Watching liberals try to discuss gun laws is all too often like watching Steve Carell in The 40 Year Old Virgin describe what it’s like to make love to a woman – it sounds superficially right unless you know, well, anything about how it actually works.
You’ve got folks thinking that the AR-15 stands for “Assault Rifle,” and not knowing the difference between a semi- and and an automatic rifle. You’ve got folks that want to pass anti-gun laws that have already been passed (if not necessarily enforced). You’ve got folks who would craft overly-simple bills who don’t realize that, because of the laughably inaccurate way they’ve defined what a “dangerous gun” is, would not stop the problem at all.
It’s a world full of folks who don’t understand how guns work at all. Hell, I’m one of those liberals, and I’ve run face-first into some very smart and very educated people on guns.
What I’d like to say is “…and they set me straight.”
Alas, that’s never what happens.
See, what happens is that they explain to me that what I’ve suggested would never ever work because of X, Y, or Z. And then I ask the legitimate question:
“Okay. I understand guns are a complicated topic with a lot of laws in place, like pretty much everything else in America, and I’d like to get the details right from someone who knows what’s happening on the ground. So how would we stop maniacs from getting their hands on the type of gun that makes it easy for an elderly man to kill almost 60 civilians?”
And if we started this by comparing liberals to the 40 Year Old Virgin, the conservatives become that guy on Tinder who talks big sexy stuff until you finally invite him over to your apartment and whoops it’s a ghost. Because they disappear.
Because what inevitably happens when I start asking, “All right, you have high standards on how you want your laws crafted, how would this work?” is that after some debate I get told, time and time again by these experts, that no law would work, really, we’re doing everything we can, the existing laws are fine and why are you dumb liberals even worried about this?
They’ve got a lot of responses there before they eventually dwindle and disappear – they’ll twiddle with the definition of “mass shooting” to shave off some of those numbers, thus making it maybe 800 mass shootings, as if that should reassure me. They’ll explain that a proper guy with a gun would have stopped all of those shootings, which also fails to reassure me because even if that’s true – and I’m pretty sure it isn’t, because a horde of armed people firing up at the shooter’s windows at Mandalay Bay doesn’t seem like it would have worked out well – that implies that the massive wave of shootings in America are even more explosive than any other country, because we’d have five times the shootings if it weren’t for all these responsible gun owners, and holy crap that is in no way reassuring.
They’ll tell me I should own a gun. I’d love to! But I’m a depressive with suicidal ideation, and I know the statistics – that gun would make it significantly more likely that I’d kill myself.
And finally, they’ll tell me how dumb I am, which I’ve already admitted, but then I ask: why not reach across the aisle to see how we can make this work? Three times now, I’ve offered to start up a podcast with the smartest, most knowledgeable folks I’ve found debating me – let’s have dumb anti-gun guy vs educated pro-gun guy on a show where we discuss how gun laws fail by liberal standards and see what ways we could craft laws that could work.
They ghost.
And the reason they ghost is that for all of the supposed education, their fundamental message is despair. Scrape off the sneering gun facts, and what they’re actually saying is “Daily mass shootings are a price I’m willing to pay to keep my guns.” Which isn’t popular at all. They know that.
That’s why they hide behind a screed of gun trivia and “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And look: liberals, we do get the facts wrong, and so you should try not to be that asshole who’s saying blatantly wrong things about guns. Guns are tricky, and it’s not as simple as “ban the assault rifle” because absolutely every gun manufacturer in the world will have dodges ready for that and besides, how you define the gun from a legislative perspective totally matters.
But pro-gun conservatives? It’s easy for you to write off people’s concerns because they got a fact wrong, but that’s like throwing out the Declaration of Independence because it has a typo in it. The fact is, something’s wrong with America gun culture if we’re having this many massacres, and common sense indicates that it’s some problem we could solve with legislation in the same way we’re trying to do so for terrorism and drugs and murder – so flinging your hands in despair and going, “You can’t regulate evil!” is a dumb fucking statement unless you’re for also dropping laws on burglary and shoplifting.
We will not craft perfect laws. We never do. But it’s astounding how laws intended to prevent Muslim terrorism can be sloppy as hell, laws intended to stop illegal drug use can put tons of the wrong people away, yet gun laws and gun laws alone must be 100% effective before we contemplate passing them.
