Having spent the past year experimenting on his friends and family (without their consent, of course) and probing just how far he could push an ego until it fought back, this liesmith finds that many Americans have grown accustomed to a person baring his soul and spilling his guts at the drop of a hat, and that baring and spilling is now so commonplace that it causes a stir if does not occur as expected. Instead of being a rare, cathartic event during which one party helps the other deal with or process a traumatic or important event, baring and spilling has become as routine as saying Thank You to a door held open out of politeness – if it does not occur, the person who refuses to bare and spill is looked upon with contempt, and treated with disdain. (This bad habit has an evil twin: that of saying “I Love You" 70 times a day to persons one doesn't really love quite enough to merit saying it to them constantly.) Taking his experiment one step further, the author has stopped baring and spilling to persons to whom he had previously talked unfettered about everything, which has lead to a variety of changes in a number of relationships.
In part, he blames daytime television shows for this overall shift in American habits; their tendency to thrust behavior previously reserved for the therapist's office before the eyes of emotionally-repressed Ynki housewives seems to have helped convince these women to search for the same kind of emotional release in their relationships with girlfriend and husband. (Rarely if ever do the daytime hosts warn of or outline the risks associated with undertaking psychological counseling on one's own.) Guests to these talk shows would routinely break down, releasing their pent-up angers and fears and joys and proclaiming how wonderfully purified they felt after having bared their souls. Housewives whose lives are often ruled by routine soon became addicted to the idea of release and emotional excitement without fully understanding the dangers associated with unassisted, amateur psychology. Some stones are best left unturned, and some secrets were never intended to leave the mental closets in which they reside, but the addiction to backyard pseudo-psychology grew, and spread; it has become so intricately enmeshed in our current society as to be one of its more common features. Today, we seldom accept statements at face value or respect the right of our counterpart to his modicum of privacy, preferring rather to keep prying and peeling back the layers until – for good or ill – we have peered into the tenderest folds of our victim's most dark and dismal core. (The author is guilty of this behavior, just like most other Americans.)
People who pry so incessantly rarely care about helping others lessen emotional turmoil or improve mental well-being; they care more about the power they feel watching a being just as fragile as they are flounder about before he descends into a spiritual malaise of his own making. How, though, might one avoid the trap of the pseudo-psychologist and maintain a pure and honest heart? By staying quiet, politely refusing to play along, and keeping one's business to oneself. We who understand the raw and awesome power of full disclosure, therefore, sparingly spill and barely bare; some beasts are simply best left chained.
mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥
Showing posts with label experiment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label experiment. Show all posts
20 March 2013
28 September 2012
jobs now offline
The grand American experiment in shifting to the Internet the system for finding, evaluating, and hiring employees seems to have failed. According to an ABC news report, 80% of all available jobs in America are to be had only for that special person-in-the-know, not merely to the first schlub with an Internet connection. This author is not the least bit surprised to hear that companies have stopped hiring off the Web; each job at which I have worked in the last decade I got through a personal contact, a temporary-employment agency, a physical visit, or a similarly old-fashioned method, and only a few of the hundreds of resumes and job-specific cover letters I have ever emailed, posted, or uploaded garnered even a brief response.
Thousands of templates exist on dozens of sites that job-seekers can use to craft for themselves slick-looking resumes, and the World-Wide-Web abounds with page upon page of detailed instructions on how to puff up or expand one's job-history, on how to use bullet-points to the greatest effect, on what the placement of those bullet-points says about the applicant's character, on the varying importance of a snail-mailed thank-you note, and on just the right thing to say in the subject line in order to catch a downtrodden recruiter's eye; I can only imagine the difficulty of doing the job of a human-resources officer sifting through mountains of documents that all look the same, that all sound the same, that all employ the same tricks. The Online resume, it seems, has faded into oblivion almost as quickly as it hurtled to the forefront of our commonly-shared dream of finally doing something satisfying or worthwhile with our lives. (Whether or not we are misguided fools for seeking fulfillment and reward outside of ourselves – in stilted and stifling job-environments – rather than within the crowded recesses of our own souls, is not in question here, although it probably should be.)
