I’ve realized something recently about the culture I’m in. It may or may not be the same as the culture I come from – this is one of the pitfalls of transitioning at one of the natural life transitions: you don’t always know what’s due to the place, and what’s due to the stage of your life, and what’s simply due to personality.

I’ve observed this method of communication hereabouts that relies heavily on getting others to talk about you, rather than stating your own case, in many situations. One that jumps to mind is if someone’s good at something. Let’s say Jo is good at writing. If Jo says she’s good at writing, it will rub most people the wrong way, at least around here. They’ll think she’s boasting, full of herself, needs to be taken down a peg, etc. But if Bob says Jo is good at writing, it’s fine. It’s even better if Jo’s not there.

Another example is with health issues. Jean may have a serious health issue, let’s say. She’ll tell her closest friends the nitty gritty of it, but she’ll gloss over all that with her acquaintances – “It’s no big deal” or “Mustn’t grumble”, etc. Her closest friends will be relied upon to fill in the gaps for the others, to tell them how horrible what she’s going through is, so that she can be admired for going through it so bravely and never complaining.

And so on. This is a pattern I see a great deal of, with different subjects, with different people.

Given that, I’ve just realized that a speaker needs to put flashing red lights around anything they want to not be spread around. “Don’t tell anyone this, you understand?”, etc. That is so weird to me. I’m so used to simply keeping confidences without thinking about it – and treating nearly everything told to me as a confidence – and expecting nearly everything I tell others to be kept confidential. I’m so used to just talking plainly, about my own things and asking about others’ things. This roundabout, painfully circuitous talk is hard. Not least because it all seems so utterly pointless.

It has become quite trendy in recent years to donate to charity as a Christmas gift: you give the would-be recipient a card or something telling them you’ve bought half a donkey in Ethiopia, or some such. (They never tell us whether it’s the right half or the left half … the top half or the bottom half … ). Now, it’s even become trendy to announce that you’re donating to charity instead of sending Christmas cards.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, undoubtedly making myself unpopular, by saying I really don’t like these trends at all. Why on earth not? Let’s take them one at a time.

By Steven Depolo. CC 2.0

“I donated to this charity instead of giving you a gift!”

“Oh, um, er, that’s good, I suppose. What’s the charity do?”

“Distributes half-donkeys in Ethiopia so that families can become self-sufficient.”

“Oh, okay. That’s nice. Um, thank you.”

What’s wrong with this picture? Lots. Perhaps the recipient’s never heard of this charity, doesn’t necessarily care about this cause, doesn’t necessarily believe that the charity does a good job at what it says it’s doing, doesn’t necessarily believe that the charity’s stated goal (distributing half-donkeys) will achieve its stated aim (making families self-sufficient), and possibly other problems.

Perhaps the recipient has a charity they really believe in, that they wish you’d have donated to instead – maybe one that distributes half-pigs to families in Kenya. That may sound like much the same thing to you, and even be about the same price point, but for all you know, the recipient knows that the Kenya one turns 90% of donations into half-pigs, versus the Ethiopia one turning 50% of donations into half-donkeys. Or perhaps the Kenya one is one the recipient actually saw in action on a visit to Africa, and was moved by. Or perhaps they’d rather if you donated to the animal shelter they volunteer at once a week. Or maybe their relative has a really rare condition, and they’d like to raise money for research into that disease.

Yet you’ve put them on the spot – they’re supposed to act thrilled that you’ve donated to this charity that you’ve chosen and you believe in – and generally, we’re socialized to feel that we should act even more thrilled about this misplaced charity donation than we should about a badly chosen ordinary gift (the horrible sweater, the book you’ll never read), because after all, it’s for a good cause! If you’re not happy about helping other people – especially at Christmas – then you’re a horrible person!

But if it’s supposed to be a gift for somebody, it needs to mean something to them. What charities do they want to support? Find out.

1940s Christmas card, by 1950sUnlimited. CC 2.0

And part number 2: “We’re not sending any Christmas cards this year – instead we’re making a donation to charity for the amount we’re saving!”

First of all, this just smacks so much of hipsterism: it strikes me that lots of people don’t see a point in Christmas cards and don’t want to do them, so they spout this line instead so they don’t have to send cards and don’t have to feel guilty, either.

I think I’ll always be biased against this one in this way because one of the first places I ran into it was in my WI, where we would just hand the cards to each other. Postage adds up, sure, but if you take that out of the equation: I just bought a pack of 20 cards last week for £1.00, and there were less than 40 members when this line started being bandied about.

