This is a guest post from Fabian Kruse. His blog is The Friendly Anarchist.
“May you live in interesting times,” a Chinese curse goes. It’s true: “Interestingness” is a dangerously broad term. Having a chronic illness can be interesting but it sucks. Wars can be interesting — but they suck even more. And maybe you too have used the classical “It tastes interesting”-excuse when your dinner host didn’t really have a clue about cooking. Not as bad as wars and chronic illnesses, but still kind of sucky.
But interestingness in general is a lot more positive. Interestingness is finding the experiences that shape us as human beings, and enjoying them to the max. What we really don’t want is the bullshit part of life.
As far as I can see it, most of us want to live our lives something like this:
Sure, a bit more interestingness would be nice, but let’s be realistic, right? At least we’ll avoid the bullshit. Read more
I want to finally end the bullshit of dividing women into categories of stay-at-home mom or working mom.
This is not just semantics: we are all working. It’s more than that. Here’s why.
Before I had my first child, in 2002, I had been bouncing between corporate jobs and fast-paced startups ten years, and I was earning a solid, six-figure salary. But I didn’t go back because I didn’t want to miss time with my son. By the time I had the baby we had used up all our savings (my husband, also, was not working), but I still didn’t go back to an office job because I wanted to stay home with my son.
But we needed money. So I wrote columns from our kitchen counter (I didn’t have a desk) when my son was sleeping. Sometimes I wrote columns while he was breastfeeding. I was deliriously tired, but I had to earn money. Read more
It’s my birthday. So I get to write about anything. I get to indulge. The first thing is that I want to republish a poem that I published a long time ago, when I thought maybe I could get away with publishing poems on my blog. Now I know that for sure, poetry kills traffic.
But I like this poem so much:
Employed
She just wants to be employed
for eight hours a day. She is not
interested in a career; she wants a job
with a paycheck and free parking. She
does not want to carry a briefcase filled with important papers to read
after dinner; she does not want to return phone calls. When she gets home,
she wants to kick off her shoes and waltz around her kitchen singing, “I am
a piece of work.”
I like it maybe because it’s me. Sometimes I get tired of having to earn money. I have so many things I want to do, and it’s so distracting to have to earn money. I could have married someone with a lot of money and then I wouldn’t have to worry about earning money, but I didn’t choose that.
For the record, those dates went terribly. Read more
Sixty-five percent of people in the white-collar world have workplace spouses. Jacqueline Olds, professor of psychiatry at Harvard, explains that because we spend so much time in the office, “these relationships can be critical to succeeding in today’s work environment.” CNN published a piece singing the praises of the workplace spouse, as “a wonderful support system among co-workers and makes a more productive worker.”
Like all other life-saving, confidence-bolstering types of relationships, workplace spouse relationships are more common among the more highly paid. This is why I should have a workplace spouse.
Plus, I'm lonely on the farm. The problem with being lonely on the farm is not that I can't find someone to cheat with. I'm a resourceful girl. The problem is that I wouldn't cheat because I'd end up trying to keep it a secret and then I'd tell the farmer and then he'd hate me even more than he probably hates me right now.
It's not that he hates me, actually. It's that he's sick of talking to me. He would like me to be more low maintenance. He does not want to talk and for sure is sick of me crying. So I am trying to stay away from him now. Read more
Throughout my career, men have helped me every step of the way. Sometimes it was when I asked for help. Sometimes they saw I needed help even before I did, and they were there.
So you might think this is December-is-full-of-good-cheer-post — you know, me thanking men for all they've done for me at work. But no. It's me asking for even more. It's my wish list for what else men could be doing.
This is not grand stuff. Okay. I mean, women are doing better in school than men, outearning men, and look, now even Time magazine says women don't need marriage as much as men do. So it's not like women are in trouble. But still, men could do some stuff to make life better for women at work.
Here are some suggestions: Read more
I have been spending my days with Jehovah’s Witnesses. I had to replace my house manager from Madison, and people told me that I should put an ad on the grocery-store bulletin board. That’s how people get jobs where I live now. So I did that. I got two responses.
The job listing said $10/hr and Jeanenne said she’d do it for $20. That’s something I would do. So I hired her. Everyone knows everyone in this town. And when I mentioned Jeanenne’s name, everyone said, “But she’s a Jehovah’s Witness.”
I didn’t really know what this meant. I mean, I knew that they’d probably say something like that about me, being (probably) the only Jewish family in the county. And I knew that when I was a latchkey kid, and Jehovah’s Witnesses would knock on our door, I would often invite them in to talk.
