Expectations: Love, positivity and otherwise

 

I've been thinking a lot about relationships lately and that's a bad thing because, well, I'm really bad at them.

Not bad in sense of being selfish or abusive.

Rather, I tend to be as my 8th grade English teacher once said to me...."Hyper analytical."

Before you run off to Google it, that just means I think too much...about everything.

Seems nothing happens in my life without at least some measure of the consequences being considered first.  

At length...

The same can be said for a lot of  people but I tend to take it to another level.  Hence...Hyper analytical.

It's served me well for all those things where there was a "safer" option but relationships are all about risk and reward.

So let me put this out there right up front.  The Internet is a HORRIBLE place to find answers to your relationship questions.  Want to ruin a good thing?  Listen to some idiot try to tell you what you're feeling.  

"The first kiss should happen by the second date..."

"Sex should happen by the 5th date..."

"If she doesn't want to hold your hand it means she's not into you..."

Bull...

Love isn't an Amazon Prime purchase.  There are no customer reviews or 5 star rating systems.  Well, there are but they're worthless.

The heart wants what it wants but I can tell you from experience that the heart is, to be blunt, stupid.  This is why we have brains.  The problem is the two are mortal enemies.  Where the heart may be warm and accepting the brain is cold, analytical and far more subject to the influence of the sin of "idle hands."

Leave things unsaid long enough and those "idle hands" get busy.

The best relationship advice is to forget about expectations.  Especially those born from uncertainty.

If you look for answers everywhere BUT the person who actually has them you're doomed.


I've written about the dangers of relying on absolutes before and when it comes to relationships it seems they're everywhere.  Look for definitive answers to questions about love and you get 1000 opinions.  All of them framed as a golden truth but as worthless as cow patties.

OK, here's the wave thing again...

Remember we can only control our own actions, our own thoughts and our own judgement.  The more we ride the waves the more we learn that no two are ever the same.  Any expectations beyond "wet" and "movement" are unreliable.

Be open to what's happening in the relationship good or bad but keep your expectations out of it.

I can tell you from experience that the worst heartbreak comes not from what you think someone did to you but rather a personal expectation they couldn't and/or didn't want to live up to.  
  
That's the issue with expectations; they aren't reality, they're just unspoken demands.  Anything unspoken eventually leads to trouble down the line.  Besides, DEMANDS don't make for great relationships.

I have a close friend that I absolutely HATE going to restaurants with.  The reason is that he's never happy with his order.    An example comes to mind. 

My friend often orders salads.  Now it's not unusual that they just might include a tomato or two.   

Thing is, he hates tomatoes with a passion but when he orders he  never says anything to the waiter about his disdain for all things tomato.  So the salad comes with the offending red veggie (Supreme Court says it's not a fruit BTW) and spends the rest of the meal grumbling about how they should have known he didn't want tomatoes.  

 It's happened so often that now I won't go anywhere with him that doesn't require you to tell someone behind a sneeze guard exactly what you want.  

Subway restaurants come to mind...

Just like my finicky eating friend you never get what you want when you make unilateral judgments.   

Admittedly, that's hard to do at times.  

Gosh, wouldn't it be just wonderful if if all our relationships were like an 80's John Hughes film.  A couple of awkward meetings, love and/or friendship develops and gets tested just before the ultimate resolution rising to a crescendo complete with happy ending all in the space of a couple of hours.

Yeah, it don't work that way.

BUT!

It's easier if you're riding the wave instead of trying to dictate its direction.  Love the moment, breathe in the atmosphere and enjoy the ride.  

Just don't forget to keep your eyes open.

We get into the most trouble when we get lost in our own expectations and make blind assumptions.

Be you, be real and be open... 

Black Friday starts on Thursday now

Black Friday....

Rampant, unrestrained, consumerism.  The world watches the darkest side of capitalism run amok.  No wonder they hate us.

Why do people still camp in front of stores for days just to get last year's TV marked down 50% from the 80% markup 2 months earlier?

Have you not heard of Amazon?

By the Way, In case you weren't aware the "Black" in Black Friday has nothing to do with how dark it is outside when the store opens. 

Nor does it have anything to do with the darker side of human nature although you'd be excused if you've ever made the mistake of participating in the madness.

There was a time, supposedly, that retailers counted on the holiday shopping season to bring their books into positive numbers aka "being in the black."

