare, so volunteer help meant drawing on the goodwill of friends and neighbours, who were often one and the same.
Kids learned in their families how to get along with others because they had to. Sure, they had fights, many physical, far more than today. But they learned to make up after a fight and get on with their lives. Friends were often combatants of the past who made up so they wouldn't have to live as hermits without any friends in areas with few other people around. Grudges were rare because people couldn't afford to have enemies living nearby.
Today people in cities believe that most of their needs can be satisfied with money. We hire people to do whatever we need done. Friends are often workmates, fellow church parishioners or other people life brings together frequently. We may know our neighbours little more than on a nodding acquaintance basis.
Friends tend to be those from whom we can derive some benefit, such as people where we work or fellow club or church members. When it's clear that these people can no longer provide us with any benefits or potential benefits--they or we change jobs, one leaves the club, one moves some distance away--the friendship dissipates with the disappearance of the potential for mutual support. Friends have become another form of object in the throw-away society. There are always more people become friends with in a city. Of course this generalization, like all generalizations, is not true of everyone and not necessarily entirely true of any one person.
Because of this impression that anything we need can be bought, we have allowed ourselves to lose the feeling of needing others in times of tragedy. In the process, over a period of decades we got out of the habit of teaching our children the skills of making friends, of keeping friends through all adversities, of knowing what makes a friendship work. Again, that's a whole society, not necessarily true in every family.
Though most of us now see more people in a day than our ancestors of a century ago saw in a month, we tend to have fewer close friends, people we can count on when the going gets rough, when worse turns to worst. We no longer teach relationship skills because they were not taught to us. We don't know what to teach because most of us don't even realize there are great gaps in our knowledge about relationships.
To make a friend, you have to know how to be a friend. To find a good mate, you have to know how to be a good mate.
The second reason most relationships fail is that we don't know our obligations in a relationship. We know what we want from others, but we give little or no thought to what they may want or need from us to maintain a healthy relationship. As relationships are two way affairs, when one person feels no great commitment to the other, the relationship fails or wanes away at the first crisis.
For any relationship to succeed, each person must believe that they contribute more to the success and health of the relationship than the other. The perception of an imbalance is usually not real because we don't fully appreciate what the other contributes. But if we perceive that we contribute more to a relationship than we receive and we can be comfortable with that, the relationship has a chance.
The best examples of why relationships fail is demonstrated by the staggering divorce rate in western countries. A husband or wife believes that the other is not giving what they used to, that their own needs in the marriage are not being met, that the spouse is "not the person I married." It's usually true. However, what most people fail to appreciate and understand is that their own commitment to being a devoted spouse may be equally weak.
You can't be a good husband or wife if you have very little idea of what is required of a good husband or wife. Ironically, we all seem to have pretty good ideas about what is required of the other, our mates, even if we don't know what is required of ourselves.
The third reason why relationships fail has to do particularly with male-female relationships. Especially the requirement of fidelity in a marriage or common law relationship. If there is one thing we have taught each other and our children about marital and marriage-style relationships it's that each partner should be monogamous.
The trouble with that is that there is nothing in our natural or evolutionary history to support that. Humans, like all the great apes, are genetically and hormonally programmed to spread their genes as widely as possible. That means that men are genetically programmed to want to bed as many women as they can. And women are programmed to find as many healthy males with whom to procreate future offspring as they can.
Many people will find those last two statements offensive. But why? Nature didn't teach us to be monogamous. Religions did. Religions even decry (in some cases even threaten death to participants of) male-male and female-female relationships. Why? Because those who formed the religions knew that most gay men are still capable of passing along their male genes to fertile females, just as most lesbians have the ability to give birth to children, can be impregnated by healthy males.
Religions, in the past, wanted desperately to expand, to enlarge their congregations, to increase their power as unelected bodies of social influence. That meant, in addition to sending out missionaries and conquering other cultures and nations by war, encouraging their own followers to have as many babies as possible. The financial ability of parents to raise children, the likely health of the children and the knowledge of parental skills held little importance compared to the lust for expansion. What was important was numbers.
As a result, homosexuality was forbidden and banned, while having large families was encouraged. To keep order among the families of congregations, religions dictated that families should consist of one adult male, one adult female, and the only other adults allowed would be those who could help to tend to the children while the parents were busy creating more or working to support the ones they had. Polygamy and infidelity were considered sinful because the resulting "families" would be hard to manage, to control.
Science doesn't care much for the word monogamy. It likes "pair-bonding." You have heard of animals that pair-bond, that stay together for life, through thick and thin. Like geese--most examples of pair-bonding are birds, including northern gannets and penguins. However, the only pair-bonding along our branch of the evolutionary family tree is the gibbon. Though gibbon mates are totally devoted to each other, they are comparatively anti-social. They have little to do with other gibbons or other animals of any kind. They keep to themselves.
Gibbons, like other pair-bonded animals, have low sex drives. Not an attractive characteristic for us humans. In fact, sex is of so little importance among pair-bonded animals that some gibbon couples are homosexual and some heterosexual couples do not engage in sex. Do we really aspire to pair-bonding for ourselves? We should see pair-bonding as it really is in other examples in nature.
Let's switch back from the term pair-bonding to monogamy. Monogamy, while a charming and attractive concept in certain contexts, is fundamentally unnatural for us humans.
If monogamy is unnatural and many people insist that they could never live with a mate who is "unfaithful" (i.e. not monogamous) then the marriages and marriage-like relationships that depend on monogamy will likely fail. Estimates in the US of infidelity among married men range around 85 percent, while most estimates of infidelity among married women range between 65 and 75 percent.
A priest commented to me recently that it's up to each member of a couple to fulfill the sexual and other needs of the other so he or she doesn't need to go looking elsewhere. Good idea in theory, doesn't work in practice.
If a marriage depends on monogamy, that makes sex the most important component of the marriage, literally the tie that binds. There are two things wrong with that. One is that a marriage must be based on much more than sex or it doesn't have enough to sustain itself. The other is that few people with a lower sex drive than their partner feel compelled to engage in sex and its accompanying gestures and procedures if they don't feel like it. They may not want to have sex, even if their partner does, but they also don't want the "needy" partner to go out and have sex elsewhere.
It may not be the actual act of infidelity of a partner that results in the breakdown of a marriage, but the attitude of the mate that feels "cheated on" who feels the partner should be something he or she was not naturally programmed to be.
Few "unfaithful" partners want to break up their relationship. They just want to be fulfilled in ways they can't get at home. Nature tells them to find it somewhere else.
A wife who says "You may be the perfect husband in all other ways but you can't be faithful to me, so you must get out of my life" (even though she can't give what the husband needs sexually)--reverse the gender words if it applies--can be the partner who makes the marriage fall apart. If doing what nature dictates and what all other primate animals do causes a marriage or relationship to fail, then the marriage was not well founded in the first place.
We humans have the ability to use our intellect to overcome our natural inclinations. Few of us use that ability. Every war that ever was, most murders, almost every person behind bars in a prison or jail and almost everyone in a mental institution or on mood altering drugs give an abundance of evidence that we tend to give in to nature much more often than we overcome it using our intellect.
