Enigmatica

I cannot imagine an experience more carefully designed to undermine self-confidence and self-esteem as modern job hunting.

Compile some data about your work history so that you can be judged based on how past employers have judged you. Make it verifiable, because you can't be trusted. But put a positive spin on everything so that you can compete with more capable liars. If you make a good impression, you win the opportunity to be judged in person based on whatever a superficial, 5-minute interview can gleen. If you do well there, you win the opportunity to take a drug test and, if you pass, be awkward in a new, high-pressure setting for a month or two while utterly failing to learn people's names. Good luck!

Things are a little worse for me as a loner. I don't keep in contact with former coworkers, so coming up with work references is awkward and difficult; when I do, they tend to leave the job shortly after me. I don't know a lot of people, so I don't have a contact anywhere. My difficulty with the whole job hunting process ensures a job history full of the kind of menial jobs that overlook a job history full of menial jobs. It's a bootstrapping failure; no one will give a chance to a guy who hasn't made something of a chance before, so there's no way to get that first chance. I've been a cashier at five different jobs, but I still have to prove I can run a cash register at every new place.

I've never been lousy at anything I've put my mind to. I'm good with customers. I can figure stuff out myself. I don't balk at hard work, or miss work. I'm honest to a fault. I ask for more hours, not more dollars per hour. I actually take pride in doing the work others don't want to do. The idea of my coming in hung over or failing a drug test is just laughable. Where's space for that on the form? I'm not applying for the space program, I'm applying at neighborhood grocery stores and gas stations. Are these not virtues? Can I get some credit for any of this?...

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There hasn't been a blog entry for a while, so enjoy this YouTube video instead.

Our days are numbered. There is a lot that can be done in a lifetime, but for the very few of us who create something of timeless value it is very hard to ensure it will survive us.

Many of us will have children, who perhaps might perhaps be willing and able to carry on our work. Others of us will find like-minded young people to mentor. The latter method is statistically more dependable, but neither can be realistically expected continue exactly as we would have done.

If our work needs stability, it needs a recorded philosophy of it's design and operation to encourage consistency. Memories fade and flex, but records endure. It is probably wise for our successors to do the same.

May God bless me with so valuable a work to do.

We all have time to spend and activities we spend it on. Some of those activities are fun in themselves, and we do some becomes they have consequences we like. Some rare joys are both fun and beneficial, and some compulsory behaviors are neither. At it's most basic, life is a perpetual choice between what feels good and what has wanted consequences. We choose how to spend our lives without truly knowing the proper balance to strike between momentary hedonism and practical planning. Some of us believe that our lives are a test, where we are rewarded or punished for the mix we live and choose. In that sense, to live is to choose.

Since we witness not only our own lives but also, though less deeply, the lives of those around us, life is also moral philosophy. The way we live is inherently advice to those around us, an argument that making similar choices will probably result in similar outcomes. In that sense, to live is to preach.

We all live in conditions that are less than our fondest desires. We have to make sacrifices and gambles in our attempts to avoid pain and seek pleasure, and we always come up short in some way. Sometimes the consequences are brutal, and other times they are only boring or discouraging or good but not great. We are free to choose, but not ensured positive or predictable outcomes. In that sense, to live is to suffer.

As new moments and new conditions replaces the old ones, we are continually faced with the questions of life. Answering those unanswerable questions is what life is for.

If there's something about you that is unique among all the people around you, whether it's a physical trait or a belief or a habit, there are only a couple things you can do about it. You can hold it back and conform. You can flaunt it in defiance of the norm. You can dismiss it as a minor fashion choice. Another option is to start a community of people who share that uniqueness, an island of shared identity in an ocean of conformity.

Anyone who has been to school has seen that kind of cliquish grouping, but in the vast diversity of global society we know we don't see them all. Each of these groups must decide how to deal with the people outside their group, people who inherently disagree and diverge from the members of the group. They must confront the fundamental psychological dilemma of the self vs. the other, not as an individual but as a society. That means laws and principles, a foreign policy of sorts, and a decision: can we be who we are and express our individuality in the presence of these others?

If they decide they cannot be themselves in the greater world, they must isolate themselves or lose their defining trait. These isolated societies have popped up and faded away all through history; some famous examples include the Greek Amazons, the Dead Sea Scrolls' society, the Druze of Syria and Lebanon, 18th Century Japan, and the Amish and Mennonite societies. Various aboriginal cultures across the world live in similar circumstances, though more often geographic and historical forces (eg, colonialism) than internal decisions. Many of these isolated cultures, such as the utopian communities of the 1840s or the communist communes and fundamentalist cults of the 20th century, were not able to endure more than a generation because they did not manage to replace their population as their founders aged and eventually died. Others have suffered severe hardship or lost their self-sufficiency and risk losing their identity due to creeping encroachment...

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