Photo by jmacphoto.com
Wednesday’s entry will be later than usual as I’ll be in an aeroplane over the sea (someone will get this, right?). It’ll be worth waiting for, though – a dating crash course for the nerdy/shy/awkward dudes in the audience. Don’t worry, fellas; GenMeh’s got your back.
Sometimes, I look at the searches that bring people to this site and I want to put my arm around the internet and give it as many cookies as it takes to make things all better. I’m equal parts natural born fixer and adamant eschewer of drama. It’s an odd combination to be sure.
A friend recently admitted that they were having difficulty with the whole cutting the cord concept I had preached in a previous post, which made me realize that not everyone is ready to go from 0 to scorched earth all at once. Some of us are all about the incremental, taking it baby steps at a time. Before you can eliminate the dead weight from your personal life, you have to be able to recognize it as such, ya know? You have to be able to identify the patterns and situations that need redress before you can fix them. So, let’s start at square one, shall we?
Photo by nickmilleruk
The first step is to stop making excuses for the people in your life. You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones who don’t call when they say they will, “forget” to return your emails or texts, who sap your energy with their overblown crisis du jour (energy vampires as advice columnist Dave Eddie refers to them), who treat you poorly because they themselves are “broken” or have “ issues” (or so you tell yourself), the ones for whom your company always seems to be a last resort or afterthought. I could go on and on, but you get the point. We aren’t talking one-off incidents here, but clear patterns of disregard and self absorption. Stop accepting their lame excuses and stop extending the benefit of the doubt. It’s benefiting them, but it sure as hell isn’t benefiting you, is it?
The reason he doesn’t call or hedges about making plans isn’t that his parents divorced when he was six after Mom discovered Dad was having an affair with Miss Kimberly the kindergarten teacher. No, it’s because he doesn’t attach significant value to you or to the relationship and because you’re enabling him to indulge in this behavior sans consequence. A big work deadline doesn’t result in digital paralysis and render your buddy unable to drop you a 40-character text message instead of bailing on your gym plans without a word. Unless she’s a neo Kate Gosselin and exponentially outnumbered by her newborn offspring, giving birth isn’t a valid reason for your former college roommate to go incommunicado for six months. And on and on and on. These are excuses we make for the people who treat us like crap because A) we refuse to take off the Pollyanna blinders B) we don’t want to seem judgmental or uncharitable C) we take their lack of caring personally and view recapturing their interest as a victory for our own sense of self-worth and a validation of the redeeming power of our friendship/love (must not roll eyes) D) All of the the above. Sadly.
There is no condition (save for maybe being pronounced clinically dead or a diagnosed sociopath*) that plausibly prevents someone from treating you and your feelings with the minimum of human decency. Their job stress? Their crappy childhood spent being raised by wolves? Their family woes? Their health issues? The emotional scars left by a cheating high school boyfriend from a decade ago? The fight you just had about the rhetoric of “death panels”? THESE DO NOT ENTER INTO THE EQUATION. Everyone has their dents and bruised spots, but these don’t give us a free pass from following the Golden Rule, the logic of which a small child can grasp. Are you seriously going to tell me a job-holding, tax-paying, non-velcro shoe wearing adult can’t handle what the Dora the Explorer set have down pat? Please. Listen to yourself. Don’t make me stage an intervention.
Not only does your elaborate emotional hoop jumping on their behalf give people emotional leeway they don’t deserve, it does them a disservice by presuming that they’re too messed up, broken or inept to rise above their circumstances and act like a functional, considerate adult. That’s pretty damn presumptuous and condescending when you think about it.
Stop waiting around for the douchebags in your life to have the relationship equivalent of a Come to Jesus moment; it ain’t gonna happen.
The truth is that no matter how busy, traumatic or mind-boggling their lives become, people who genuinely care about you will make an effort to keep in touch or at least let you know that they’re still alive and that while they’re indisposed right now, they have every intention of picking up the friendship again once they’ve wrapped up their uncle’s estate, negotiated their girlfriend’s release from Taliban captors, recovered from their gender reassignment surgery, etc. They will not just leave you twisting in the wind or treat you as nothing more than their personal wailing wall/emotional booty call.
Bottom line: When you care about someone, you don’t treat them shabbily. And if you do hurt them, you make amends. If someone hurts you and seems unaffected by your pain, Occam’s Razor would say that the mofo never cared about you in the first place. Dig? And if you recognize that you’ve treated someone else like this (and we’ve all been there at one time or another)? Forget what OneRepublic tells you, because it’s never too late to apologize. Possibly too late to be granted open-armed forgiveness, but good karma is its own reward, right?