But mostly, if you want to make a donation, just make a donation. Don’t make a grand song and dance about it.

In our local paper recently, there was a story about a bride and groom who got married after courting for 13 years and living together for 3, so they already have 2 of everything. They asked for donations to charity in lieu of wedding presents, and their guests happily obliged: £605 was raised, enough for the local charity they chose to buy a wheelchair for a girl who needs one. The couple’s delighted that they were able to help this charity that means so much to them, that means so much to a friend of the bride. The guests, I’m sure, will likewise be thrilled that they were able to contribute to something quite tangible and meaningful for the recipients.

That story struck me as how to do gift giving for charity right.

Who knows what she’ll go on to accomplish now?
Image by Tom Thai. CC 2.0.

When I was a small child, I trusted adults and authority figures greatly. I think most small children do. I was usually teacher’s pet; I vividly remember this being true in my second kindergarten (we moved part of the way through) and in third grade. I helped them with things without giving any thought to why or whether those things were important – like randomly checking to see if desks were kept neat and tidy. Today, I reckon it doesn’t matter if someone’s desk is tidy or not; everyone has their own system.

So what changed my attitude? Mrs. Curly, in fourth grade. I lived in Hawaii for kindergarten through third grade (ages 6-9), complete with lessons in the Hawaiian language. (I can just about remember how to count to four in Hawaiian.) Then we moved 4,500 miles to Michigan for my fourth grade year. We arrived in time for the worst blizzard they’d had in 30 years; that was fun. Mrs. Curly, who had very curly hair, was my teacher. We got to the part in the textbook where it told us about the Hawaiian island of Kauai. We must’ve been reading aloud, I suppose. The text book told us to pronounce it “kow-eee”, which is completely wrong. In Michigan, Hawaii is a faraway, almost mythical land, so they’d never know the error, except here they had someone on hand who did know better. I raised my hand and told Mrs. Curly that no, the book has it wrong, it’s actually “ka-why-ee” (with a very brief pause between the second and third syllable, which is why modern spellings put an apostrophe in the word that wasn’t in my textbook). She decided that no, we’d use the book’s pronunciation. Little did she know what a watershed that moment would be in my life.

In that instant, I learned that authority figures can be wrong. I learned that you should never believe anything just because “the teacher says so” or “the book says so.” I’ve carried that with me my whole life. I’ve questioned, I’ve wondered, I’ve pondered, I’ve challenged, I’ve looked for evidence, I’ve disproven, and I’ve proven. As I’ve grown, this has expanded to other authority figures, friends, “common knowledge”, received wisdom, and so on.

I’m inspired to share this after running across this quote recently (thanks, Dr Mabry), from John F Kennedy’s 1962 commencement address to Yale University:

As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.

The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. [source]

Overall, this questioning attitude has stood me in good stead. I did well through most of academic life in large part because I asked questions and sought to understand how things really worked, rather than just learn by rote. I ran into one or two more teachers like Mrs. Curly who weren’t confident enough to deal with me querying things, and shut me down instead – but only for their classes. In my early working life, I was blessed to mostly have managers who were open minded when I asked why a process was run this way instead of that more efficient way.

In ordinary life, it means that when I moved to the UK and discovered the water isn’t fluoridated, I researched fluoridating water and learned that they’re not really sure it helps anyway (and it may in fact harm, but they’re really not sure), so then I wasn’t bothered.

By Alias 0591. CC 2.0

When I wondered about the idea – treated as gospel in the US – that we should all drink eight 8-oz glasses of water a day, I researched it and discovered that, back in the 1980s, the bottled water industry took something from a 1945 paper. Recommended dietary allowances by the Food and Nutrition Board of the US National Academy of Sciences (No 122, pages 3-18) “recommended daily water intake of 2.5 Liters. These guidelines were based on opinion, not scientific evidence, and suggested the majority of the 2.5 Liters/day of water intake be derived from prepared foods. This portion of the 1945 recommendation has been largely ignored.” [source; Snopes] Did you know that roasted chicken breast (meat only) is 65% water? [source] Yep, you’re getting water from your food all the time. The bottled water industry conveniently left that part out of its advertising campaign. Don’t drink eight glasses of water a day; just drink when you’re thirsty.

Very rarely, I have to turn down that part of my brain to get through a specific ordeal, but generally the questioning lets me get to where I can understand the motivations behind what’s going on, even when those answers are entirely unsatisfactory (the answer might be “because he’s only concerned with how anything impacts on him personally” or “for the money,” for example). I can cope far better once I can understanding why people do the things they do.