They never made any sense to me.
Now I know why. Jehovah’s Witnesses are all about being happy. They are all about having the answers, knowing the rules, and following them to happiness.
1. The real path to happiness is contentment, and it looks a lot like hell.
Jeanenne recognizes that this is the big difference between us. She took this photo for me. She said, “The cow reminds me of you.”
I laughed right away. The cow has acres of land with corn and grass to feed on all day long. But she went to the edge of the fence and poked her head through to somewhere else. That’s how I am. Read more
I’m always shocked to hear that people don't like brown-nosing. If I could do it, I definitely would. But as someone who has Asperger’s, brown-nosing always looks very difficult. So I have been looking for someone to teach me how to be better at brown-nosing, and finally, I found it.
First, here is research from James Westphal and Ithai Stern at Kellogg School of Management. They found that being adept at ingratiating behavior was the number-one factor for getting positions at the top of the corporate ladder.
This is not surprising to me. What is surprising is that the research comes with a how-to provided (perhaps inadvertently) by the American Bar Association Journal.
According to the study, here are the traits that are most likely to be rewarded.
1) Frame flattery as advice-seeking. For example, you can ask, “How were you able to close that deal so successfully?”
2) Argue before accepting a manager's opinion. Read more
One of the posts on my blog that gets a lot of angry comments is the one where I explain why women should not report sexual harassment at work. The problem with reporting workplace sexual harassment is that none of us is going to change policy single-handedly. There is a huge risk with little reward if you report the harassment to human resources, because the law dictates that HR doesn’t focus on your problems — HR must protect the company, not you. When you report harassment, you become the company’s problem.
So a lot of people naturally ask, “How are we going to change things if no one reports the problem?” But no one changes corporate America by sacrificing her career. Which is what you end up doing if you report harassment. You lose your job. Not legally, but for some other reason. Because it’s so easy to fire someone and so smart for the company to fire anyone who complains about harassment.
You can say that’s unfair but you can’t say it’s not reality. You are better off taking care of harassment yourself, and staying in the game and getting power at work to make change. Read more
You think it would be really fun to have sex with me. Because, I think you can tell from my posts, I’ll do anything. But maybe you can also tell from my posts that it’s a little bit weird. Because you know that I’ll say anything, too, but sometimes, I make you cringe.
I think I’m that way in bed, too.
This post is about work. And sex, which are two of the essential areas of life one needs to be able to function in before you can feel like a normal adult. And both sex and work are governed by a set of rules that many people are able to learn just by being in the world.
Asperger Syndrome compromises one’s ability to read nonverbal social cues. A simple example of this deficit is answering the question, “How are you?” It is loaded with so many nonverbal issues that I simply freeze. Even if you tell me, “Just say fine,” sometimes the situation looks special to me, and I can’t figure out why it’s special, so I can’t talk.
So I’ve spent my life teaching myself the rules for what to do in each social situation. I study people, make notes for myself, and then test the notes to see what other situations my notes apply to. To get a sense of how awkward this looks, here’s a video that is supposed to be a parody of people with Asperger’s interacting with each other. But my family has such a high proportion of people with Asperger’s that this video, honestly, is not far from what our life is like.
In my experience, the places with the most rules are work and sex. So, you can teach yourself the process of becoming better at work by applying the process of learning the rules about dating and sex. And vice versa. I, for example, am great at work rules and terrible at sex rules. So I teach myself using the reverse mechanism. Read more
Maybe the reason that young people are optimistic in the face of a poor job market is that young people can probably do your job better than older people can.
The truth is, non-gen-y-workers have a bunch of shortcomings when it comes to competing with today’s workforce. Management consultant Stephen Denning has a great little history of management in his new book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management. He points out that managers of the 20th century were trained to supervise people to get them to do stuff, to perform tasks. But now that most people are knowledge workers and not semi-skilled workers, we need managers who inspire, motivate, and encourage collaboration-managers, even, who care about the well-being of their employees and strive to make the workplace meaningful. And that’s not a corporate world where the older set is generally comfortable.
Yup, I’m arguing that Gen Y – that age-group that gets dumped on for acting all entitled – can teach everyone something about making it in the modern workforce. A lot, actually, because Gen Y is more prepared and has an advantage over older folks with far more experience. Here are areas where Gen Y can run circles around everyone at work: Read more