Now to the more important question: chocolate chip or molasses ginger?
* N.B. Applying the wisdom of this article to a heroin addict or a paranoid schizophrenic is also an obvious no-go.
List Served is a weekly feature wherein I present you with an ordered grouping of (at least tangentially) related points. I love lists and the internet loves ephemeral minutiae. It's all good.
In honor of the fact that it seems as if I’ve been in transit since June (although the most recent Boston/Montreal doubleheader was worth it) and will continue to be for the foreseeable future (starting again Tuesday!), I humbly present you with an itemized list of my numerous travel quirks. I’m currently accepting applications for the ideal travel companion. “Ideal” will obviously be determined by the degree to which said companion is willing to accept/embrace the contents of the list below.
Photo by Bob AuBuchon
Dear GenMeh;
I don’t know what to say or how to keep a conversation going when I meet people. I even have trouble with friends and that awkward silence, not to mention my paranoia that everybody thinks I’m a loner loser. Are there any tips on better social interaction for dummies?
-Tongue-tied
At first glance, I’m a poor one to ask. As I recently declared loudly to a friend, I have neither an affinity for nor an interest in conversational foreplay. When it comes to chatting it up, I’m most definitely a hit it and quit it kinda girl. I can be verbose, but it depends on my mood and whether I have an interest in A) the subject matter at hand and B) my fellow conversationalist. If I find both you and the topic fascinating, it’s Algonquin Roundtable go-time.
All that to say that you should look elsewhere for tutorials on open-ended questions, probes, using “feeling” words or mirroring body language. Talking to fellow human beings isn’t rocket science and I’m not about to pretend it’s so. I will, however, tell you to take a deep breath and read the following. All this reassurance can be yours for the low, low price of $19.95.
Photo by Sarah and Mike …probably
Speak when you have something to say or when someone asks you a question. If you don’t feel like talking, don’t sweat it. Smile politely, nod and move along. And give yourself a break; awkward is (quite literally) just a state of mind.
Have a career/life/love problem you’d like help with? Drop me a line and we’ll see what we can do.
A friend of mine was remarking recently about how much she admires people with the courage not to let quotidian concerns stop them from following their dreams and how she wishes she could be this way. Considering this was a woman who arrived from Romania with only two suitcases and a couple hundred bucks in her pocket, I think she’s done okay for herself in the courage dept. I thought about the c-word again when doing an interview for an upcoming post about someone who has definitely put her money where her mouth is when it comes to taking risks and pursuing adventure. I’m sensing a theme here.
Photo by ClickFlashPhotos
I will admit to being a fan of the grand gesture (not that I’ve been the recipient of many of them in my lifetime, but we all live in hope, right?*) and what gesture is grander in this day and age than simply quitting it all and walking away? As a generation, we fear ambiguity more than anything, so what it stands to reason that embracing the unknown and the uncharted strikes us as the height of bravery. We might not buy into the American Dream, but it’s at least a safe target at which to aim. People who shrug off this convention are curiosities and however we might dismiss them as foolhardy and capricious, we secretly envy their willingness to jettison what isn’t working for them and take a chance on what else might be out there.
But are these mavericks (can we finally start using this word again? Has it been long enough?) really courageous or have they simply figured out what the rest of us in the Generation Meh boat haven’t – we really don’t have that much to lose. Truth. Take a good look at your life. If you’re in your twenties, unmarried, without children, a mortgage or a chronic illness, you likely don’t have a lot of social or physical collateral to put on the line. There are very few choices in life that, should they not pan out, will leave you living alone under the Brooklyn Bridge in a refrigerator box (I’ll write more about this in future posts). So what do you stand to lose by taking a chance? Status? Income? Security? Not only are these not written in stone in the first place, they can be regained with time and effort. Do you really believe that if you left your current (unsatisfying, soul-killing) job that you’d never find one with the same salary and/or level of prestige for the duration of your 30+ year career? That you’ve already reached the apex of your working potential at this young age? If so, please go stand in the corner with the folks who unironically refer to high school as the best years of their lives. Substitute the word “relationship” for job and it’s the same deal.