Which assumes the rest of the year they're operating at a loss. 

Which may be true but gross sales have less to do with it than the perverse trickle down economics of corporate structures that reward CEO's with multi-million dollar bonuses.  

Shed no tears for a corporate empire built on the standard of indentured servitude and slave wages.  

I find nothing more distasteful than the want ads for a "seasonal" worker with the lure of  some meager discount off merchandise they can't afford.

No wait..

I find something even more distasteful than that...

Stores open on THANKSGIVING!

What the living hell is wrong with you?  I'm not just talking about the stores either.  Why they hell does anyone think it's OK to force people to leave their families just so you can buy some more crap?

Black Friday is bad enough but now we can't even let the pumpkin pie settle before it's off to the races!  

What's the point of a holiday if everybody has to go to work?  

OK, not "everybody"  just those poor unfortunate souls forced into indentured servitude by the likes of Kohls and Best Buy.

Here's a list of the worst offenders. 

• JCPenny stores open at 3 p.m.
• Old Navy is scheduled to open at 4 p.m.
• Best Buy, Macy's, Toys'R'Us and Bonton will open their doors at 5 p.m. 
• Walmart, Target, Kohl's, Dick's, Modell's and Sears will all open at 6 p.m. 

They blame everything from Amazon.com to Obama for it but the real reason is bald-faced greed.  

They'll claim in an age of online stores that they must do this to survive.  By extension they'll claim to support the economy by providing jobs to all those "seasonal" workers to meet the "demand."  

You probably saw this coming but here it is anyway....

Boycott them.  All of them without exception and anyone else that thinks it's OK to perpetuate this outrage.  Oh and before you get on the high horse about all those jobs they're providing.  Know that most of those "seasonal jobs" don't contribute to the economy when people  have to supplement their wages with food banks and government assistance.

It's even worse for the "regular" employees many of which are working 39 hour "part time" schedules.  They're on Food Stamps too.

Talk about corporate welfare.  

Wanna get all biblical about it?  

Fine.  Since the Thanksgiving tradition usually involves somebody spouting bible verses before gorging themselves try this one out...

Matthew 25:46

"Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

You say you live in a "Christian Nation?"  

Then start acting like it.

Amazon isn't alone, this is how we work now

If you've been in the workforce for the past decade or so you may have noticed subtle changes.  Sure it takes hard work and sacrifice to get to the top but does it feel like all that effort has left you just spinning your wheels?

It's no secret that we're all working harder and getting less for it.  Less pay, less benefits and less free time.  The old adage was that work was its own reward but the guy who came up with that didn't have a mortgage or a dwindling 401K to worry about.

He also had his weekends...

Consequently, it's no surprise that we find today's workplace increasingly demands more than just a job well done, it demands a lifestyle commitment.

As in your job is your life.  

So what? That's work and that's how it's always been.

Except it hasn't...

Where the baby boomers may have had a reasonable expectation of a shiny pot of gold at the end of their career rainbow those that came after found themselves without a pot to...well you know...

Without falling into the trap of every succeeding generation blaming its predecessor, the point is that the endgame has changed.

While we hear a lot of lip service about work/life balance and the importance of family it seems such things are at odds with expectations of the average worker in today's corporate culture.

So is it any surprise that when the NewYork Times peeled back the curtain of Amazon's corporate culture they found more in common with the Kremlin than KMart.

Horrific stories like...

"A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals." NYTimes

Or...

"Amazon came under fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse toiled in more than 100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside, taking away laborers as they fell." NYTimes

If these were but a few isolated incidents they could be excused but it appears that rather than the exception, they're the rule...

"At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.)" NYTimes

None of this shakes the Wall Street Glitterati though...

"I envision all investors saying 'Great,'" (Jim) Cramer said Monday. "Do I want to work at amazon? No. If you want to play your money with companies that only treat their employees well and do everything right, it's harder than you think to find." CNBC

Which has to be the most stunning display of cognitive dissonance (one of my favorite phrases) since Bernie Madoff uttered this 2007 quote, 

"It's virtually impossible to violate rules in today's regulatory environment"

InformationWeek

Of course Wall street loves this stuff.  We all know that nothing will raise a share price faster than pulling the rug out from under workaday America.  So it was with Amazon the following Monday after the New York Times expose'.  Amazon's share price was effectively unchanged.