(Which isn’t to say that I don’t want the antiterrorism and antidrug laws tightened. All legislation should be as good as we can make it, and continually improved. But every law will be imperfect on some level because humans are imperfect.)
So yeah. The next time a liberal goofs up on what kind of ammo that gun takes, that’s an error. And we should fix that. But in turn, you should not use that as the excuse to toss that concern out to promote your special brand of despairing nihilism.
There are solutions. Maybe you fear us taking all the guns away, but most of us don’t want all the guns away, we want not to be shot. As, I suspect, do you.
What can you do to help us achieve that goal? Because hint: what doesn’t work is writing everyone off who fails the Gun Trivia Quiz.
Help us fix a problem. You can do that by admitting there is a problem, and the solution is not to chug despair until some murderous clod puts a bullet in our head at random.
Embrace hope. Even though, unfortunately, hope seems to be an increasingly liberal concept these days.
Louisville, KY – Local man Doug Sims is beaming with pride today as he started his long over-due work out plan. “I had an a such a unique idea, to start my exercise plan on the first of the year!” he said. “It just makes so much sense, new year, new way of living. I just don’t know why no one else has ever thought of this before!!!”
Doug bought new shoes for this historic day, new workout clothes, a gym bag, the towel he received from his sister on Christmas, and of course protein shake mix for his post workout drink. “I carbo-loaded last night in preparation,” Doug said.
Friends of Doug report he has been planning this since August. “We are proud of him to finally take action. Why he waited 4 months like everyone else is beyond me,” a friend said. “Let’s just hope he keeps it up, along with the hundreds of other January Gym goers here today.”
He almost didn’t complete his planned workout, the parking lot was extremely full. ” I drove around for about 10 min and didn’t find a spot! There were people parked up on the grass.” Doug said. “Everyone works out, they should build more gyms.”
A parking spot opened at the last second. Doug was able to go inside and sign up for a $60 a month membership and complete his twenty minute workout, walking on a treadmill. He was also seen sitting on one of those balls and then a foam roller before heading home. “They have some weird stuff at the gym!” Doug said referring to the roller and ball. “I have no doubt in my mind I can do this everyday, just look at all the other people who are doing this too!” he said pointing to the the hundreds of other gym-goers.
Not to worry, he had his post workout protein drink.
Here’s the lens to view things though: Every woman is flirting with you because you’re powerful.
The problem is, you remove that lens, and the truth is that some of those women aren’t flirting with you. Let’s be generous and say that most of them are, but 10% are just being nice.
When you expect to see flirting, everything becomes flirting. Someone making eye contact becomes their bold way of seducing you. Someone’s looking away when you stare at them becomes their shy way of leading you deeper into their boudoir.
When what you expect to see is women wanting to fuck you, well, you can always find evidence that someone’s trying.
And if you are a powerful man, with the ability to make or break their career, and you have this lens that everyone’s secretly trying to fuck you, then there’s a good chance you start trying to fuck them. Which, again, maybe a lot of the women there want you.
But the ones that don’t suddenly wind up with a tongue in their mouth, or your hand on their intimate parts.
And some of them freeze. They freeze because they’re reliving some former trauma, or they freeze because they’re trying to figure out how to tell you “no” without losing the career they so desperately need, or they even freeze just because this is so far out of the line of what they expected that they don’t even know how to react to this.
And if you expect every woman to be into fucking you, you’ll see that very still and silent moment of them, breathlessly savoring what they always wanted.
Except it wasn’t that.
It wasn’t that at all.
Even if, reluctantly, they let you keep their hands there in that intimate place because they do that awful math and decide that “getting assaulted” is better than “being beaten up and assaulted.”
But you don’t see that, because you expected them to fuck you, and that lens transforms a trembling, sobbing woman into a girl who was so very nervous about revealing how much she wanted you.
And that’s the thing: you can be right 95% of the time. Maybe you are that attractive, maybe you are that sexy.
But as a human being with any kind of compassion – are you really okay with raping or molesting one out of every twenty women you’re with?
Or do you double down on the lens because you really want those nineteen women, and that twentieth becomes someone who you’d rather lose behind the distorting fog of the lens of “EVERYONE wants me,” and slowly sell your humanity off one 5% risk at a time?
