Each paragraph of the article on pre-designed lifestyles reveals intense depths of ignorance about the causes of the author’s own experiences. It is impossible for me to understand how one can be so indifferent and so lacking in curiosity about his or her own psychological states. This indifference is masked by generalizations:

The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce.

The feeling that work is not life and is extremely painful is the author’s personal experience which s/he projects onto humanity at large. It is easier to hide in a crowd, albeit an imaginary one, from a realization that one is not very good at managing one’s own life. If working is so painful to you that it feels like you are dead during the working hours and if, instead of using normal and healthy compensatory mechanisms, you need to compensate so heavily for working, this simply means that you have chosen the wrong career.

I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing. The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time.

Actually, if this author weren’t as obsessed with money (which in itself is a sign of psychological problems), s/he would notice that these activities have something far more significant in common: they require an investment of energy. This person’s job is a drain on his/her energy to the point where s/he is nearly incapacitated outside of working hours. Normally, one’s job should be a source of extra energy. None of this is about society, culture, the media, the corporate world, or any of the other imaginary foes the immature love to blame for their troubles. All such people need to do is look for a different job.

The culmination of this manifesto of extreme immaturity consists of the author projecting and generalizing in a way I cannot qualify as anything other than a fit of hysteria:

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

This completely unhinged and bizarre monologue is a normal reaction of an extremely immature person who is baffled by and terrified of the world of adults. One of the most telling signs of immaturity is the incapacity to own one’s problems. Instead of saying “I’m dissatisfied with my life and feel like something crucial is missing from it”, they attribute their own experience to everybody else and assign the responsibility for it to some undefined outside authority. Of course, if you in no way caused your own problems, you cannot be expected to solve them. This position is very convenient in that it allows one to avoid doing anything to address the situation. Whining impotently becomes the only course of action that is open to one.

Proving that nothing can be done to change one’s life was, of course, the only goal of this article.

The linked blogger ends the article the following way:

The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.

Is this you?

No, my friend. The person who is uninterested in serious personal development is you. And “big business” or the Industrial Revolution are not to blame for this. Only you are.

Thanks to reader anon who left a link to an article titled “Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed“, we can continue discussing an issue that interests me a lot, namely, a grievous ignorance of the general public of everything that concerns human psychology.

The article is in no way different from a multitude of similar pieces where all that an author has to sell is zero insight into anything whatsoever. The blueprint for these article is always the same: the author identifies an extremely trivial phenomenon, shows that s/he is completely baffled by it, and proceeds to roll out a very bizarre explanation that is based on badly digested self-help books and TV shows of the Dr. Phil type.

This is the big question that the article’s author find it so hard to answer:

One of the most surprising discoveries I made during my trip was that I spent much less per month traveling foreign counties (including countries more expensive than Canada) than I did as a regular working joe back home. I had much more free time, I was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world, I was meeting new people left and right, I was calm and peaceful and otherwise having an unforgettable time, and somehow it cost me much less than my humble 9-5 lifestyle here in one of Canada’s least expensive cities.

Yes, hugely surprising. For people under the age of three. Because everybody older than that has already figured out that vacationing is easier than working and, hence, the psyche needs a lot less maintenance (called “compensatory mechanisms” by those who as old as 18) to vacation than to work.

In the documentary The Corporation, a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toys would not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used these studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.

We all know how much I love this impotent and immature narrative of parents as victims of their own small children. What is especially funny is that an author who dedicated the preceding paragraph to ranting against companies selling people useless junk immediately demonstrates the propensity to buy useless junk in the form of idiotic documentaries. Of course, it is easier to swallow the pablum dished out by such stupid film-makers than to make an effort and realize that the only language small children know is the one their parents taught them. If they nag, that only happens because their parents taught and encouraged this system of communication to the kids. If these parents suffer so much because of “having to buy the things they don’t want to buy” (which is, of course, a lie. They do exactly what they want to do), they can simply teach their children another way of communicating. By doing so, they would do us all a huge favor because I, for one, find it excruciating to have to deal with whining students who bring this annoying habit from home.

[To be continued. . .]

So. I just listened to the President of our university speak to us about the budget crisis.

Here are the most important points:

1. The state of IL sucks dick and has done so for the past 10 years at least.

2. Our university is the cheapest to attend in the state.

3. Enrollments at respectable universities are plummeting. This happens because crowds of people prefer to pay a lot more to shady online schools for colored pieces of toilet paper than enroll in actual universities, do real work, and get valuable diplomas. (My analysis: This is the result of raising an entire generation of pill-popping, instant gratification people.)

4. One of the greatest challenges our university faces is a growing monitoring and interference with every aspect of what we do by state abd federal governments. This has been happening for the last 10 years. Please re-read the last sentence before commenting on this point.

5. What I discovered: Professors have the same tendency as students to share boring disquisitions on how they feel instead of asking concrete questions.

6. This current budget scare is just one in a row of many. Everything will probably work out just fine in the end.

7. Nobody will be able to avoid offering some percentage of their courses online. I’m perfectly fine with that because I dig working from home. A mix of in-person and online courses works great for me. So if you hate the words “online teaching”, make sure you have a colleague like me who is willing to develop online courses. Pretending that this trend will not become huge, however, and bemoaning it is as useful as arguing that candle-light is better for the environment than electricity.