Which is strange because for all the conservative admonitions about self reliance and the glories of capitalism Wall Street heaps praise upon companies that have effectively adopted management based on communism.

Hypocritical.

That any company can be celebrated for a institutionalized policy of devaluing people should be cause for outrage.  But there's that cognitive dissonance again.  So long as Wall street gets its money nobody really cares how it got there or who gets  hurt.

Think it's OK to throw a little Chairman Mao in with your capitalism?  Consider how relatively backward communist nations were before they embraced some form of capitalistic markets.  China wasn't known for anything but making cheap knockoffs of American goods.  The Soviet Union couldn't make a decent car and Cuba might as well have thrown out the calendars after 1962.

Creativity, innovation and progress are not born out of repression and abuse.  These days, however, no matter where you work you will suffer it in some measure.

Your choices are to literally be a "Wage Slave" or strike out on your own.  Of course if whatever shingle you hang happens to threaten one of those places you choose NOT to work for, expect to be crushed. 

Ask Barnes and Noble how that feels...

Let's bring back the America we were sold.  The one where hard work was rewarded and CEO's didn't look to Chairman Mao for guidance.  Let's get the Labor Department to actually do something other than print lunchroom posters and spit out manufactured statistics for the crystal ball prognosticators on CNBC.

How far have we really progressed over the past two generations when wages remain stagnant, women are still underpaid and companies blatantly abuse their workforce without consequence? 

We need real progress, not just some dumb commercial of waving wheat fields complete with proclamations of America's greatness on Bloomberg.

There's only one way to do it, make them fail and to hell with what Wall Street thinks.  There are other places to buy crap that aren't Amazon.com, other retailers that don't have "Walmart" over their doors and other phones that don't have an Apple Logo on them.

Commercials: Barometer of a society

Have you been watching TV lately?

I don't mean becoming one with your comfy couch binging on entire seasons of Game of Thrones.  No I'm talking about plain old TV, commercials and all.

In a world where just about everything is on Demand from your dinner to your favorite sitcom you probably haven't noticed the latest trends in advertising.  With the curated experience of services like Netflix and Amazon Instant video you'd be excused if you haven't seen a commercial in months.

The vast majority of viewers, however, aren't completely detached from the advertiser-driven TV experience.  That means there's still an audience to watch somebody's commercial.  

Regardless of how irrelevant they may be to you, commercials aren't created in a vacuum.  Whatever they're selling,  you can be sure somebody wants it.

Ok, so we're all used to ads from everything from cars we can't afford to phones we don't really need and food we really shouldn't be eating.  I don't care about those.  I'm more interested in the filler commercials.  The ones about things like prescription drugs and ambulance chasing attorneys.  The ones you see far more often.

In the past few years I've seen more commercials about one-off gambling casinos, lottery games, settlement funding and prescription drugs for every ill than anything else.  Even the ambulance chasers have upped their game from simple fender-bender litigation to multi-billion dollar payouts from big pharma.

That there are so many means the U.S. isn't as much about consumption anymore.  It's more about want.  We're underpaid, poorly fed and sick and we can't seem to find relief.

We can't count on much these days.  Careers are transient and so are people.  It seems the ground is ever shifting under our feet. 

They sell us the promise of stability, the righting of a wrong or just something to make us feel a little better about our situation.

Maybe that's the classic advertising formula, sell a belief instead of a product.

The trouble is, what they sell is a reflection of the world we live in.  A world where needs can only be met by indebtedness to monoliths that profit from continuing our suffering.

We want the lottery win, the big settlement, the freedom from worry and want.  That desire has become an industry in itself.

We are a country forever searching for the light at the end of the tunnel but the tunnel never ends.  The joke has long been that the light is an oncoming train.  That's wrong.  Were that the case at least there'd be some hope of an end but the light seems ever out of reach.

So am I making too much out of a bunch of stupid ads? 

I don't think so. 

If the "product" is security and freedom from want then it stands to reason that those are commodities we're sorely lacking.  I don't find it acceptable to be "sold" on a dream of self-sufficiency.  I shouldn't "need" a mason jar full of pills to live another day or settlement funding to catch up on my bills. 

Trading on fear is a dark negotiation. 

Not the mark of a healthy society.

Think about it...