What else could happen to you if you took a flying leap of faith? Ridicule? Disapproval? If you’re going to let someone else’s lack of endorsement dictate whether or not you pursue your dreams, you need to get more durable dreams and you need to re-read this. Because I guarantee the people who would dismiss your plans aren’t half as invested in your success or failure as you imagine them to be. And even if they are/were, they don’t live your life and they aren’t going to be the ones living in the box under the bridge, are they?
If you’re going to let someone else’s lack of endorsement dictate whether or not you pursue your dreams, you need to get more durable dreams….
What about rejection? What if you put it all on the line, throw caution to the wind, hire a skywriter, take out an ad in the New York Times and then get turned down or dismissed? Or what if you risk it all to move to Kuala Lumpur with your one true love and three months later the honeymoon is over and you’re at each others’ throats? Well, kids, that’s life. It will hurt, you will feel stupid, angry, self doubting and heart broken, but you’ll also have peace of mind because you’ve slayed the dragon of what if. You’re not wasting time and preciously finite emotional energy wondering, comparing and romanticizing the path not taken. You took it and you now know exactly where it leads, for better or worse. Even if it doesn’t keep you warm at night, that’s valuable intel; hold onto it.
There are people out there who’d rather live with a lifetime of wistful regrets and aborted intentions than face the possibility of failure. I know them, you know them. Hell, we might even be them. Sounds pretty sad when you think about it. Don’t be that person. It might be a comfortable existence for the moment, but it’s ultimately a cowardly and unfulfilling way to live. Take your chances now, while you’ve still got nothing to lose.
*Seriously, I only live on the second floor. I could totally hear a boombox from my bedroom window, ya know? Just sayin’.
Hate To Break It To You is a recurring feature wherein we dispense succinct home truths that everyone could benefit from facing up to, unpleasant as they may be. Read the first installment here.
Photo by spike55151
You’ll never get what you claim to want if you don’t truly believe that you deserve to have it. Fact. Be it the white picket fence and 2.5 kids, your dream job or the opportunity to live abroad, desiring it and working for it aren’t enough if deep down you consider yourself unlovable, untalented or lacking courage. You will find a way to unwittingly sabotage yourself and prove your nagging, unspoken, middle-of-the-night doubts true. Every barrier and roadblock (real or imagined) will seem insurmountable and a cause for throwing in the towel. And any efforts you do make will be undermined or undone by the secret fear that you could never really live up to the end result anyway, that you’d inevitably fail or be revealed as presumptuous fraud. Better then to hide your desires away, keep them pristine and untainted by their confounding unattainability.
Dreams and goals aren’t worth having until and unless you believe that you’re worth the effort to achieve and embody them.
But it’s a long old life if you allow yourself to spend all of it waiting for the other shoe to drop. And you (yes, even you) really do deserve better than that, whether you believe it or not.
Carrie Hooks, Jenny Chalk and Cami Thompson are three Cleveland-based twentysomethings with a wryly pragmatic (and utterly post-modernly American) approach to dating. The friends founded the Board of Love, a three-member roundtable devoted to using a business-minded focus to help Thompson find Mr. Right. They hold formal meetings, have business cards and recruit edifying guest speakers, all in the name of honing their relationship resumes. The Board of Love was recently the subject of a Cleveland Magazine feature and an ensuing minor maelstrom at Jezebel. The ladies behind the hype have graciously agreed to offer GenMeh readers their tongue-firmly-in-cheek wisdom on the parallels between the job hunt and their man hunt.
Photo by Jerry Mann, Cleveland Magazine
In what ways are managing your love life and managing your career similar? What are the glaring differences?
Taking care of business and Cami’s love life career are similar in that both need lots of attention, dedication, and hard work. So long as you don’t give the milk away for free, it’s only a matter of time until you’ve got yourself a cash cow in a bull market! Ultimately, when your stock is down, a merger of equals is the best way to set it back on track.
There are only a couple of differences that we can think of. One is you shouldn’t make out with the mail guy at work. Even if you think no one else is in the copy room. Another is that if you break up with your boyfriend, you’re not required to wait around for two weeks while he looks for someone new.
What do you think is more difficult – finding love or landing your dream job? Why?
Both are tough – the only way to get either is to listen to the good advice you get from the Board. It may be the company board of directors, a job board or your own board of love; whoever it is, they’re the experts. It takes two, baby…or in BOL’s case, three.
What have you learned from the BOL experience that you think would help you or your peers in the work world?
Trying to get Cami to take advice on dating and love is like trying to get your boss to spring for that new HP color printer with the dual output and built-in scanner. Probably not going to happen, but for some reason, you still keep working on new approaches. It’s a good exercise in creative thinking.