When following what comes naturally to us causes a relationship to fail, there is something wrong with how the relationship is constituted. That is, we don't know what a close human relationship is, what it should consist of.
When you don't know what you're doing, expect something to go wrong. It will. If you want a relationship to succeed, you need to learn what the other person needs and how you can fulfill that.
A successful relationship means two people each committed more to the welfare and happiness of the other than they are to their own. That's hard. But no one ever said it was easy.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers, parents and grandparents who want to give their children what they need at each stage of their development, rather than leaving it all to chance.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
"If we were endowed with the same biological mating pattern as the [pair-bonding] goose, there could be no polygamy, no promiscuity, no celibacy, no harems, no group marriage, no trial marriage, and no divorce in any human community in any part of the world." and "The gibbon's 'very low sex drive' is a reminder...[of the fallacy] that pair-bonding is based on sexual attraction."
- Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman, Bantam 1972
The article title refers mostly to male-female relationships, though the first reason could apply to any relationship, including friendships. Let's examine that first reason.
Why so many relationships fail is simply that few people know what makes a relationship work. A large part of that has to do with the fact that living conditions for most people today are so different from those in the past.
In my country, Canada (numbers for the US are similar), a century ago 85 percent of the population lived in the country, in rural areas. That left only 15 percent in cities, despite what we hear and read about lots of people in cities in those days and very little about those who lived "off the land." Those numbers are reversed today.
Today 85 percent of North Americans live in urban areas, have access to everything cities have to offer, but miss out on so much that was good about rural life. Country living is simply not available to most people, for reasons beyond their control. More importantly, what was good about rural life in the past has not been replaced sufficiently by the good of city life today.
In agricultural areas and in areas where most people made their living from resources in the past, people had few enemies. They needed each other. Everyone people knew had value. No one knew when they might find themselves at the side of the road with a broken wagon wheel, homeless (or barnless) because of a fire, in need of someone to fetch the doctor in town but unable to get there for having to look after a sick child, or any of uncountable possible emergencies.
Rural people often needed someone else to help them. They couldn't afford to alienate others they may need to help them one day. Few rural people had money to spare, so volunteer help meant drawing on the goodwill of friends and neighbours, who were often one and the same.
Kids learned in their families how to get along with others because they had to. Sure, they had fights, many physical, far more than today. But they learned to make up after a fight and get on with their lives. Friends were often combatants of the past who made up so they wouldn't have to live as hermits without any friends in areas with few other people around. Grudges were rare because people couldn't afford to have enemies living nearby.
Today people in cities believe that most of their needs can be satisfied with money. We hire people to do whatever we need done. Friends are often workmates, fellow church parishioners or other people life brings together frequently. We may know our neighbours little more than on a nodding acquaintance basis.
Friends tend to be those from whom we can derive some benefit, such as people where we work or fellow club or church members. When it's clear that these people can no longer provide us with any benefits or potential benefits--they or we change jobs, one leaves the club, one moves some distance away--the friendship dissipates with the disappearance of the potential for mutual support. Friends have become another form of object in the throw-away society. There are always more people become friends with in a city. Of course this generalization, like all generalizations, is not true of everyone and not necessarily entirely true of any one person.
Because of this impression that anything we need can be bought, we have allowed ourselves to lose the feeling of needing others in times of tragedy. In the process, over a period of decades we got out of the habit of teaching our children the skills of making friends, of keeping friends through all adversities, of knowing what makes a friendship work. Again, that's a whole society, not necessarily true in every family.
Though most of us now see more people in a day than our ancestors of a century ago saw in a month, we tend to have fewer close friends, people we can count on when the going gets rough, when worse turns to worst. We no longer teach relationship skills because they were not taught to us. We don't know what to teach because most of us don't even realize there are great gaps in our knowledge about relationships.
To make a friend, you have to know how to be a friend. To find a good mate, you have to know how to be a good mate.
The second reason most relationships fail is that we don't know our obligations in a relationship. We know what we want from others, but we give little or no thought to what they may want or need from us to maintain a healthy relationship. As relationships are two way affairs, when one person feels no great commitment to the other, the relationship fails or wanes away at the first crisis.
For any relationship to succeed, each person must believe that they contribute more to the success and health of the relationship than the other. The perception of an imbalance is usually not real because we don't fully appreciate what the other contributes. But if we perceive that we contribute more to a relationship than we receive and we can be comfortable with that, the relationship has a chance.
The best examples of why relationships fail is demonstrated by the staggering divorce rate in western countries. A husband or wife believes that the other is not giving what they used to, that their own needs in the marriage are not being met, that the spouse is "not the person I married." It's usually true. However, what most people fail to appreciate and understand is that their own commitment to being a devoted spouse may be equally weak.
You can't be a good husband or wife if you have very little idea of what is required of a good husband or wife. Ironically, we all seem to have pretty good ideas about what is required of the other, our mates, even if we don't know what is required of ourselves.
The third reason why relationships fail has to do particularly with male-female relationships. Especially the requirement of fidelity in a marriage or common law relationship. If there is one thing we have taught each other and our children about marital and marriage-style relationships it's that each partner should be monogamous.
The trouble with that is that there is nothing in our natural or evolutionary history to support that. Humans, like all the great apes, are genetically and hormonally programmed to spread their genes as widely as possible. That means that men are genetically programmed to want to bed as many women as they can. And women are programmed to find as many healthy males with whom to procreate future offspring as they can.
Many people will find those last two statements offensive. But why? Nature didn't teach us to be monogamous. Religions did. Religions even decry (in some cases even threaten death to participants of) male-male and female-female relationships. Why? Because those who formed the religions knew that most gay men are still capable of passing along their male genes to fertile females, just as most lesbians have the ability to give birth to children, can be impregnated by healthy males.
Religions, in the past, wanted desperately to expand, to enlarge their congregations, to increase their power as unelected bodies of social influence. That meant, in addition to sending out missionaries and conquering other cultures and nations by war, encouraging their own followers to have as many babies as possible. The financial ability of parents to raise children, the likely health of the children and the knowledge of parental skills held little importance compared to the lust for expansion. What was important was numbers.
As a result, homosexuality was forbidden and banned, while having large families was encouraged. To keep order among the families of congregations, religions dictated that families should consist of one adult male, one adult female, and the only other adults allowed would be those who could help to tend to the children while the parents were busy creating more or working to support the ones they had. Polygamy and infidelity were considered sinful because the resulting "families" would be hard to manage, to control.
Science doesn't care much for the word monogamy. It likes "pair-bonding." You have heard of animals that pair-bond, that stay together for life, through thick and thin. Like geese--most examples of pair-bonding are birds, including northern gannets and penguins. However, the only pair-bonding along our branch of the evolutionary family tree is the gibbon. Though gibbon mates are totally devoted to each other, they are comparatively anti-social. They have little to do with other gibbons or other animals of any kind. They keep to themselves.