Look. I get a lot of women flirting with me, and I don’t even vaguely qualify as a celebrity – I’m a sex-blogger with a few thousand fans. I can believe that when you’re on national television, you’d get offers that would blow my mind.
But I keep that firm idea in my head: FLIRTING IS NOT NECESSARILY DESIRE. Even though a lot of the times, honestly, it is.
Because that “not necessarily” becomes vital when you start moving into other equations, such as ACQUIESCENCE IS NOT NECESSARILY ENTHUSIASM and SILENCE IS NOT NECESSARILY APPROVAL.
That “not necessarily” is where the remainder of your humanity lives, when temptation comes knocking. That “not necessarily” is where you avoid that 5% exception, or that 1% exception, or even that .01% exception, because holy fuck, what percentage of women are you comfortable assaulting, shouldn’t it be zero, God I hope it’s zero, please Lord let it be zero.
All the women flirted. And maybe they did.
But it’s what you do with that interpretation that makes you either a human, or a monster.
(Title taken from a quote by Donald Trump, but it could apply to any number of people who wind up getting more fame than they counted on.)
Want to know what it’s like to go senile? Pokemon Go is the perfect way for teenagers to experience what it’s like to get old, so much so that I presume your trainer just dies when he hits level 30.
Because in Pokemon Go, you start out as a young and hale Pokemon trainer at the top of his game. Every monster is capturable. You can track down monsters easily, and the rewards for getting them are plentiful. The world is your oyster.
But as you level up, old age settles in. Your senses dull. Monsters you once tracked easily become findable only with great effort, and by today you can’t even find them at all – you know, maddeningly, that the Clefairy you so desperately seek is somewhere in the neighborhood, but deafened and blinded, you have no idea where it might be.
Your grip weakens, too, as you level up. Trivial Pokemon that once took a single ball to capture now require you to weakly lob five or six balls with your arthritic, useless hands. The rewards you used to get for accuracy and skill get removed, so the 50 extra XP you used to get for a nice throw no longer count – presumably because you’re so bitter and jaded that you no longer believe you deserve reward for an excellent throw.
Other games, foolishly, have equated “levelling up” with “more power” and “greater skill.” Pokemon Go breaks with that tradition by demonstrating that levelling up is merely crawling closer to the nursing home – with each level and Pokemon Go patch, you lose power and skill.
I’m level 19 now, and I dread becoming level 20 because I can barely catch a Weedle as it is, and how do the poor bastards of level 24 shuffle about?
You may think I’m kidding here: I’m not. Thanks to a combination of poor game design and inexplicably terrible patches, Pokemon Go has become a game that actively punishes you for playing it, and players are not happy about this.
Let me first explain how I play Pokemon Go, however, because there’s two ways you can play the game. A lot of people are concerned about levelling up their biggest Pokemon so they can battle for dominancy of the gym markers placed all over the map. Personally, that’s of no interest to me. Pokemon Go released in summer, which means that teenagers and college kids have nothing to do except squat near their gyms and battle. If I, the underlevelled fortysomething, do manage to squeeze a Vaporeon into the gym, the seven camp kids squatting near the Rocky River pool will ensure I’m kicked out in short order.
No, I play Pokemon Go for Pokemon’s very mandate:
Gotta catch ’em all.
There are a hundred and fifty or so Pokemon, and the only way to catch them is to go wandering for great distances in real life. My wife and I, who know little about Pokemon, get a thrill every time we find a Pokemon we didn’t know about – “What the hell is that magnet thing? Look at that” we cry happily, as one of us captures some weird-ass beast we had no clue existed.
We could look up the list of Pokemon on the Internet. We don’t. For us, as for many people, the joy is in the exploration.
And Niantec has actively started punishing us for exploring.
In the beginning, the game gave you a list of Pokemon in your neighborhood, along with a rough estimate as to how far you needed to walk to get them. You had no directional element – but you knew there was a Ponyta roaming through this Target parking lot somewhere, and you could play an elaborate game of cold/hot to find it.
After a few weeks, Niantec removed this feature. Now you could see the Pokemon in your neighborhood, but they were only sorted by distance. You couldn’t tell how far away you were, only that you were closer to the Ponyta than you were this useless frickin’ Weedle.
