Does anyone else feel a wave of inadequacy when scrolling through their LinkedIn feed?
For me, it’s the professional equivalent of dragging my flabby ass into a Maxx Fitness Gym full of fitness junkies and muscle heads.
Are these people for real? Doesn’t anybody just work a crappy job to pay their bills anymore?
When did we become our jobs?
Are there really this many passionate professionals who love what they do – or are most of us just playing the game?
For me, it’s difficult not to feel like a fraud when I post about work because I am not my job.
My job is a taxing and challenging endeavor to endure. I work hard at it to keep a roof over my head and food on my table and grow my savings so that eventually I can get the fuck out.
LinkedIn is an advertising agency for the self – where we all try and keep up with the Joneses and match the energy of everyone that’s on the platform saying how proud they are to be part of a company or industry or technology and what a positive experience working for company x has been and how they can’t wait for the next exciting chapter in their career.
When you’re in the gym next to a guy like this, you immediately throw an extra 25-pound plate on the bar because you don’t want to look and feel like a failure.
If I had a dime for every “Penny in a pan” abortion survivor story, I’d have ten cents.
That said, how long before Penny in a Pan becomes the next Joe the Plumber presidential campaign sideshow?
How long before other farfetched family folklore and fables seep into the lexicon of Republican presidential candidates?
How long before we listen to Tim Scott on a debate stage relay an incredible Debby in a dumpster or Terry in the trash abortion survivor story?
How long before hundreds of “abortion survivors” pop up across America in a weird parade of zygote zombies and pro-life Presidential hopefuls?
What’s the “over-under” of these scenarios?
Just asking.
Meanwhile, political leaders (especially Republicans) refuse to confront genuine problems or propose solutions to issues affecting people, like the high cost of healthcare, housing, and education, the changing climate, gun violence, sky-rocketing anxiety and depression in children and young adults.
There’s such a deficit of decency in public service today.
Public service, where public servants look to make a difference in the lives of others, is on life support in America.
Public service today is a bunch of self-serving politicians constantly pushing cultural hot-button issues and fostering petty grievances to catapult themselves into positions of power, wealth, and authority.
Meanwhile, our world and our sense of safety erodes and crumbles around us.
No matter the strength of the evidence in the multiple indictments in which this man is named, he is assumed innocent until proven guilty.
So, let’s put aside the four criminal cases and 91 felony counts he faces and instead look at some of his actions as President.
As President, this man:
Knowingly lied to the public about the dangers of the COVID-19 virus.
Regularly praised anti-democratic and authoritarian leaders around the world.
Equated the moral character of neo-Nazis with the people protesting neo-Nazis.
Welcomed interference from foreign governments into American elections.
Refused to accept the results of a free and fair election even after sixty court cases, and his own attorney general stated the claims of election fraud were bullshit.
Sat idly in the Oval Office for nearly 3 hours as his supporters attacked the capital building and assaulted police officers.
Even if you believe this man is innocent of the 91 felony charges, he is demonstrably guilty of being a shitty human being.
I’m unsure why millions of Americans refuse to look at this man’s lack of ethics and morality and continue to support him, but my gut says it’s human behavior.
Admitting Trump is a shitty human means admitting you knowingly voted for a shitty human, which reflects poorly on you. So, to avoid the embarrassment of your vote and inability to judge a person’s character, you turn a blind eye to all that orange shittieness and hop on the “What About Hunter Biden” bandwagon.
A president or presidential candidate’s lack of character threatens the republic only when voters are unable or unwilling to judge that character.
Until Republicans discover their character and admit politics blinded them to Trump’s lack of morality and that they were conned, America will continue to teeter on the abyss.
What happens to the partnership between the Evangelical Church and the Republican party when compassionate conservatism gets replaced with MAGA mania?
How do Evangelical ministers square the teachings of Christ with their MAGA-infected flock?
What happens when ultra-MAGA Evangelicals sit fidgety in church pews and listen to sermons contradictory to the messages spewed by their political Messiah on the campaign trail?
It won’t be long before we see a sectarian split within the Evangelical church and radical versions of Evangelicalism start popping up across the country, like crack houses in the 80s.
These radical Evangelical churches will teach a MAGA-tinged Christianity, where Christ, a muscular blue-eyed-blond-messiah, wields his razor-edged cross to slice and dice woke liberals, immigrants, homosexuals, and atheists, to reestablish truth, order, and the American way.
Break-away Evangelical churches are how MAGA survives and (thrives). These churches will become radicalization factories in America like Wahhabi mosques in Saudi Arabia.