Gibbons, like other pair-bonded animals, have low sex drives. Not an attractive characteristic for us humans. In fact, sex is of so little importance among pair-bonded animals that some gibbon couples are homosexual and some heterosexual couples do not engage in sex. Do we really aspire to pair-bonding for ourselves? We should see pair-bonding as it really is in other examples in nature.
Let's switch back from the term pair-bonding to monogamy. Monogamy, while a charming and attractive concept in certain contexts, is fundamentally unnatural for us humans.
If monogamy is unnatural and many people insist that they could never live with a mate who is "unfaithful" (i.e. not monogamous) then the marriages and marriage-like relationships that depend on monogamy will likely fail. Estimates in the US of infidelity among married men range around 85 percent, while most estimates of infidelity among married women range between 65 and 75 percent.
A priest commented to me recently that it's up to each member of a couple to fulfill the sexual and other needs of the other so he or she doesn't need to go looking elsewhere. Good idea in theory, doesn't work in practice.
If a marriage depends on monogamy, that makes sex the most important component of the marriage, literally the tie that binds. There are two things wrong with that. One is that a marriage must be based on much more than sex or it doesn't have enough to sustain itself. The other is that few people with a lower sex drive than their partner feel compelled to engage in sex and its accompanying gestures and procedures if they don't feel like it. They may not want to have sex, even if their partner does, but they also don't want the "needy" partner to go out and have sex elsewhere.
It may not be the actual act of infidelity of a partner that results in the breakdown of a marriage, but the attitude of the mate that feels "cheated on" who feels the partner should be something he or she was not naturally programmed to be.
Few "unfaithful" partners want to break up their relationship. They just want to be fulfilled in ways they can't get at home. Nature tells them to find it somewhere else.
A wife who says "You may be the perfect husband in all other ways but you can't be faithful to me, so you must get out of my life" (even though she can't give what the husband needs sexually)--reverse the gender words if it applies--can be the partner who makes the marriage fall apart. If doing what nature dictates and what all other primate animals do causes a marriage or relationship to fail, then the marriage was not well founded in the first place.
We humans have the ability to use our intellect to overcome our natural inclinations. Few of us use that ability. Every war that ever was, most murders, almost every person behind bars in a prison or jail and almost everyone in a mental institution or on mood altering drugs give an abundance of evidence that we tend to give in to nature much more often than we overcome it using our intellect.
When following what comes naturally to us causes a relationship to fail, there is something wrong with how the relationship is constituted. That is, we don't know what a close human relationship is, what it should consist of.
When you don't know what you're doing, expect something to go wrong. It will. If you want a relationship to succeed, you need to learn what the other person needs and how you can fulfill that.
A successful relationship means two people each committed more to the welfare and happiness of the other than they are to their own. That's hard. But no one ever said it was easy.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers, parents and grandparents who want to give their children what they need at each stage of their development, rather than leaving it all to chance.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, August 18, 2008
This Is Who Controls Your Life And The Lives Of Your Kids
Men are born to succeed, not fail.
- Henry David Thoreau, American author, poet and philosopher (1817-1862)
Well, heck, that sounds simple enough.
So why doesn't it work?
Because to succeed, a person must have the tools to succeed and the attitude that the goal is possible. In other words, a person needs a good work ethic, something to do and the means to do it.
Easy again.
But most people settle for less than what they are capable of, then either overwork to benefit their employer or underwork in the mistaken belief that only partial success at work does not equal only partial success in life.
If the original statement is correct, then why are most people not feeling successful, fulfilled and personally complete?
We don't teach to success of the individual. We teach success for the nation. We teach that success for corporations is good. We teach that our working to keep corporations successful is good. We teach that spending every bit of income we get is good, that it should make us happy and keep the economy rolling.
But we don't teach to individual success. That is, we don't teach to success of the individual on a massive, nationwide scale.
What we do teach individuals is that they should have the skills to satisfy employers sufficiently that they will keep us employed. We almost never teach entrepreneurial skills because that would be counter to the benefit of corporations.
Ask most teens why they will continue with their education past high school and you will hear "so I can get a good job" more than any other answer. In other words, "so that I can get a good paying job." Hopefully, one that will not disappear when the employer downsizes because it has not forecast future markets correctly and has lost money, so needs to cut staff to show more profit or minimize losses to satisfy its shareholders.
We don't even teach our children what it means to be successful, other than that they will be happy being constant consumers. Which few are, really. Again, ask a teen what it means for an adult to be successful and the answer will most likely be related to a secure job with good income (with which to buy lots of stuff).
It's not my purpose to teach you what success is. I know what it is for me. But it took me a few decades of searching to learn.
You need to learn what success is for you. What it really is. What it really means to lead a fulfilling life.
Then teach it to every kid you know.
Schools don't do this. Their purpose is to train employees to be good workers and consumers.
Corporations control the curriculum. If you doubt this, check the name brands on all kinds of products in today's high schools and even in grade schools. Including in text books.
First you must learn what success in life really is. Then teach it to others, both adults and children.
How many people, on their deathbeds, have claimed that they should have worked harder or that they should have spent more of their money in order to make their own lives and the lives of their family members better? Corporations want us to believe that we should follow that line of unthinking.
Learn, then teach. It's what we are supposed to do. Corporations took that responsibility from us because we walked away from it ourselves.
When you teach children what is meaningful in life, don't report it to your employer. The employer won't like that. Just do it in private.
A recent study (actually several of them) showed that large corporations were set up to be sociopathological (amoral, capable of violence or spreading fear without feeling guilty). It's part of their corporate ethic.
This is the power that will control the destiny of your children unless you change what your kids believe.
If you don't like it, do something about it. Talk it up. Social change happens only when enough people believe that children should be taught differently. Every socially acceptable norm of today was once a radical idea. Then people talked about it.
So talk. It's easy.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to have a time scale, content and methodology for teaching children what they need to know to lead successful lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Henry David Thoreau, American author, poet and philosopher (1817-1862)
Well, heck, that sounds simple enough.
So why doesn't it work?
Because to succeed, a person must have the tools to succeed and the attitude that the goal is possible. In other words, a person needs a good work ethic, something to do and the means to do it.
Easy again.
But most people settle for less than what they are capable of, then either overwork to benefit their employer or underwork in the mistaken belief that only partial success at work does not equal only partial success in life.
If the original statement is correct, then why are most people not feeling successful, fulfilled and personally complete?
We don't teach to success of the individual. We teach success for the nation. We teach that success for corporations is good. We teach that our working to keep corporations successful is good. We teach that spending every bit of income we get is good, that it should make us happy and keep the economy rolling.
But we don't teach to individual success. That is, we don't teach to success of the individual on a massive, nationwide scale.
What we do teach individuals is that they should have the skills to satisfy employers sufficiently that they will keep us employed. We almost never teach entrepreneurial skills because that would be counter to the benefit of corporations.
Ask most teens why they will continue with their education past high school and you will hear "so I can get a good job" more than any other answer. In other words, "so that I can get a good paying job." Hopefully, one that will not disappear when the employer downsizes because it has not forecast future markets correctly and has lost money, so needs to cut staff to show more profit or minimize losses to satisfy its shareholders.