BOL has improved all of our skill sets. Cami’s photoshop skills are amazing, she can even put someone’s face on Godzillas’s body. Jenny’s really perfected her use of bullet points and italics and Carrie has never been better at taking attendance and finding objects on tables to use as gavels. Obviously, these are all directly transferable into the work environment.
Do you think women in their twenties can have both a fabulous career and a successful love life? Based on your experience, are women placing too much emphasis on one and not the other?
Of course you can have both. This is America. What women need to do is quit whining and go after what they want. Unless your last name is Hilton, don’t expect anything to be handed to you on a silver Tiffany platter.
Which would be more awkward – a job interview with Donald Trump or a dinner date with him?
Hmm…they’d both have their awkward moments, but a dinner date would probably be the worst. Donald would love the BOL, and then we’d have to go through the whole “it’s not you, it’s me” scenario. We just couldn’t do that to Donald…or his hair…or his wife.
Board of Love has a definite reality show title ring about it. Maybe something in the vein of Dragons’ Den where the three of you evaluate men on their pick-up techniques and relationship management skills? Has FOX called yet?
No, but we have an interview with a production company in LA on Thursday. Obviously, FOX is just playing hard to get!
Photo by jasonEscapist
When I was in grad school, I worked as a teaching assistant. One year, my job entailed leading workshops on team building and group dynamics for freshmen business students. One of the questions I frequently had to field was about what to do about group members who didn’t pull their weight. My standard spiel was to suggest that the group agree beforehand what type of outcome they wanted from the project (Is an A imperative? Are most people cool with a B?) and that if your personal expectations were higher than the group’s, you would be faced with the option of adjusting them downward or putting in the extra effort required to bring the work up to your standard. Not exactly fair, but collective apathy is harder to fight than city hall.
There is, however, a third option that I didn’t tell the kids about, one that might not work in the context of collaborating on a midterm assignment, but perfectly sums my current feelings about dealing with disparities of effort and investment interpersonal relationships – You can simply take your ball and go home.
The older I get, the more I’ve come to believe in reciprocity: the investment you make in a relationship should be commensurate with the effort put in by the other party/parties. I don’t advocate keeping score, or taking it to ridiculous lengths with a mercenary what’s in it for me? attitude and I acknowledge that some relationships are inherently unequal (parent/child for example), but I’ve sworn off doing the lion’s share of the legwork and heavy lifting in most of mine. I’ve been weeding out my emotional rolodex over the last six months or so. I’ve stopped reaching out to people who rarely respond. I’ve stopped making plans with fair weather friends who consistently get Fs when it comes to follow-through. I’ve stopped forcing myself to hang out with people out of a sense of duty even as I find their personality quirks beyond aggravating. And most importantly, I’ve stopped giving people the benefit of the doubt and limitless empathy when they’re careless with my feelings or my time. There have been no confrontations, no accusations, no drama. In fact, the only thing that’s changed is that my relationship stress level has dropped significantly and I’m able to channel the energy that I was wasting being affronted, slighted and overly solicitous of the feelings of others who had little regard for mine into other, more productive ventures. I’m not angry at the people I’ve let go of. I’m still polite to those I see regularly and I’d have no objection to hearing from those I don’t cross paths with as often, but I have no intention of being the one to make the next and subsequent moves. I’ve simply ceased putting energy into relationships that had a low or non-existent return on investment.
Stop emailing, stop calling, stop worrying and for heaven’s sake, stop martyring yourself on the altar of someone else’s indifference.
Most of the hurts we suffer at the hands of others are unintentional. Our pain is simply someone else’s collateral damage. And while it’s true that the majority of people who cause you distress may not have done so out of spite or malice and may actually be decent, upstanding individuals, that doesn’t mean that you should cut them slack in the form of elaborate excuses for their actions or by extending your saintly patience to silently enduring their careless treatment. Doing so continues to give them power over you, a claim to your limited emotional energy and the opportunity to continue to hurt you by not responding in the way that your vivid imagination dictates that they should, but that history shows that they never will. In other words, you’re still getting the short end of the relationship stick. Instead, you need to acknowledge the hurt, recognize that it likely wasn’t intentional and then shut down any opportunity for them to hurt you again. Stop emailing, stop calling, stop worrying and for heaven’s sake, stop martyring yourself on the altar of someone else’s indifference. Cutting these people off isn’t cold or callous, it’s emotionally mature. You’re not hurting these folks, because they’re not actually aware of or invested in you in the first place. They will more than likely not notice the withdrawal of your attention and caring because it held little to no value for them, anyway. Harsh but true. We’ve all been there.