Some of us still have a bit of spunk left in our gullets, however, such as the young man who posted a fake hiring-bulletin on craigslist.com in order to spy on his competition for personal-assistant jobs, receiving over four hundred responses before the end of the first day. (He now has the names and addresses of hundreds of different people, data he can sell – to advertisers, political campaigns, or Kenyan scammers – for good money.) One idea is to get all of the people looking for jobs to come together at a physical location where they can network and figure out which businesses to start with each other, or get paid to assemble widgets, thingamajigs, or whatnots – for a few hours a day while getting paid the federal minimum wage. (With just a sliver of the hundreds of billions of dollars that the United States of America spends waging war on foreign peoples, we could employ every single job-seeking man, woman, and teenager in this country for a whole decade, in the spirit of the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps.) Another idea is to pay these unemployed masses to stand out in the streets to watch the watchers, to keep an eye on corruption-prone and law-breaking police officers. Our ultimate purpose as a nation, however, is to create methods by which our citizens can discover their true passions and abilities, so that they might Pursue their Happiness independent of outside pressure, outside influence, and outside coercion rather than sitting around all day staring at television screens and computer monitors and eating junk food; but, with our state and federal governments filled with persons who have sold their souls to corporate scumbags from agribusiness (Monsanto) and to banks awash with debt-payments (BofA, TD Ameritrade, etc.), we, the American people, will keep on suffering, all the good jobs having been shifted to South-East Asia. But, hey, someone has to restock these t-shirts, and man the deep-fryers. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
Thousands of templates exist on dozens of sites that job-seekers can use to craft for themselves slick-looking resumes, and the World-Wide-Web abounds with page upon page of detailed instructions on how to puff up or expand one's job-history, on how to use bullet-points to the greatest effect, on what the placement of those bullet-points says about the applicant's character, on the varying importance of a snail-mailed thank-you note, and on just the right thing to say in the subject line in order to catch a downtrodden recruiter's eye; I can only imagine the difficulty of doing the job of a human-resources officer sifting through mountains of documents that all look the same, that all sound the same, that all employ the same tricks. The Online resume, it seems, has faded into oblivion almost as quickly as it hurtled to the forefront of our commonly-shared dream of finally doing something satisfying or worthwhile with our lives. (Whether or not we are misguided fools for seeking fulfillment and reward outside of ourselves – in stilted and stifling job-environments – rather than within the crowded recesses of our own souls, is not in question here, although it probably should be.)
Some of us still have a bit of spunk left in our gullets, however, such as the young man who posted a fake hiring-bulletin on craigslist.com in order to spy on his competition for personal-assistant jobs, receiving over four hundred responses before the end of the first day. (He now has the names and addresses of hundreds of different people, data he can sell – to advertisers, political campaigns, or Kenyan scammers – for good money.) One idea is to get all of the people looking for jobs to come together at a physical location where they can network and figure out which businesses to start with each other, or get paid to assemble widgets, thingamajigs, or whatnots – for a few hours a day while getting paid the federal minimum wage. (With just a sliver of the hundreds of billions of dollars that the United States of America spends waging war on foreign peoples, we could employ every single job-seeking man, woman, and teenager in this country for a whole decade, in the spirit of the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps.) Another idea is to pay these unemployed masses to stand out in the streets to watch the watchers, to keep an eye on corruption-prone and law-breaking police officers. Our ultimate purpose as a nation, however, is to create methods by which our citizens can discover their true passions and abilities, so that they might Pursue their Happiness independent of outside pressure, outside influence, and outside coercion rather than sitting around all day staring at television screens and computer monitors and eating junk food; but, with our state and federal governments filled with persons who have sold their souls to corporate scumbags from agribusiness (Monsanto) and to banks awash with debt-payments (BofA, TD Ameritrade, etc.), we, the American people, will keep on suffering, all the good jobs having been shifted to South-East Asia. But, hey, someone has to restock these t-shirts, and man the deep-fryers. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
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