We don't even teach our children what it means to be successful, other than that they will be happy being constant consumers. Which few are, really. Again, ask a teen what it means for an adult to be successful and the answer will most likely be related to a secure job with good income (with which to buy lots of stuff).
It's not my purpose to teach you what success is. I know what it is for me. But it took me a few decades of searching to learn.
You need to learn what success is for you. What it really is. What it really means to lead a fulfilling life.
Then teach it to every kid you know.
Schools don't do this. Their purpose is to train employees to be good workers and consumers.
Corporations control the curriculum. If you doubt this, check the name brands on all kinds of products in today's high schools and even in grade schools. Including in text books.
First you must learn what success in life really is. Then teach it to others, both adults and children.
How many people, on their deathbeds, have claimed that they should have worked harder or that they should have spent more of their money in order to make their own lives and the lives of their family members better? Corporations want us to believe that we should follow that line of unthinking.
Learn, then teach. It's what we are supposed to do. Corporations took that responsibility from us because we walked away from it ourselves.
When you teach children what is meaningful in life, don't report it to your employer. The employer won't like that. Just do it in private.
A recent study (actually several of them) showed that large corporations were set up to be sociopathological (amoral, capable of violence or spreading fear without feeling guilty). It's part of their corporate ethic.
This is the power that will control the destiny of your children unless you change what your kids believe.
If you don't like it, do something about it. Talk it up. Social change happens only when enough people believe that children should be taught differently. Every socially acceptable norm of today was once a radical idea. Then people talked about it.
So talk. It's easy.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to have a time scale, content and methodology for teaching children what they need to know to lead successful lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, February 25, 2008
How You Can Follow Your Bliss
If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of trackthat has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life youought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that,you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, andthey open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't beafraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going tobe. If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn'thave opened for anyone else.
- Joseph Campbell
[bliss: noun, a state of extreme happiness]
A small voice inside me wants to add "except if you are physically, intellectually, emotionally or mentally lacking the fundamental ability to achieve your goal."
Can a person who has no talent for painting follow his bliss into a life of painting, for example? Perhaps yes. Some styles of painting seem to be so simple that a child in primary grades could do them.
Is that possible? Yes. Within each brain is the ability to do something far better than most others. Savants are geniuses in one particular field, while being considered retarded in most others. A painter with no talent for painting in conventional styles may invent a new genre which would make him a creative genius of painting.
We really know very little about the brain functions that come into play in creative processes. Science is studying the brain, but scientists may have problems understanding what they learn because they have trouble appreciating what can't be hypothesized, tested and proven.
Van Gogh either sold only one painting in his life or none, depending on which story you read. By that standard, he died a failure. And he cut off part of his ear out of shame for embarrassing his friend, which makes him an insane failure to some. He also indulged liberally in absinthe, which would make him an addict.
Yet van Gogh followed his bliss. Failure though he may have been during his lifetime, we now recognize him as one of the great masters of art. During his life, most people thought what he painted was crap. For van Gogh, it was his world.
Music is another field in which a person may get lost and live a good part of a lifetime in a world that many would say doesn't exist. People who can get "lost in the music" must be mysteries to those who are unable to achieve that state.
Music exists in every culture, in every part of the world. In many of those cultures people enter trance-like states that mimic drug-induced states as their minds leave their immediate surroundings and get folded into the music that becomes a whole separate world for some period of time. This may happen while listening to music or dancing to it.
That blissful state is available to those who only listen to music as well as to those who make it. When your bliss involves music, you will be blissful participating in music at whatever level you choose to make part of your life.
Writers experience a similar phenomenon when they write. They create a world within the scenario they are writing about. To them, the rest of the world disappears like a vapour and reality forms around what their mind produces. Time means nothing. Hunger doesn't exist. Even a change of ambient temperature from comfortable to extra cold or hot may not be noticed because it plays no role in the created world of the writer's imagination.
While I can't speak from personal experience about the world of art, I am abundantly familiar with getting lost in music and writing. I can't play a musical instrument because of motor problems with my fingers. I would be an excellent conductor (have been on a few notable occasions) except that I must memorize the score because I can't read as fast as the music must go. But I can listen to and enjoy music with the best of them.
I can also say with some confidence that I can write. This may seem like a small accomplishment, but 20 years ago I was functionally illiterate, barely able to either read or write.
While my reading improved over many years of practice, my writing only improved when in 1999 I found myself with something profound to say, a message to deliver to the world. Since writing my first book I have written on hundreds of topics, each time taking me into a world of that subject as I lose track of anything happening in the "other world."
Can you follow your bliss? Definitely. Will doors magically open for you, as Joseph Campbell said? Amazingly, they do. Is it easy? Nothing worthwhile is.
When what you are doing is your bliss, hard work is part of the living of that special life that no one else understands but you. Others may appreciate it if they have had similar experiences, but they will never understand it the way you do yourself.
Following your bliss you are always alone, but never lonely. It's like being surrounded by love. Maybe you can express some of that love in painting, in music or in writing, or maybe it's just your special place alone. When you are there, your brain cooperates by splashing you with dopamine, its own special feel-good drug.
It's an addiction when you learn to use it. But one without a hangover or come-down period afterward. No one knows why or how those special doors open to you. Some attribute it to a higher power than us. Those of us with the ability to experience that bliss won't discover the source of the door opening because that requires us to alienate ourselves from the very thing that makes us whole and worthwhile in order to study it.
So, like many important things in life, bliss remains a mystery.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how parents and grandparents can guide children so that they can experience the bliss of life rather then the drudgery and fear that most adults live with daily.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Joseph Campbell
[bliss: noun, a state of extreme happiness]
A small voice inside me wants to add "except if you are physically, intellectually, emotionally or mentally lacking the fundamental ability to achieve your goal."
Can a person who has no talent for painting follow his bliss into a life of painting, for example? Perhaps yes. Some styles of painting seem to be so simple that a child in primary grades could do them.
Is that possible? Yes. Within each brain is the ability to do something far better than most others. Savants are geniuses in one particular field, while being considered retarded in most others. A painter with no talent for painting in conventional styles may invent a new genre which would make him a creative genius of painting.
We really know very little about the brain functions that come into play in creative processes. Science is studying the brain, but scientists may have problems understanding what they learn because they have trouble appreciating what can't be hypothesized, tested and proven.
Van Gogh either sold only one painting in his life or none, depending on which story you read. By that standard, he died a failure. And he cut off part of his ear out of shame for embarrassing his friend, which makes him an insane failure to some. He also indulged liberally in absinthe, which would make him an addict.
Yet van Gogh followed his bliss. Failure though he may have been during his lifetime, we now recognize him as one of the great masters of art. During his life, most people thought what he painted was crap. For van Gogh, it was his world.
Music is another field in which a person may get lost and live a good part of a lifetime in a world that many would say doesn't exist. People who can get "lost in the music" must be mysteries to those who are unable to achieve that state.