On the one hand, we al give lip-service to accepting and even “celebrating” cultural differences. On the other hand, the recognition that said cultural difference don’t only manifest themselves in regional cuisines and quirky traditions people observe at home but also color every aspect of people’s behavior is just not there.

“A Hispanic woman in her 50s”, “a Russian man in his 30s”, etc. are not simply comforting statistics that will look nice and diverse on your personnel reports. They are, rather, actual universes that are governed by laws you might not even be able to imagine.

When I was learning Spanish and spending all of my time with Hispanic people, I had to learn not just the language but also the shared way of being of the people around me. And it was hard. It felt like breaking my own identity into small pieces and reassembling it anew. The process ultimately enriched me profoundly but it was very difficult and often painful.

After this experience, I never assume that people from other cultures are a sort of a version of me with a different accent. We all share a basic humanity but the ways that humanity manifests itself are profoundly disparate.

This is why “multi-culturalism” is not a happy-happy-joy-joy phenomenon but, instead, something that requires very hard work on the part of everybody. And this hard work is something that many people might simply not feel like engaging in.

So instead of saying honestly, “This is too hard, I have too much on my plate as it is, screw multi-culturalism”, people wimp out and pretend that cultural differences are simply cosmetic.

And what bugs me out of my head is seeing people who have dedicated their lives to foreign languages and literature make this mistake.

Last week when I was in a cafe waiting for my mediumskimicedmocha, I overhead one student say to another, “Of course it’s true that professors grade easier than TAs”, and the other student agreed with that statement.

Of course! I rather liked this indication that we professors might actually become nicer with time, as opposed to more cranky and mean.

But do you agree with these students?

Yes. In my experience, beginning academics definitely feel the need to make themselves feel more important by being super strict with students. Normally, they get over it pretty fast.

There is nothing cuter than a young academic announcing in a trembling voice filled with profound insecurity, “I never give As in my courses because nobody can know this material well enough to deserve an A!” A few years later, academics look back on such memories and laugh.

A photographer decided to prove that people despise her for not being thin:

Memphis-based photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero has long been aware of strangers making fun of her behind her back due to her size. So aware, in fact, that she has turned the whole concept into a full-blown photography project. Titled Wait Watchers, the series consists of Morris-Cafiero’s self-portraits in public in which strangers can be seen in the background giving her strange looks and/or laughing.

The entire thing seemed extremely unconvincing to me. I really hate these self-pitying exercises. I’m a happily plump woman and I only see people observe me with admiration and awe. This woman, on the other hand, is so invested into proving that the world hates her that doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that the problem is not her size but:

1. The horrible clothes;
2. The dirty hair that makes her look like a public menace;
3. Standing in a way that makes it impossible for a crowd to pass;
4. And, most importantly, the fact that she is being photographed while posing with weird facial expressions.

I also wonder how many photos of people not noticing her existence or looking at her kindly and respectfully she edited out of this collection.

Remember, when people look at you, they see exactly what you see in yourself. You see a fat, ridiculous, pitiful creature, and that’s what everybody else will see. You see a beautiful, elegant, awesome person, and that is what everybody else will see.

The gaze of the Other originates inside you. And that is a position of great power. Don’t squander the power.

P.S. Thank you, David Gendron, for leaving the link to the article.

I was listening to a student present her research on post-WWII Germany but couldn’t concentrate because the student’s insistence on referring to the Soviet soldiers as “Russians” was very grating.

Not only weren’t all of those soldiers Russian, some of them barely even spoke the Russian language. At the same time, those who were ethnically Russian would not, with rare exceptions, have identified as Russian. Stalin really didn’t like that kind of thing, you know.

It is really annoying to see how many people buy into Russia’s attempts to erase the other 14 republics of the USSR from the Soviet experience. Remember, whenever you use the words “Russian” and “Soviet” interchangeably, you are making Comrade Putin very happy.

See what we get served at the university cafeteria these days? The positive changes started with freshly tossed salads, and now we get little bowls of fresh berries for $2. How great is that? My berries look a little squished but that’s only because they are so popular that I had to scrape up the last remaining ones. A queue of students was giving me nasty stares as I was doing that. This was the first time I was tempted to announce apologetically, “I’m pregnant!”

I find it very very annoying when people try to refute a stupid and offensive argument by saying something equally stupid and offensive. Here is an example from the notoriously careless Juan Cole:

Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions. Murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States.

Yes, Maher was being an idiot when he said this. But Cole is being the same kind of idiot. Murder rates are not indicative of absolutely anything. In the USSR under Stalin, murder rates were extremely low. Murderous criminals had legitimate, state-sponsored and state-rewarded venues to fulfill their need to torture and kill. Crime rates, especially for violent crime and murder in particular, also plummeted during Hitler’s rule in Germany. Did that signal a lower degree of violence among Germans in 1930s? Ask the Jews, the Slavs, the Gypsies, etc.

Murder rates per se don’t indicate whether the populace of a country is more or less violent than anybody else.

And if you think I’m comparing Muslim countries with Stalin’s USSR or Hitler’s Germany, you are an idiot who should leave my blog and head over to Cole’s.

Just a little addition to a recent discussion on this blog. A mentally sick individual engaged in a mass shooting in Belgorod, Russia. Today, Russian state officials are referring to the massacre as “American-style shooting.“