MAGA politicians are no different than any other. They understand religion is a tool for controlling and mobilizing masses – Churches plant seeds dipped in fear and bigotry to grow compliant human saplings so that future outcomes that align with religious ideology can take hold in society.
“The meek shall inherit the earth” will be replaced by a mite-is-right mentality—where the rationalization and justification of cruelty to achieve a particular end is the norm.
The transformation of the Evangelical church will correlate and coincide with criminal charges against former president Trump and his impending legal jeopardy.
Let’s keep our eyes peeled for an upstart-fire-brand Evangelical minister looking to make a name for himself by taking advantage of political chaos.
Donald Trump will be the new radical Evangelical church’s prophet of revenge and retribution.
I hope none of this comes to fruition, but I would not be surprised if it did.
I’m more than a bit dismayed that I still wallow in work worry.
At 60 years old, I thought that shit would have dissipated by now, but it hasn’t.
I still lie awake at night and stress out about work.
And lately, worry is partnered (weirdly enough) with a growing and sustained apathy, where even though I’m frenzied and panicked about my job, I struggle to find the motivation needed to push through the mile-high mountain of inane yet necessary Zoom meetings, team stand-ups, One-on-ones with my managers, deliverable deadlines, and new processes, procedures, and tools.
You know you’ve reached a saturation point when you can’t summon the energy needed to organize your thoughts and quell your work worry.
And I’m beginning to think that’s where I am – at the intersection of panic and apathy.
If I never hear another “let’s jump on a call” or “find some time on my calendar,” I’ll be OK because honestly, after 35 years, work has become an exhaustingly joyless and life-draining endeavor – a toxic and twisted nest of feigned interest and stress made worse by the fact that our daily lives are unfolding against a devastatingly bleak backdrop of worldwide calamity; from our crumbling democracy to the rise of authoritarianism to the climate catastrophe, humanity is in shambles – making it damn-near impossible to focus on two-week Agile sprints and software deliverable deadlines.
At least, for me, it does.
And so, I’m itchy to retire. I want to step off the “dread mill,” put my work worry aside, and use the surplus of time and onset of calm to focus on things that matter – family, personal relationships, health and relaxation, and preparing for the apocalypse.
And actually, it’s beginning to feel like retirement might be close at hand — I mean, after 35 years, the next step, the one where my wife and I get to relax and smell the roses, should be just around the corner.
Right?
I consider myself one of the lucky ones. Barring a catastrophic financial meltdown, I hope to retire while I still have some tread on my soul. But for millions of Americans, the high cost of healthcare, housing, food, gas (and just about everything else) makes retirement a pipe dream.
If I had to continue the rest of my days writing bland and drier-than-dessert-dirt descriptions of software features, I don’t know what I’d do.
I did it for 35 years.
I’m ready to stop.
To keep at it when I no longer care would damage my emotional well-being.
Humans are strange; we keep doing what we do, even when we’re dead tired, exhausted, and deflated by it. Even when it brings us no joy and turns us into stressed-out, fidgety, and fragile work zombies, we keep on with it. Maybe because we have to. Maybe because we have no choice – we work or get swallowed up and spit out.
And fear prevents us from stopping (even for a minute), stepping back, and considering another path.
The system that we’re part of has turned millions of Americans into robots. Programmed and cultivated by the carrot-and-stick, the pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow message of capitalism.
And so, we move ahead, expressionless, one foot in front of the other, until that final day when we stop and fall over into our shiny and perfectly polished coffins.
That’s no way to live, and not a good way to die either.
I’m stunned but not surprised at the number of Americans promoting the notion that many slaves were happily indentured, treated nicely by their owners, and benefited from their involuntary servitude.
Do you know what enslaved people couldn’t do? Leave.
Do you know why? Because they didn’t have the freedom to do so.
Creating a counter-narrative to absolve America of the sin of slavery and then instituting that narrative into public education is the very definition of White fragility and privilege.
I don’t give a flying fuck if the enslaver’s behavior ran the spectrum from humanistic to violent rapist; the fact is America kidnapped human beings from another country and forced them to provide free labor.
Suppose I was arrested for snatching a young woman from the street, locking her in my basement, making her clean and cook for me, and using her sexually. Should I be spared a harsh judgment at sentencing because, while enslaved by me, the girl developed and sharpened her culinary skills?
Instead of whitewashing and minimizing slavery’s impact by saying enslaved people learned valuable skills, we should condemn it uniformly, formally apologize for it, and never suggest a positive aspect (and then espouse that positive impact in our textbooks).