Music exists in every culture, in every part of the world. In many of those cultures people enter trance-like states that mimic drug-induced states as their minds leave their immediate surroundings and get folded into the music that becomes a whole separate world for some period of time. This may happen while listening to music or dancing to it.
That blissful state is available to those who only listen to music as well as to those who make it. When your bliss involves music, you will be blissful participating in music at whatever level you choose to make part of your life.
Writers experience a similar phenomenon when they write. They create a world within the scenario they are writing about. To them, the rest of the world disappears like a vapour and reality forms around what their mind produces. Time means nothing. Hunger doesn't exist. Even a change of ambient temperature from comfortable to extra cold or hot may not be noticed because it plays no role in the created world of the writer's imagination.
While I can't speak from personal experience about the world of art, I am abundantly familiar with getting lost in music and writing. I can't play a musical instrument because of motor problems with my fingers. I would be an excellent conductor (have been on a few notable occasions) except that I must memorize the score because I can't read as fast as the music must go. But I can listen to and enjoy music with the best of them.
I can also say with some confidence that I can write. This may seem like a small accomplishment, but 20 years ago I was functionally illiterate, barely able to either read or write.
While my reading improved over many years of practice, my writing only improved when in 1999 I found myself with something profound to say, a message to deliver to the world. Since writing my first book I have written on hundreds of topics, each time taking me into a world of that subject as I lose track of anything happening in the "other world."
Can you follow your bliss? Definitely. Will doors magically open for you, as Joseph Campbell said? Amazingly, they do. Is it easy? Nothing worthwhile is.
When what you are doing is your bliss, hard work is part of the living of that special life that no one else understands but you. Others may appreciate it if they have had similar experiences, but they will never understand it the way you do yourself.
Following your bliss you are always alone, but never lonely. It's like being surrounded by love. Maybe you can express some of that love in painting, in music or in writing, or maybe it's just your special place alone. When you are there, your brain cooperates by splashing you with dopamine, its own special feel-good drug.
It's an addiction when you learn to use it. But one without a hangover or come-down period afterward. No one knows why or how those special doors open to you. Some attribute it to a higher power than us. Those of us with the ability to experience that bliss won't discover the source of the door opening because that requires us to alienate ourselves from the very thing that makes us whole and worthwhile in order to study it.
So, like many important things in life, bliss remains a mystery.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how parents and grandparents can guide children so that they can experience the bliss of life rather then the drudgery and fear that most adults live with daily.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Are You Afraid To Die?
Today I am sufficiently exhausted that I can understand and empathize with people who want to die.
What I have trouble understanding is why people fear dying. I don't.
Following a traumatic event in my life in 1997, I developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). For people with the most severe cases of CFS, just getting out of bed to go to the bathroom or to eat at a table can be either exhausting or painful or both. Mine was not that severe.
By the time I had finished breakfast on most days, I was so exhausted that I had to have a nap for an hour. Two or three naps followed through the day. Only when I took myself too far, beyond the point of being simply tired, would I have pain in every muscle in my body. I tried to avoid that. That's dumb. But it didn't always work.
Sometimes, going beyond the critical point becomes necessary. As a result of a series of coincidences, in the first half of 2007 I had more jobs to do than my body could manage. I got excessively tired every day. Recovery was not an option (is not even today) because the jobs that couldn't be avoided had to be done or my ability to sustain myself as a person would have collapsed.
When people get too tired, especially when excessive fatigue continues for a prolonged period of time, they begin to think strange thoughts. No matter how much sleep or rest (relaxing horizontally or sitting) a person gets, if the exhaustion continues the person can develop symptoms like that of sleep deprivation. Irritability, moodiness, impatience, intolerance of others or themselves, making mistakes that wouldn't have happened under normal circumstances, distancing themselves from loved ones and more problems ease themselves seamlessly into their life.
Sometimes, thoughts can turn to death. That could mean suicide, murder or murder-suicide. If severe enough, such as in some cases of post partum depression, it could even involve a mother killing her own baby, "to protect" the child.
Thoughts, discussion or proposals having anything to do with death are taboo in western cultures. Consequently we don't address their causes. "Go to the doctor." "Take a drug to make you happy." Pharmaceutical responses to problems or stress and other problems related to mental health of the 1960s and 1970s, primarily taking tranquilizers, evolved into taking a variety of drugs today. Some want to make smoking marijuana legal simply because so many people use it illegally, possibly as high as 25 percent of adults.
While people discuss the taking of drugs with emotional vigor, taking one side or the other, debate never turns to the subject of death and rarely to ways to avoid the effects of stress in the first place. In a materialistic society with an industrial mindset, normal conversation involves apparently healthy people talking about any subject other than death or social change to avoid the causes of stress that destroy so many lives.
The most important fact that we avoid talking about with those who may be suffering the effects of stress or some cause that makes another person consider suicide or murder is that the critical time in their life will pass, that they will feel better about life later. Discussion of how to reduce stress is not a popular topic among those with the industrial mindset. People who talk about stuff like that tend to be "out there somewhere," extreme liberals, aged hippies, not those in the mainstream of business culture.
One topic that everyone agrees on is that death is bad. Death must be avoided at all costs, even if it requires a person to remain in pain for years or to suffer in an institutional environment with most elements we consider as freedom removed. We don't know why. We don't discuss it so we never find out.
We have been told that death is painful, for one thing. In fact, it seldom is. For most people, even those who die unexpectedly or as a result of violence, death comes peacefully and as a release from the burden of life. Compared to many of the painful experiences of life, death is blissful. What comes before death, including treatment in a hospital, may be painful, but death is not.
You have likely heard of those who have returned from the brink of death, from near-death experiences or who have "come back from being clinically dead" speak of feeling at peace, of seeing a bright white light, of being welcomed to the next life. Even those who claim to have had out of body experiences, of seeing their bodies from above an operating table where their fleshly existence lay in clinical death, say that death was not to be feared, was not painful.
I don't propose that we encourage people to end their lives when they feel that life is no longer worth the pain and trouble. I do propose that we change our attitudes toward death and the stressors of life so that we can all live more peaceful, safe and loving lives.
Love is part of the equation. Those under constant stress have trouble feeling love, expressing love and accepting love.
The same may be said of people in depression. The odd thing about depression is that we know how to avoid it most of the time. Health experts know how it develops, why it develops and how to avoid it. But, except for a relatively small number of experts who put themselves out to help others through rough times, most health experts stay away from the subjects of depression, thoughts of suicide and stress.
Nothing improves when we refuse to talk about a subject that impacts the lives of everyone, either directly, indirectly through loved ones or friends, or both.
We may not be certain about what's "on the other side" of death. That doesn't mean that we should avoid talking about what's on this side. It could save many lives.
It could save your life one day.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about what, when and how to teach children what they need to know to live healthy adult lives, free of excess stress and fear.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
What I have trouble understanding is why people fear dying. I don't.