There are precious few people in this world who are genuinely invested in your happiness and well-being beyond a superficial and perfunctory interest. Your emotional energy is best spend focusing on and/or finding those people. Start letting the others fend for themselves. They’d do (and in a way, have already done) the same for you.
List Served is a weekly feature wherein I present you with an ordered grouping of (at least tangentially) related points. I love lists and the internet loves ephemeral minutiae. It’s all good.
Photo by kristofabrath
A Chronological Listing of My Elementary Through Junior High Arch-Nemeses by First Initial
Dear GenMeh;
Help! I have my annual performance appraisal next week. Not only do I suck at meetings like this, I’m pretty sure that telling my boss that I spend every lunch hour fantasizing about quitting and running off to the Dominican Republic won’t go over too well. I kinda hate the job (a lot), but I do like being able to pay my bills and feed myself. What sort of stuff should I say?
-Don’t Want to Get Fired, kthxsbai
I could point you to half a dozen kinder-careerist websites that would walk you through this very process or reiterate the point about GenMeh not being in the business of helping out earnest young corporate go-getters, but I get the sense from your full letter that you just want to know the right things (true or otherwise) to say to get through the performance appraisal in one piece. So, if you’re looking for glossy BS speak for the purpose of making your 9-5 hell just a little less hellish, that we can certainly do. I give you:
Photo by Kumar Appaiah
1. Unobjectionable and appropriately ambitious sounding goals
When asked what your goals are for the coming period, go with the tried and true. Everyone wants to “strengthen their management and leadership skills.” Fact. “Gaining more exposure to other functional areas of the company as a means of strengthening my own job performance” also works. Ditto, “Increase my knowledge and understanding of our industry/sector/field via participation in training/workshops/conferences and key professional development events.” You want to balance appearing ambitious and forward thinking with naming goals both vague and modest enough to ensure that you can make a case for having achieved them by the time your next appraisal rolls around.
2. Inoffensive organizational critiques
If you’re quizzed on your org’s faults and failings, keep your answer as back-handedly complimentary as possible. If you can tie these weaknesses to an act of God in which no one within the organization can actually be faulted for the shortcoming, so much the better. Unfortunately, “I believe office morale has suffered a decline since that tornado destroyed the break room last month.” doesn’t work for everyone.
“Our exponential growth over the last year has meant that forming personal relationships with each of my new colleagues has been more challenging than when there were a fewer of us on staff, but it’s a challenge I welcome.” might suffice if you’re the type who can pull off a little tweeness and your company is actually, you know, thriving.
If you’re surrounded by control freak information hoarders who refuse to cooperate, why not opt for the passive-aggressive, “I support strengthening our ongoing commitment to sharing information and continuing to improve our team communications.”?
3. Flattering flaws
If you have to discuss your own flaws, make sure to couch them in terms of the work you’re doing to overcome them. How about, “becoming increasingly comfortable with the flexibility and adaptability required by the nature of our work/field/project and actively working to anticipate and prepare for these shifts in priorities through ongoing info gather and environmental scanning”? Impressive! Or perhaps you’re “recognizing that perfect information doesn’t exist and becoming more comfortable with assuming risk and making decisions based on the best inputs and resources available”?
Ideally, you want to paint the “flaw” as circumstantial and outside of your control and play up your excellent coping mechanism (unless said coping mechanism involves sneaking into the men’s room with a flask of Jim Beam. Skip that part).
But what if your supervisor wants you to discuss her flaws? Firstly, THIS IS A TRICK QUESTION. No one is actually cool with constructive criticism. She doesn’t want you to suggest areas in which she could improve her management approach; she simply wants you to validate her awesomeness in a plausible, yet not overly fawning, manner. Talk about your appreciation for the opportunities to take on increased responsibility and mention that you hope that this trend will continue in the future and that you welcome any and all opportunities to be included in management-level discussions and to participate in/observe the decision making process. Give her milquetoast and mealy-mouthed; that’s what she’s looking for.
No guarantees, but if you follow these simple tips, you should be well on your way to securing another year of gainful employment as a self-loathing wage slave. Why not take an extra long lunch to celebrate?
Have a career/life/love problem you’d like us to help you solve? Drop us a line and we’ll see what we can do.
Generation Meh 