Author Archives: Damon

To Hell With Privatization of Education, Health, and Law Enforcement

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$85 + $40 shipping for a power cord for Clyde’s feeding pump. Ever feed a five year old boy three times a day with a syringe and tube? It’s really a 50 cent wire. If I buy it, then I can’t buy food.

We’ve failed at health care. I’m so sick of Big Pharma bleeding us dry.  Shame on Moog Pharmaceuticals for charging $120 for a power cord so I can feed my kid.

To Hell with privatization of healthcare and education.

And to Hell with our privatized law enforcement, which is all of it. We’ve built a nation of corruption, greed, and narcissistic social media addicts. I’m so ashamed of us.

Unconditional Love

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I believe in the Golden Rule.  For this essay, I want to address a few details as a result of applying this rule.  These are my personal guiding principles when it comes to my own behavior:

  1. Do unto others only what I would do unto my self.
  2. Actively Love Unconditionally:  Choose to pay attention to and engage with people outside of my self.
  3. Place the support and love of family first. Family:  Partner, children, all parents, and all siblings and their children as well, at a minimum.
  4. Be actively and consistently honest through time.
  5. Be respectful and kind.

I constantly fail at #1 (and 2 through 5).  Everyone does.  To be alive means trying anyway.

How does this affect how I treat my partner?  It means I choose to pay attention to the details of their life, their words and expressed thoughts, what makes them happy, what hurts them, or even what makes them anxious or distracted from that which makes them happy.  I want to support them in the ways they feel best and also how I feel is best, because self-aware entities cannot avoid such thoughts.  I also want them to thrive in the ways that they define thriving.

For me to thrive, I must make choices which enable those I love to:

  1.  Pursue love on their own terms.
  2.  Guarantee those they love thrive at least as well as my own self.
  3.  Demonstrate love of family first.
  4.  Speak and act honestly.
  5.  Actively take actions which are kind in nature.

If I were to prohibit any of those activities, then I would be prohibiting those that I love from living the way that I do, which would be contradictory to my own being.  I would be preaching one thing and doing another.

For everyone, this means:  They should be supported in their efforts to pay attention to that which they love.

Specifically, for my partner this means I have the following expectations:

  1.  One is free to love anyone they want.
  2.  One is free to act in supporting ways to others.
  3.  I expect a demonstration of placing love of family first.
  4.  I expect honesty.
  5.  I expect actively taking actions which are kind in nature.

These are not unconditional.  These are the conditions.  And, if one considers the act of love as a choice, which I do, it means that I can actively choose to ignore that which I love in order to not create more love and attention, which could be damaged and lost later should the person I love betray my expectations.

Make no mistake, I have these expectations.  I cannot avoid them because I’m an actively thinking creature that uses mental models of the future to determine (or so I like to think) my own actions.  If I’m constantly betrayed, I will choose to pay attention to other people who generate less pain and misery in my own life.  Otherwise, I would be hurting myself, slowly destroying my own ability to not only support myself (due to depression or anguish) but my family and those I love as well.

What does it mean to love someone unconditionally?  To me, it means having the confidence in my self to ignore the psychological impact created by the changes and behavior of the person whom I love, on my own identity.  Shorter:  I love them no matter what they do to me.  And by to me, it could mean that I’ve misperceived the other’s actions or intent.

The most common argument against I’ve heard about the Golden Rule:  Sometimes we don’t know what is best for the other person, so this is a bad rule.

My response:  All rules fail in that scenario, and no other rule performs as well when faced with not knowing what is best for the other person.  Also, this argument also contains an element of potential confusion:  Sometimes it’s assumed that one is always going to do something to the other person because of the presence of the words do unto others.  Let’s not forget the word only which follows just after others.  This means one can choose to do nothing at all.  Choosing to not think about the other person is also an option.  Choosing that option is called ignoring.

I suspect that conditions will always apply because we are biological creatures which use mental models to mathematically represent the Universe, and these models will inevitably reveal and project fundamental contradictions in our perception–of everything.

Contradictions in our understanding of one another present themselves constantly.  We expect one behavior, and yet another behavior takes place, resulting in anxiety, doubt, and fear.  These are powerful emotions, and the lizard parts of our primate brains impose powerful forces our physical bodies will not ignore, even if we want them to.  They will react to inconsistencies in the Universe that cannot be ignored, even if they are imagined.

And, if one were to mathematically represent love, what would that look like?  My mental musings led me to consider the following context, one that I’ve mentioned before.  As a poem:

We love what we pay attention to.

We pay attention to what we love.

I like this representation because it is two-way:  It says that attention, if identified, happens when one loves.  If one’s attention could be examined, one could examine the love that one holds.

The hard part starts when one discovers that what is being paid attention to fundamentally breaks all of the rules.  Like paying attention to work or things instead of partner and family.  Constantly engaging in selfish activities, self-destructive behavior like drug and alcohol abuse, infidelity, absence, and deception will utterly destroy relationships.  My own have failed because of these.

Want to destroy your marriage?  Work day and night. On anything.  You could be working on a brilliant new Bible you think will save all of mankind, and if you pay attention to it instead of the people in your life, those people will go away or fail to thrive, which is a normal thing for them to do.  They will be forced, by you, to make a choice of living without you or attempting to thrive in a world where you are actively keeping them from thriving.

Want to alienate your kids?  Talk to them about work all the time, miss daily events in their lives, and just simply pay attention to other things.  It will happen naturally.  I suggest just listening for while.  You’d be surprised what kids say after a few days of just being around them without saying anything.  If they trust you, they will share their lives with you.

Want to fundamentally damage your partner?  Engage in infidelity, dishonesty, absence, or material obsessions.  Routinely choosing to act in ways that cause anxiety, stress, or emotional pain is hurtful.  Do not be surprised if they turn their attention to other things and other people.

The Rise of Work Wives and Work Husbands

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We’re seeing the rise of work wives and work husbands in addition to partners at home. We love who we pay attention to all the time, and the opposite is true: We pay attention to those we love, all the time. Corporate life injects this conflict systemically.

And, out of the dozens of married executives I’ve worked with as peers, I’ve witnessed approximately 50% of them experience divorce. Each case involved infidelity with a colleague with whom they worked daily. We build our family out of those we surround ourselves with. Who else?

Ever witnessed jealousy and envy between an executive assistant and the partner of the one being supposedly assisted? I have. More than once. Why does that happen? Because people make family where they are, and we are spending all of our time at work.

If you aren’t spending at least half of your time communicating and planning with your partner the success plans of your relationship and family, in my experience, your efforts to build a family will almost certainly fail.

To do this, it means spend 6-8 hours *at* work, paying attention to business details, engineering, marketing, physical labor, whatever, but the rest of your waking seconds, every single one, is dedicated to *attention* to family, partner, and overall health and success of them.

And don’t get me started on If Your Partner Hates Your Boss and Your Boss Forces You To Choose Sides as we’ve seen in recent politics. We saw someone abandon their partner for a career. Well, that career isn’t a family. It’s just another job about to be lost.

If one’s partner says: “I’ve watched what’s going on at work with your colleague. I’m uncomfortable with the relationship that has developed, I’d like to see it change or ideally stop so we can focus on repairing any reasons for distrust.” Cease immediately or it’s an affair.

I’ve had employees reveal to me in 1:1s that their partner at home is worried about a specific relationship at work. I sometimes expressed sympathy with their partners due to my own observations. I offered options to move. When I was ignored, their families disintegrated.