Following a traumatic event in my life in 1997, I developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). For people with the most severe cases of CFS, just getting out of bed to go to the bathroom or to eat at a table can be either exhausting or painful or both. Mine was not that severe.
By the time I had finished breakfast on most days, I was so exhausted that I had to have a nap for an hour. Two or three naps followed through the day. Only when I took myself too far, beyond the point of being simply tired, would I have pain in every muscle in my body. I tried to avoid that. That's dumb. But it didn't always work.
Sometimes, going beyond the critical point becomes necessary. As a result of a series of coincidences, in the first half of 2007 I had more jobs to do than my body could manage. I got excessively tired every day. Recovery was not an option (is not even today) because the jobs that couldn't be avoided had to be done or my ability to sustain myself as a person would have collapsed.
When people get too tired, especially when excessive fatigue continues for a prolonged period of time, they begin to think strange thoughts. No matter how much sleep or rest (relaxing horizontally or sitting) a person gets, if the exhaustion continues the person can develop symptoms like that of sleep deprivation. Irritability, moodiness, impatience, intolerance of others or themselves, making mistakes that wouldn't have happened under normal circumstances, distancing themselves from loved ones and more problems ease themselves seamlessly into their life.
Sometimes, thoughts can turn to death. That could mean suicide, murder or murder-suicide. If severe enough, such as in some cases of post partum depression, it could even involve a mother killing her own baby, "to protect" the child.
Thoughts, discussion or proposals having anything to do with death are taboo in western cultures. Consequently we don't address their causes. "Go to the doctor." "Take a drug to make you happy." Pharmaceutical responses to problems or stress and other problems related to mental health of the 1960s and 1970s, primarily taking tranquilizers, evolved into taking a variety of drugs today. Some want to make smoking marijuana legal simply because so many people use it illegally, possibly as high as 25 percent of adults.
While people discuss the taking of drugs with emotional vigor, taking one side or the other, debate never turns to the subject of death and rarely to ways to avoid the effects of stress in the first place. In a materialistic society with an industrial mindset, normal conversation involves apparently healthy people talking about any subject other than death or social change to avoid the causes of stress that destroy so many lives.
The most important fact that we avoid talking about with those who may be suffering the effects of stress or some cause that makes another person consider suicide or murder is that the critical time in their life will pass, that they will feel better about life later. Discussion of how to reduce stress is not a popular topic among those with the industrial mindset. People who talk about stuff like that tend to be "out there somewhere," extreme liberals, aged hippies, not those in the mainstream of business culture.
One topic that everyone agrees on is that death is bad. Death must be avoided at all costs, even if it requires a person to remain in pain for years or to suffer in an institutional environment with most elements we consider as freedom removed. We don't know why. We don't discuss it so we never find out.
We have been told that death is painful, for one thing. In fact, it seldom is. For most people, even those who die unexpectedly or as a result of violence, death comes peacefully and as a release from the burden of life. Compared to many of the painful experiences of life, death is blissful. What comes before death, including treatment in a hospital, may be painful, but death is not.
You have likely heard of those who have returned from the brink of death, from near-death experiences or who have "come back from being clinically dead" speak of feeling at peace, of seeing a bright white light, of being welcomed to the next life. Even those who claim to have had out of body experiences, of seeing their bodies from above an operating table where their fleshly existence lay in clinical death, say that death was not to be feared, was not painful.
I don't propose that we encourage people to end their lives when they feel that life is no longer worth the pain and trouble. I do propose that we change our attitudes toward death and the stressors of life so that we can all live more peaceful, safe and loving lives.
Love is part of the equation. Those under constant stress have trouble feeling love, expressing love and accepting love.
The same may be said of people in depression. The odd thing about depression is that we know how to avoid it most of the time. Health experts know how it develops, why it develops and how to avoid it. But, except for a relatively small number of experts who put themselves out to help others through rough times, most health experts stay away from the subjects of depression, thoughts of suicide and stress.
Nothing improves when we refuse to talk about a subject that impacts the lives of everyone, either directly, indirectly through loved ones or friends, or both.
We may not be certain about what's "on the other side" of death. That doesn't mean that we should avoid talking about what's on this side. It could save many lives.
It could save your life one day.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about what, when and how to teach children what they need to know to live healthy adult lives, free of excess stress and fear.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Why Having Long Term Life Goals Might Save You
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another, and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
- J.M. Barrie, novelist and playwright (1860-1937)
How many people really do plan their lives, lay out the objectives and goals they hope to achieve? That would have to be in a meaningful and realistic way, as some people plan to make their first million by age 30 but few make it. Most of those people are divorced by age 30 instead.
Most people I have met have a vague idea of what they would like their lives to be like a few decades down the road. With divorce being so common today and security in jobs more a dream of the past than a reality of the present, surely most plans will go astray somewhere.
Not necessarily. Life plans can go astray the way we have to make detours around the roads we planned to take on a long trip because of construction. The destination or life goals can remain in place even if we have to take different routes to get there than we planned.
I planned what I wanted to be, the kind of person I wanted to be and position I wanted to be in life at my present age, when I was 15. I had no idea how to get there, took a variety of interesting detours along the way--some delightful, some petrifying.
Whether I reached the goals I had for myself may be less important that the fact that I explored many avenues, especially paths I didn't think I was suited for, and made at least modest successes out of each. In taking those unplanned routes, I learned how to turn weaknesses into strengths as I had to accomplish tasks and objectives I had not previously prepared for.
I don't want to set myself up as a role model. However, each young person needs to know that they should set life goals for themselves, that they may take diverse paths to reach them, but that the goals are worth having.
Life goals keep us from straying too far from our course, such as by seeking short term pleasures with drugs or other addictions, and such as taking liberties with the law when we find ourselves short of income and long on bills owing and finding ourselves in prison as a result. And such as destroying our marriage because we can't cope with some of the unpleasantness of it. Or allowing ourselves to sink into depression or another state of (manageable) mental illness because we can't cope with the problems of the day.
We need to have a clear idea of what we want from life and we need to keep heading in that direction, more or less. Expecting someone else to tell us what life is all about won't get us to a destination or life goal. If we don't set our own goals, we won't be committed enough to stick to the course along the way.
Life is complicated if we look at all the little problems and diversions along the way. It's much simpler if we understand that these are not very important over the long term, but our forging our way toward our goal is what matters. We are the architect of the person we will become.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to give some perspective to what life is about.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- J.M. Barrie, novelist and playwright (1860-1937)
How many people really do plan their lives, lay out the objectives and goals they hope to achieve? That would have to be in a meaningful and realistic way, as some people plan to make their first million by age 30 but few make it. Most of those people are divorced by age 30 instead.
Most people I have met have a vague idea of what they would like their lives to be like a few decades down the road. With divorce being so common today and security in jobs more a dream of the past than a reality of the present, surely most plans will go astray somewhere.
Not necessarily. Life plans can go astray the way we have to make detours around the roads we planned to take on a long trip because of construction. The destination or life goals can remain in place even if we have to take different routes to get there than we planned.