When I worked for IBM, all employees were required to review and sign IBM’s Business Conduct Guidelines (BCGs) annually. IBM’s BCGs are the behavioral business principles and standards they expect from their employees.
Many companies send their version of BCGs annually to employees through training materials and reference documents. The employees complete the training, read the documents, and sign indicating compliance.
If an employee violates their company’s BCGs, the employer can terminate them.
Violating the guidelines can also lead to criminal or civil prosecution.
When the Government discovered that former President Trump had taken hundreds of their classified documents, they repeatedly asked (with deference) for him to return them. If former President Trump had done the right thing and returned the documents that were not “declassified,” not “Presidential records,” and that DID NOT BELONG TO HIM, he’d have one less scandal to worry about.
But, of course, Donald Trump didn’t do the right thing. Instead, he lied, deflected, and obstructed his way to a 37-count indictment.
If you or I purposely violated our employer’s Business Conduct Guidelines by stealing proprietary or classified information and then lying about it, we’d be in legal trouble—and rightfully so.
Concerning his conduct in general, former President Trump has a long record of dubious businesses and business deals, for which he’s paid millions of dollars in legal settlements – not to mention his abhorrent personal behavior.
And yet, this crooked, twice-impeached, ethically vacuous convicted felon is the Presidential candidate for the Republican party.
Intelligent and decent-minded people not tainted by political tribalism are appalled at the mere thought of Trump once again sitting at the helm of American democracy.
I usually refrain from making political posts on LinkedIn. But I’m at a point where I have zero fucks to give, so I’ll speak my mind regarding America and American values (regardless of the venue), especially when both are in jeopardy of being trampled.
Additionally, I firmly believe a second Trump presidency will damage the collective psyche of Americans, especially those who genuinely care about conduct, ethics, and integrity.
Our political parties, institutions, and businesses coexist in the same ecosystem. The rot from today’s GOP will seep into other areas of society unless we stop it at the ballot box.
The ballot box is America’s last line of defense against the rot of political grift, intolerance, and authoritarianism, which will erode the fabric of our country, including corporate America.
With that said, here we go.
After the 2020 election and the events of January 6th, most Americans just wanted to put our abusive relationship with Trump in the rearview mirror and return to normalcy.
Unfortunately, Trump lingers like a fart in a closet.
After eight years of Trump polluting our politics with dishonesty and unethical behavior, we continue to wallow in a palpable and inescapable MAGA malaise – because Trump is all around, all the time. He’s on the news, in the newspapers, on social media.
Most Americans are exhausted (not to mention ashamed and embarrassed) by Trump.
When hard-working Americans pull their noses away from the grindstone and look up to see the former highest official in the land lying and disregarding the rule of law, with an entire political party backing that behavior and an onslaught of propaganda aimed at deconstructing our democratic institutions, they begin to question the stability of the country in which they live and work.
And quite honestly, I think that’s the intent of the Trump-led GOP. To weaken Americans’ confidence in democratic institutions and systems so they can dismantle and replace them with authoritarian-based systems.
Americans generally refrain from discussing politics at work (historically, we know nothing good comes from it). We willingly accept our political differences because we know (or at least we thought we knew) that values like honesty and integrity transcend politics – that if a President were demonstrably dishonest and unethical, we’d put aside politics and condemn him uniformly.
Unfortunately, we discovered that with the Trump presidency, the reverse is true – politics transcends values. As former President Trump once said, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any of his supporters.
The assault on truth and our democracy did not end when Trump-inspired rioters left the capital late in the afternoon on January 6th. The assault is ongoing. Today’s perpetrators are not violent insurrectionists beating police officers with American flags but elected and appointed officials with blind and cult-like allegiance to a corrupt demagogue. The assault and threat are equally, if not more dangerous, as it has the illusion of legitimacy.
Several months ago, Republicans voted unanimously to censure a member of the opposition party for his role in the impeachment trial of former President Trump. Republicans have floated a proposition to “expunge” the impeachments of President Trump, who knowingly tried to extort the leader of a foreign country and overturn a free and fair election.
The GOP crossed the Rubicon by embracing Trump and Trumpism – dragging millions of brainwashed Americans with them.
American corporations who spoke out against the events of January 6th and pulled support from candidates who knowingly lied about that day need to tap back into the sense of urgency and condemn what is happening currently with the Republican Party. So, when former President Trump gets on his social media platform, and spouts lie after lie about the 2020 election, companies need to return to form and explicitly and publicly denounce him and any member of Congress who regurgitates the lies. Silence provides a haven and fertile environment for unethical conduct to grow and spread.