And now, with the latest update, Niantec has removed the order. You can only see the Pokemon in your neighborhood. You don’t know which direction to go, merely that they’re within about a half a mile of you. Good luck!
If you started playing from the first week, in the last month you have watched your ability to find Pokemon degrade. That’s Pokemon Senility, Part One.
Now, “finding Pokemon” is pretty much the largest reason people play – so much so that there are multiple sites that fake geolocations to map out the Pokemon in your neighborhood. Or there were. Niantec has shut them down, ostensibly because they were overloading the server – but their game trailer promised that you’d be able to find Pokemon by direction and distance, so basically Niantec has eliminated third-party services that provided what they promised.
Want to find a rare, specific Pokemon? Hell with you, buddy. Now you can’t. And by the way, we’re going to punish you for wanting to do anything else while you’re hunting for rare Pokemon.
Punish? How? Well, as every Pokemon player knows, your local neighborhood is infested with Com Mons – Pidgeys and Rattatas are everywhere. You will, quite literally, find Pidgeys and Rattatas on every corner, sometimes two or three at a time…
…and you will hardly find anything else, if you live in a “Pokedesert” like I am. See, Pokemon are generated according to the number of people playing Pokemon Go in your local area. If you live in a big city, rare Pokemon spawn all the time, because the game goes “Oh, there’s fifty people there, let’s drop some good loot.” But if you’re walking through the sleepy suburbs Rocky River, you will hardly ever find a Pikachu – just Pigeons and Rats everywhere.
Which would be fine, if the game encouraged you to capture pigeons and rats. But as you level up, it encourages you not to.
See, Pokemon Go’s way of encouraging you to make in-game purchases is Not Subtle. In fact, it’s so blatant that it literally makes you feel feeble. Because as you level up, Pokemon become much more likely to escape your tossed balls, until eventually a Pidgey that would have taken a single ball at level 5 suddenly starts requiring four or five balls.
Now, admittedly, quietly ramping up the difficulty on pay-to-play games is a long-standing tradition. Seriously; go read this article on a guy who’s spent $9,000 on his iPhone game, it’s terrifying. But Game of War has tons of fiddly options that confuse the user – which doesn’t sound like a strength, but at least when the game screws you over, your dignity is preserved because you’re not sure what’s happening.
Pokemon Go has so few stats that it’s blatantly apparent the game is jacking you. Pokemon have a single rating: Combat Power. And you know that at level 12, getting a Pidgey at CP 45 never took more than a single ball, but when at level 18 it takes two or three balls to capture it, there’s no denying the game is making you less effective as you climb the ranks.
And that Pidgey breaking loose is maddening, because you don’t even want the Pidgey. You’ve captured literally hundreds of Pidgeys, and if your goal is to “catch ’em all,” then Pidgeys are an active annoyance because they’re taking up a spot that maybe an exciting Staryu or a Bulbasaur might occupy.
Why would you try? Because the game is boring otherwise. You’re just looking for some small entertainment while you’re endlessly wandering around, hoping a Squirtle appears. Having it burn up four or five of your precious supply of Pokeballs, particularly in Poke-dry areas where you can’t refill them except by buying them or driving to better locations, means that when a Squirtle does hove into view you might not have the balls left to capture him.
(Oh, and Niantec inexplicably removed the XP reward for super-accurate throwing of your Pokeball. That didn’t matter when your reward was a rare Pokemon, but removing rewards when all you’re getting is a Pidgey makes the grindy parts even grindier and less fun.)
So you wander, the game encouraging you not to interact with its low-level entertainments, rendering you unable to find its high entertainments. And you can’t have the game on in the background, you can’t text while you have Pokemon Go on, you can’t do anything but Pokemon Go and maybe have some tunes on.
Basically, Pokemon Go demands PAY ATTENTION TO ME and then, as you level up, actively punishes you for trying to interact with what it offers the most often, and has taken away the tools that allow you to find the things you want.
That is the epitome of bad game design.
And unless Niantec can deal with this problem, it’s going to start hemorrhaging users soon; oh wait, it already has. Unsurprisingly, people don’t like feeling stupid, and the entire game is currently devoted to making its most invested users feel feeble.
They can fix this; I know the stated issue is “server overload,” but honestly if the game allowed me to home in on rare Pokemon, I’d be okay with it not working more often. Helping you find rare Pokemon is a must-have feature in a game that is about capturing and exploration; otherwise, why do I even have this thing on?