I planned what I wanted to be, the kind of person I wanted to be and position I wanted to be in life at my present age, when I was 15. I had no idea how to get there, took a variety of interesting detours along the way--some delightful, some petrifying.
Whether I reached the goals I had for myself may be less important that the fact that I explored many avenues, especially paths I didn't think I was suited for, and made at least modest successes out of each. In taking those unplanned routes, I learned how to turn weaknesses into strengths as I had to accomplish tasks and objectives I had not previously prepared for.
I don't want to set myself up as a role model. However, each young person needs to know that they should set life goals for themselves, that they may take diverse paths to reach them, but that the goals are worth having.
Life goals keep us from straying too far from our course, such as by seeking short term pleasures with drugs or other addictions, and such as taking liberties with the law when we find ourselves short of income and long on bills owing and finding ourselves in prison as a result. And such as destroying our marriage because we can't cope with some of the unpleasantness of it. Or allowing ourselves to sink into depression or another state of (manageable) mental illness because we can't cope with the problems of the day.
We need to have a clear idea of what we want from life and we need to keep heading in that direction, more or less. Expecting someone else to tell us what life is all about won't get us to a destination or life goal. If we don't set our own goals, we won't be committed enough to stick to the course along the way.
Life is complicated if we look at all the little problems and diversions along the way. It's much simpler if we understand that these are not very important over the long term, but our forging our way toward our goal is what matters. We are the architect of the person we will become.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to give some perspective to what life is about.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Thursday, March 01, 2007
One Good Reason For Hope For The Future
I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now only that place where the books are kept.
- John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)
Let me say at the outset that what follows is a huge question which has been given too little consideration and to which I have no clear answers or solutions. Just some ideas.
Throughout history the greatest commitment that humankind has had was to its respective lands. Untold numbers of men fought and died, entire cultures were wiped out, families rent asunder and some put into slavery by acting to take or retake possession of their land. Almost a century after much Palestinian land was taken away from the Palestinians (who sided with Germany and lost the Second World War), the remaining Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza continue to fight to regain the land that was once the property of their ancestors.
Every country except one in the Americas fought to gain independence, thus full possession, of their land from the former European colonial powers.
Land represented who a people were. Empires were built by taking over land through coersion or conquest from their previous overseers.
In the 21st century, imperial powers hold economic strength and do not focus on ownership or occupation of land. It turned out that the wisdom of the ages, that control over land was the ultimate power, was wrong because imperial powers went broke defending their territories from others who wanted to build their own empires or to take their land back.
Today we have young people in the families of western and Asian nations obtaining university educations and taking positions all over their native countries and in nations of rising production and trading activity in other parts of the world. Families today communicate less by hugging when they meet than by exchanging email. Using VOIP technology, mothers and daughters can chat by phone from around the world as if they lived next door to each other.
When land was the tie that held families together, their values and principles tended to be much alike. Now that families are not tied together by the tradition of owning the same land as their forefathers, how have values and principles changed as young people have been exposed to many other sets of values and principles of people from many other cultures?
For one, people take a greater interest in what is happening in other aprts of the world. While 9/11 produced wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, peacekeeping efforts have taken place in several other places where genocide had already happened or was about to happen. Now it matters more than it used to if people somewhere else are slaughtering each other. It matters if some country wants to make war on another because they all have ties with the United Nations.
It matters if a trading partner does well economically because a rich country doesn't want to just buy products from a poorer country and have nothing sold back to that country, thus generating a balance of payments problem (more money going out of the country than coming in).
Health care has become an important issue, such as with the potential of AIDS to spread from its hot bases in Africa and India through genetic mutations of its causal virus. The world watches as people die somewhere from bird flu because a mutated bird flu virus (H5N1) could devastate the world worse than the 18 million who died in 1918 from the Spanish flu. Now it matters to everyone if personal health habits of people of a distant land act to promote the spread of disease to more health conscious countries.
Obseity, an enormous problem in the US and UK, is also a problem in most countries of the world, though to a lesser extent. Now everyone wants and needs answers to the causes and cures or solutions for obesity. Even poor countries have too many fat people and no one knows why for sure.
Has our tie to the land of our ancestors becoming less important resulted in our sharing and caring more about the people of other parts of the world? Or has it given impetus to rich countries to control even more foreign people through economic ties making their business leaders greedier than ever before in history?
I prefer to believe the former. But we must be aware that the greedy among the people of every country will always want to have power over others. So our caring and sharing must include measures of assistance beyond trade and health care. It must include education and basic services such as clean water at least.
As the world recognizes fewer ties to specific pieces of real estate, its people see each other more as fellow members of a global village. DNA research has shown that there are no races among us. Climate change shows us that personal and industrial activity in even distant parts of the world can affect us in our homes.
Now everyone matters. It will take world history a while to catch up with that change. Transition periods traditionally are periods of great upset. We can see the upset around us. What we may not be able to see as easily is where we are headed as a species.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to put it all into perspective.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)
Let me say at the outset that what follows is a huge question which has been given too little consideration and to which I have no clear answers or solutions. Just some ideas.
Throughout history the greatest commitment that humankind has had was to its respective lands. Untold numbers of men fought and died, entire cultures were wiped out, families rent asunder and some put into slavery by acting to take or retake possession of their land. Almost a century after much Palestinian land was taken away from the Palestinians (who sided with Germany and lost the Second World War), the remaining Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza continue to fight to regain the land that was once the property of their ancestors.
Every country except one in the Americas fought to gain independence, thus full possession, of their land from the former European colonial powers.
Land represented who a people were. Empires were built by taking over land through coersion or conquest from their previous overseers.
In the 21st century, imperial powers hold economic strength and do not focus on ownership or occupation of land. It turned out that the wisdom of the ages, that control over land was the ultimate power, was wrong because imperial powers went broke defending their territories from others who wanted to build their own empires or to take their land back.
Today we have young people in the families of western and Asian nations obtaining university educations and taking positions all over their native countries and in nations of rising production and trading activity in other parts of the world. Families today communicate less by hugging when they meet than by exchanging email. Using VOIP technology, mothers and daughters can chat by phone from around the world as if they lived next door to each other.
When land was the tie that held families together, their values and principles tended to be much alike. Now that families are not tied together by the tradition of owning the same land as their forefathers, how have values and principles changed as young people have been exposed to many other sets of values and principles of people from many other cultures?
For one, people take a greater interest in what is happening in other aprts of the world. While 9/11 produced wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, peacekeeping efforts have taken place in several other places where genocide had already happened or was about to happen. Now it matters more than it used to if people somewhere else are slaughtering each other. It matters if some country wants to make war on another because they all have ties with the United Nations.
It matters if a trading partner does well economically because a rich country doesn't want to just buy products from a poorer country and have nothing sold back to that country, thus generating a balance of payments problem (more money going out of the country than coming in).
Health care has become an important issue, such as with the potential of AIDS to spread from its hot bases in Africa and India through genetic mutations of its causal virus. The world watches as people die somewhere from bird flu because a mutated bird flu virus (H5N1) could devastate the world worse than the 18 million who died in 1918 from the Spanish flu. Now it matters to everyone if personal health habits of people of a distant land act to promote the spread of disease to more health conscious countries.