The corporations we work for can help Make Americans Proud Again by speaking out against dishonest and unethical behavior and the assault on truth from Trump and Trump sycophants in the GOP. Otherwise, confidence in American institutions will wane, cynicism will take root, and morale will drop – which isn’t good for business.
Death and burial used to be pretty straight forward:
You died.
They buried you (or maybe tossed your ashes to the wind).
They said a few words and got on with life.
The end.
Short and sweet.
Today there’s a plethora of creative ways to orchestrate your final exit.
Be One with the Earth
You can go with a “natural” burial, which involves being put directly in the soil in a way that promotes or even accelerates decomposition.
Here’s an interesting tidbit: Luke Perry of 90210 fame was buried in a mushroom burial suit containing mushroom spores that helped decompose his body and filter toxins from it.
The filtering and decomposition from a mushroom suit prevent surrounding plant life from being contaminated by the body. Not that Luke was any more contaminated than you or I.
I see natural burials as a form of human recycling, which I imagine is popular with the environmentally conscious – but I can also hear my conservative, non-environmentally conscious uncle quipping, “When I go, just put me out with the recyclables.”
I suspect the squeamish might be put off by microbial decomposition, but I’m okay with it. It feels both altruistic and symbiotic.
People who choose this type of burial seem to be saying, “I’m no more important than the petunias” and “I don’t need to be memorialized with a headstone or plaque” – and as a humanist, that philosophy resonates with me.
Be Above it All
Don’t want to be put in the ground? Then maybe a space burial is for you.
Space burials launch your remains into space, where they orbit around the Earth or go to the Moon or somewhere further into space. Space burials even include cheaper “suborbital” excursions where the human remains are briefly transported into space before returning to Earth, where (hopefully) they can be recovered.
To me, space burials seem braggadocios and sadly pathetic.
“No, I’m not an astronaut – I’m an accountant. But I’m planning on being an astronaut after I die. So, yeah, I’m kinda like the Neil Armstrong of accounting.”
I feel there’s an element of cowardice to space burials. It’s like being an astronaut without any of the risk. And from an ego perspective, space burials check all the boxes. They scream, “Look at me; I am one with the heavens! I AM A GOD!
Be Around Forever
The most fascinating alternative burial, at least to me, isn’t a burial at all.
The diamond growth process uses high-pressure technology to turn human ashes into diamonds for wearable “cremation jewelry.”
For anyone who isn’t religious but still wishes for eternal life, the diamond growth process puts a new spin on the old adage “diamonds are forever.”
Personally, I have no delusions about an afterlife. As soon as I developed the ability to think critically, religion and eternal life registered as complete bullshit. I believe when you’re dead – you’re dead. Everything fades to black, and you cease to exist, except in the memories of loved ones – and even that is short-lived.
We’re all destined to fade away entirely, like the billions of ordinary people before us, who no one remembers – we will eventually be totally and irrevocably gone. And honestly, the thought of that doesn’t bother me in the least.
But something about an ashes to diamond after-life appeals to me. I like the idea of being an object amongst the living long after I’m dead – and even though I know I won’t be conscious or aware of this existence, the idea of it, as a living human being, interests me.
Is that weird?
And being a ring on the finger or broach on the collar of a loved one might be a pretty cool icebreaker at a cocktail party.
What a lovely ring, where did you get it? Well, my dad gave it to me when he died – something to remember him by. And actually . . .
I like the idea of being an heirloom passed down from generation to generation and remaining in the mix. And if someone in the future lineage of my family falls on hard times, and I end up in a pawn shop, that’s even better, because then the story of me goes in an entirely new direction.
To me, it’s all about the story; after all, what is life but a story.
When you’re a piece of jewelry, your destiny is fluid, unknown, and full of possibilities. Maybe you get lost at the beach, coming off your son’s finger as he body-surfs, only to be found a few weeks later by an elderly beachcomber who throws you in an old leather-bound jewelry box full of broken watches and faded polaroids and wears you every-now-and-then until the day he dies. At this point, you might end up as a mention in the final paragraph of the will of this total stranger and get passed along to the beachcomber’s favorite nephew, and off on new adventure you go.
The original story fades and gives way to another.
I’m aware that wanting to be turned into a diamond comes off as shallow. I can hear someone say, “Why can’t you die normal, like most people?” – and I guess I can see their point – but I don’t give a fuck.
And as an atheist, I like that we have this advanced scientific process that yells “Screw You” to the old Ashes to Ashes proverb from the Book of Common Prayer, which says that we’re made of dust and will return to ashes and dust after we die.
bendingtheneedle 