Likewise, yes, technically speaking we’re “encouraged” to buy Pokeballs when the game ramps the level up. But that ramp is so apparent, and for Pokemon we actively have come to hate, that we’re more likely to quit the game out of disgust, or only check it when we’re in a high-traffic zone.
This game is broken, and broken in a way that screws over its most heavily-invested users. It can be fixed, but that’s gonna require communication – Niantec is infamously closed-mouthed, but an announcement of “We know how important Pokemon-tracking is, we’re working on that, it’s our top priority” would keep me playing more because I’d know they knew why I was playing.
As it is, Niantec looks clueless. That’s not a good look. Especially when you’ve taken an interesting game and patched out all the features the “Gotta catch ’em all” people liked.
“I’m four chapters deep in my first novel, and I’ve never done this before. I was wondering, if you don’t mind me asking, what do you do when a magazine, or a book publishing company doesn’t accept your work? I mean, I don’t like the idea of spamming it around either, and obviously I’m only going to submit it to companies that seem like a good fit for it, but what if I throw it out in the lake and nobody bites? Do I just set it aside and wait X months? Years? Do I go at it with a broad ax and try to make it more… palatable? Do these companies and magazines ever tell you why a work doesn’t fit with them? Since they receive so many submissions, do they just say ‘no, git gud’?”
This is a pretty common question from new writers, so here’s a big secret in the publishing industry:
You wanna know the main factor that separates Professional Authors from the never-wases?
Professional Authors learn to let rejection roll off their shoulders.
To be a writer is to be rejected. Period. There is no writer you’ve heard of who has never been rejected. They’ve all poured their hearts into a story and seen it come bouncing back, often with an insult tacked onto the end of the rejection.
You’re gonna get rejected by agents. By publishers. And even if you make it past all those hurdles, you’re going to be rejected by readers, some of whom will give you snotty one-star reviews, the vast majority of whom will not even read your book at all. Few people talk about the rejection of “The book didn’t sell,” but hoo boy do tawdry sales feel like a rejection.
Good writers keep writing.
Good writers finish their stories. No excuses. As Elizabeth Bear is so fond of saying, “It’s a draft, it can suck.” Fix it in revisions. That’s where most of the magic happens for most people anyway.
Good writers send it out, as the Viable Paradise workshop‘s motto will tell you, “‘Till hell won’t have it!” Do some minor research to ensure they’re not opposed to your story – don’t send dick stories to Fireside fiction, for example – but since you’re going to rack up all these rejections, why reject yourself?
Send them out as far as you can. Let the editors turn you down, not you.
Sadly, most of them won’t have the time to explain to you why you didn’t fit today. The irony of the publishing business is that by the time a busy editor sends you a note explaining why they didn’t like the story, you were better than 95% of the other submissions. Which is why you seek out criticism from other writers and beta readers.
But here’s what you do with critique, whether that’s from an editor or a beta reader or a bad review:
First, you figure out whether this criticism is trying to rewrite your story to something else that’s not you. Sometimes you’ll get feedback like “Do we really need a lesbian squid romance at the center?” and the whole reason you wrote this story is to explore the world of sapphic squid sexuality, and at that point someone is trying to do violence to your story by turning it into a story you’d actively dislike.
Ignore those people. Your stories are your way of fulfilling your kinks. Take that away and you’ll have a published tale that has your name on the cover and nothing of you in the story.
Everyone else who complains, well, shut up and listen. Don’t tell them what you meant to do, because the way you get better as a writer is to map out the differences between “What you meant them to feel” and “What they actually felt.” Hear where they’re confused, or angry, or bored – they’ll be bored a lot in the beginning – and try to figure out what you can do to make them feel what you want.
(And never forget the deadliest criticism: “It’s okay.” If you hear someone shrug that your story’s good, you have failed. You would by far rather have someone screaming at you How could you write that than the indistinguishable blandness of an okay, because for every person who hates something passionately there is someone who loves it with equal fervor.)
Anyway. You asked what happens when a publisher rejects your work – which is wise phrasing, because there’s no “if.” They will. Chances are really good that your first book won’t sell, whether you’re selling it to a publisher or putting it into the sea of self-published books on Amazon. Your first book will probably go nowhere. So here’s the most valuable advice, right at the end:
Keep writing.