Obseity, an enormous problem in the US and UK, is also a problem in most countries of the world, though to a lesser extent. Now everyone wants and needs answers to the causes and cures or solutions for obesity. Even poor countries have too many fat people and no one knows why for sure.
Has our tie to the land of our ancestors becoming less important resulted in our sharing and caring more about the people of other parts of the world? Or has it given impetus to rich countries to control even more foreign people through economic ties making their business leaders greedier than ever before in history?
I prefer to believe the former. But we must be aware that the greedy among the people of every country will always want to have power over others. So our caring and sharing must include measures of assistance beyond trade and health care. It must include education and basic services such as clean water at least.
As the world recognizes fewer ties to specific pieces of real estate, its people see each other more as fellow members of a global village. DNA research has shown that there are no races among us. Climate change shows us that personal and industrial activity in even distant parts of the world can affect us in our homes.
Now everyone matters. It will take world history a while to catch up with that change. Transition periods traditionally are periods of great upset. We can see the upset around us. What we may not be able to see as easily is where we are headed as a species.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to put it all into perspective.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Boring Meetings Aren't Really Wasted Time
"A meeting moves at the speed of the slowest mind in the room. In other words, all but one participant will be bored, all but one mind underused."
- Dale Dauten
As common as meetings are in business, they tend to accomplish very little. The reason is as Dauten stated.
The tone of meetings tends to be pitched at the lowest common denominator, the one or ones who will understand everything that is happening at the slowest rate. The others usually become distracted.
I doubt that all minds but one are underused. Wandering minds tend to focus on other matters than those that are the focus of the meeting. Or they rest, which is beneficial over the long term because they are ready to do more work once the regular schedule begins again.
Tangents and distractions in meetings can be useful as well. They give people time to think about matters they would not have enough time to consider carefully during their regular work hours. A mind that is underused on the main topic of the meeting may not necessarily be wasting time.
The question that many meeting leaders have is whether ot move forward faster, thus leaving the slower thinkers behind. As with grade school classes that tend to wait for the slowest student, thus leaving the faster thinkers to become distracted and create discipline problems, most meetings move along at a pace that the slowest people can stay up with.
The solution would be to move the meeting faster, then have review meetings with the people who might have missed some of the goings on because they got lost. That kind of personal attention can itself be beneficial to an employee who has trouble keeping up with the faster thinkers but is otherwise a good worker. It boosts self esteem that the leader takes time to give personal attention. Classrooms work well that way too.
What is important is whether the objective(s) of the meeting is accomplished once everyone has had an opportunity to go over the material presented, either in the meeting or privately afterward. The goal is more important than the route each person gets there.
People who think quickly can become mentally tired faster than others. Thus they need a mental rest more often. Mettings can provide that rest because they don't have to maintain a frantic pace they may set for themselves during their regular work hours.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to put it all into perspective.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Dale Dauten
As common as meetings are in business, they tend to accomplish very little. The reason is as Dauten stated.
The tone of meetings tends to be pitched at the lowest common denominator, the one or ones who will understand everything that is happening at the slowest rate. The others usually become distracted.
I doubt that all minds but one are underused. Wandering minds tend to focus on other matters than those that are the focus of the meeting. Or they rest, which is beneficial over the long term because they are ready to do more work once the regular schedule begins again.
Tangents and distractions in meetings can be useful as well. They give people time to think about matters they would not have enough time to consider carefully during their regular work hours. A mind that is underused on the main topic of the meeting may not necessarily be wasting time.
The question that many meeting leaders have is whether ot move forward faster, thus leaving the slower thinkers behind. As with grade school classes that tend to wait for the slowest student, thus leaving the faster thinkers to become distracted and create discipline problems, most meetings move along at a pace that the slowest people can stay up with.
The solution would be to move the meeting faster, then have review meetings with the people who might have missed some of the goings on because they got lost. That kind of personal attention can itself be beneficial to an employee who has trouble keeping up with the faster thinkers but is otherwise a good worker. It boosts self esteem that the leader takes time to give personal attention. Classrooms work well that way too.
What is important is whether the objective(s) of the meeting is accomplished once everyone has had an opportunity to go over the material presented, either in the meeting or privately afterward. The goal is more important than the route each person gets there.
People who think quickly can become mentally tired faster than others. Thus they need a mental rest more often. Mettings can provide that rest because they don't have to maintain a frantic pace they may set for themselves during their regular work hours.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to put it all into perspective.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Busywork Might Bankrupt Your Employer
"Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing."
- Thomas Edison
Te term busywork likely came along after Edison's time. However the concept would not have fully developed until a little before his lifetime. Before Edison's time, people had to produce or they would starve or be fired from their work because production could be measured by product produced or mission completed.
The concept of busywork reached its peak in Soviet bloc countries and their allies, where the saying became popular "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." What workers perceived as being significant was that they appeared to be doing something when the boss came along. The fact that little was accomplished mattered not because the boss likely didn't do much either except to obstruct the process so that nothing could be done efficiently.
People tend to care less about the quality of their work and the financial success of their employer when the product of their work brings them no reward other than a pay cheque. In larger companies, the work ethic sometimes develops where employees work for their cheque.
This situation reached it peak in western countries during the 1970s when workers in automobile manufacturing plants demanded huge raises, to which the companies agreed, but their production couldn't increase to meet the added cost. In that case, even conscientious workers who were more interested in their pay cheque than in the benefits their employer received from their production cost their employers dearly. (Today US auto makers can't afford the cost of pensions that resulted from those high wages.)
"Seeming to do," as Edison put it, is the best way to put yourself out of work because the employer always suffers financially. The demise of the Soviet empire is the world's greatest example.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to put the important things in life into perspective.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Thomas Edison
Te term busywork likely came along after Edison's time. However the concept would not have fully developed until a little before his lifetime. Before Edison's time, people had to produce or they would starve or be fired from their work because production could be measured by product produced or mission completed.
The concept of busywork reached its peak in Soviet bloc countries and their allies, where the saying became popular "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." What workers perceived as being significant was that they appeared to be doing something when the boss came along. The fact that little was accomplished mattered not because the boss likely didn't do much either except to obstruct the process so that nothing could be done efficiently.
People tend to care less about the quality of their work and the financial success of their employer when the product of their work brings them no reward other than a pay cheque. In larger companies, the work ethic sometimes develops where employees work for their cheque.
This situation reached it peak in western countries during the 1970s when workers in automobile manufacturing plants demanded huge raises, to which the companies agreed, but their production couldn't increase to meet the added cost. In that case, even conscientious workers who were more interested in their pay cheque than in the benefits their employer received from their production cost their employers dearly. (Today US auto makers can't afford the cost of pensions that resulted from those high wages.)
"Seeming to do," as Edison put it, is the best way to put yourself out of work because the employer always suffers financially. The demise of the Soviet empire is the world's greatest example.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to put the important things in life into perspective.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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