Maybe your first book sucks, but if you take advice and feedback and learn, your second book will be better. So write a second book. And a third. And a fourth. And – well, I’m infamous for writing seven novels before I finally got my first one published, which is a lot, but that happened because I kept writing all kinds of stuff and didn’t get caught up on any one thing.
If they rejected my first book, I’d make a second. If they rejected my second book, I’d make a third. And I’d get better with every book until someone listened.
As for you? You’ve got a voice.
Keep speaking until people hear you in the way you want to be heard.
SILVER SPRING, MD – Nurses, it’s time to rejoice! The American Nurses Association (ANA) has officially declared today National Destroy Your Pyxis with a Sledgehammer Day!
“Now where’s that Pyxis at?!”
“Nurses, report to your closest Pyxis machine!!!” announced the CEO of the ANA Marla Weston, PhD, RN, FAAN. “We will be deploying sledgehammers to each of our 3 million-plus nurses throughout the country. When you have received it, let your Pyxis have it.”
To the delight of nurses across the country, sledgehammers will neither be dispensed through a Pyxis nor scanned prior to use. No other nurses need to double-check your work or perform a sledgehammer count. Just grab and go.
Another plus: no patient wristbands need to be scanned either.
“It’s a love-hate relationship between nurses and the Pyxis machine though it’s skewed 100% towards hate,” said charge nurse Erica Stanton. She takes a few practice swings with her 10-lb. Stanley sledgehammer. She also brought a Thor-like hammer club for good measure. “I’ve been waiting for this day!”
Nurses will tell you that they don’t enjoy waiting on a line full of other nurses and techs waiting to access the Pyxis, especially if a patient is crashing. But on National Destroy Your Pyxis with a Sledgehammer Day, nurses are more than happy to wait their turn. Undoubtedly, there will be long lines at Pyxis machines nationwide. And they’re okay with that.
Weston reminded all nurses: “Please don’t forget eye safety. Wear goggles.” Patients and other health care providers have been provided earmuffs, in case the loud destruction of Pyxis machines gets disruptive.
Like her peers, Stanton gets frustrated by all the scanning and checking and rescanning and swiping, calling it “beyond redundant.” It was now Stanton’s turn. “I’m gonna swipe the sh*t outta that blasted machine! Someone press Play!!!” Right on queue, an iPad by the Pyxis machine started playing Peter Gabriel’s 1986 hit, “Sledgehammer.” Skillfully wielding her weapon, Stanton released all of her Pyxis frustrations in one fatal blow. It was a thing of beauty!
So the next question nurses have for the ANA: When is National Unplug Your Patient’s Call Light Day?!
The average nonbeliever may know even less about his tradition’s intellectual debates than the average Christian does — because its institutions, like Sunday Assembly, tend to be tiny, relatively new and allergic to anything that resembles dogma. But nonbelievers should pay attention. Atheism, like any ideological position, has political and moral consequences. As nonbelievers become a more self-conscious subculture, as they seek to elect their own to high office and refute the fear that a post-Christian America will slide into moral anarchy, they will need every idea their tradition offers them.
…
As nonbelievers tangle with traditional Christians over same-sex marriage and navigate conflicts between conservative Muslims and liberal democracy, they will need a confident humanist moral philosophy. The secular humanist liberation movement, in its zeal to win over religious America, should not encourage nonbelievers to turn away from their own intellectual heritage at the time when they will want it most.
I couldn’t agree more with that assessment. I just spent the weekend at a Sunday Assembly conference in Atlanta and one of the recurring themes of the weekend relied on the notion that we didn’t believe in God and didn’t need more convincing of that.
The question we wanted answers to was: What now?
For some people, the Sunday Assembly model — with songs and talks and community — is great. For others, that’s too church-like and it doesn’t really appeal to them. And there are also those for whom it’s not enough (yet). They want a community that motivates them and gives them a way to help others. They want a community that helps them through the toughest times in their lives. They want a community that really helps change the world with more than words.
There’s plenty of reason to create that kind of community because of our atheism: We only have this one life, God’s not going to make things better, and it genuinely feels good helping others.
How do we spread those ideas? That’s the question a lot of atheists are trying to answer now. Because if your worldview doesn’t tackle the biggest questions we’ll ever have to wrestle with — like finding meaning in life and dealing with death — why should others even bother with it? To them, religion fulfills all their spiritual needs (even if we see it as false hope and mythology). Unless we give them a worthwhile substitute, based in reality, we’re not giving them a reason to consider giving up their faith.
(Side note: Why don’t these people use the word “Humanist” to describe themselves? In part because they want to avoid labels completely. In part because most people don’t know what it means.)
“If I could just manage to feel happy again, I’d be productive. I just know it.”
That’s what my friend said to me, and he was entirely serious about this. He’d been experiencing depressive fits for months, his life decaying at an increasing rate, and he blamed all of his flagging grades and lost friendships and money troubles on a lack of happiness.
See, when he was happy, he could do anything. He would wake up empowered and DO ALL THE THINGS. And he’d be productive for a day, maybe a week, before something bummed him out again and he just couldn’t rouse himself to do all these depressing things.
The trick, my friend thought, was to somehow arrange his life for MAXIMUM HAPPINESS, so eventually he’d just be happy all the time and thus productive.
Whereas I told him the trick was to learn to keep working when you were miserable.
“Look,” said I. “Right now, you have a beautiful sailboat. And it is a glorious thing, with full sails powered by your happiness, and when the winds are blowing strong you can go anywhere.
“Unfortunately, happiness is like the wind in that it comes and goes. It’s good enough to get you around, but some days dreams will die and plans will die and people will die… and then your sails go slack. And the happiness will probably come back – it usually does – but by the time it returns, you may have starved to death on a becalmed sea, hoping like hell for the wind to come back when what you really needed was an oar.”
It’s a misnomer to say that anyone can work when they’re happy. A lot of people don’t want to do the unfun work when they’re depressed because they’re too despairing to go look for work, and when they’re happy they don’t want to bum themselves out by going back out and seeing how terrible the job market. So as it turns out, they’re actually unproductive no matter what their mood; they just have an excuse that works under any circumstances.
But even if you get ALL THE THINGS done when you’re happy, you gotta learn to work when your lover dumped you, when your dog just died, when that rejection you were dreading just came in over the transom. Because life has a nasty habit of not giving a shit about how good you feel. Life usually asks, “Well, did you pay the bills? Get a job? Go to work?” And if the answer is “No,” then life tends to say, “Well, okay, I’m just gonna make your life harder for you then.”
You can wait for happiness to fill your sails, man. But you might be waiting for a long time.
In May I noticed my 15 year old was on his digital device way too much. He had a smart phone/cell phone. So it was in his pocket all the time and I would catch him watching You Tube videos when he was supposed to be doing homework, etc. I could see things were just going downhill. That it was becoming an addiction. I had worked so hard to help my boys avoid addictions, limiting TV, video games, etc. To see him going there was upsetting.
I prayed and realized it was time to take the smart phone away. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go. We had a heart to heart with T1. We got him a dumb phone with an alphabet keyboard so he could still easily text. He agreed to give up the smart phone cold turkey, with the thought he would get it back with limits. We also took T2’s itouch away at that point, thought it would be beneficial for him too!
Cold Turkey.
4 days later T1 THANKED ME!!!!!! I am not kidding. I wasn’t sure if he was going to be angry or resentful. But he thanked me. It is now December. He has chosen not to use his handheld digital device at all. He found our OLD ipod so he could listen to music, without distraction of apps. internet, etc. He texts his friends, but never goes on the iphone. Sometimes he will borrow mine to check the weather or something. But he is grateful.
I heard him yesterday telling a friend at church who was on an iphone playing a game (at church) and said, “I used to have a smartphone, but my parents took it away because it was too distracting.” I don’t even know if the other kid heard him. But I know that T1 is GLAD, because once he disconnected from his phone, he was able to have time to do real connecting.
Moderation is key.
My 13 year old, got his itouch back after a week or so. But with the limits I described above. And he is on it definitely less than an hour a day. He has a dumbphone that he texts friends on. He is satisfied and I can see with the limitations of plugging it in when you are not using it instead of slipping it in your pocket help amazingly!
So, I hope this helps you if you are giving your children digital devices for Christmas or if they already have them. It is never too late to make changes! Protect your children!!!!!