Always question. Always ask.

Even if only inside your head, always challenge the received wisdom until you figure out what’s really going on.

One of the RSS feeds I subscribe to is from Snopes, the fact-verifying website we all turn to (or should) when we hear some outlandish tale. Recently, one came across entitled Pitfalls of Sending Cash as a Christmas Gift. In relevant part:

Now, let me tell you something which happened to a friend of a friend last Christmas. Her friend is a busy advertising executive and ran out of time to buy presents for family and close friends. So instead she decided to enclose some rather generous cheques with her Christmas cards, scribbling the message: “Have a lovely Christmas but, if you don’t mind, buy your own present this year!”

A little impersonal, but actually fairly practical, she thought. Except that a week or so into January, having not received the customary thank-yous from her relatives and friends, she found all the cheques in a drawer. In the rush, she had neglected to enclose them.

Snopes concludes this is a legend, and gives us an analysis of the general themes. I found the analysis of gift-giving in our society really interesting; this is something I’m struggling with philosophically these days – but more on that another time, maybe. I found the analysis of the gender issues staying with me, though, and that’s what I want to talk about (at least to start) in this entry.

The story contains an element of punishment for women leaving traditional duties behind in favor of competing in the business world. Working outside the home may cause them to have less time for family and friends, thus legends like this serve to warn women against taking up such lives by pointing out what could be lost or compromised.

This stayed with me because it doesn’t ring true. I currently am a homemaker, doing those traditional duties, and yet I experience endless confusion and quite a lot of outright hostility about my choice in this matter from nearly all who learn of it (friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers alike). Women can’t win by being homemakers, and women can’t win by succeeding in paid employment, either. We are, of course, supposed to do it all – a demand that leads to no end of mental health issues.

As this percolated in my head, I stepped back to take a larger view of things, as is my wont. Men, of course, have their own impossible-to-meet pressures from society. Indeed, any group you care to name runs into the same problem of not being able to win, such is the stupidity of the pressures. If we don’t measure up to all these conflicting demands, we risk rejection; this is a problem in a species bred for tribalism. The larger part of the problem, I think, is that we tend to internalize these societal pressures and carry them with us – so we have a very large population of folks constantly feeling like they don’t measure up, like they aren’t succeeding at life. This is no good.

Image from Blisstree.

I wondered why we have this state of affairs. The first lot that sprung to mind were those who benefit from it: the entire apparatus of capitalism. If you already have a population of individuals convinced that they’re not good enough, half the work of selling them the solution to their woes is done. I still think this plays a large part in this problem.

However, something else occurred to me: I think our circles are so numerous that we find ourselves trying to simultaneously be all things to all people. This isn’t aided by the current social media explosion, of course: when in person, you’ll talk one way to your mates and another way to your parents; it’s only natural. When they’re all your facebook friends, you have to somehow talk to all of them at the same time; this is tricky.

Then I came across a piece in the business pages of the local paper, of all places, that made me ponder this some more. (It’s written by David and Duncan Wright of BSA Marketing.) On the surface, it has nothing to do with any of this, but since when did I ever settle for surface thoughts?

In a column about online marketing, Step 1 is to Turn Off Your Computer. The idea is to realize that the various places on t’internet only provide the channels of communication with your target audience – the how. You need to stop before diving in to consider what you want to say, who you want to say it to, etc. I especially like this line:

By leaping straight for the web browser before answering these questions, there is a real danger that you will just … be sold the next magic wand, unlikely to deliver any sustained marketing benefits.

I was blessed to be taught marketing by Dr Wolfgang Hinck, who I see has moved up to Dean of the School of Business at Berkeley College in New York & New Jersey. Congrats, Dr Hinck! He’s an exceptionally good teacher, and one whose classes I thoroughly enjoyed. One of the things he drummed into our heads was:

Marketing is Everything & Everything is Marketing

I saw the truth of it then, and I see it more with each passing year.

Image from here.

So I read this article about online marketing and immediately clicked it together with this other stuff I’ve been thinking about – and I realized how true that is for all of life. How often we leap into the speaking without the thinking! In this particular case, how common it is that we’re trying to be all things to all people all the time, instead of making decisions about ourselves first and then finding the right people to gather round us.

How much easier would it be if we first decide things like:

• Who do I want to be?
• What qualities and skills do I want to develop in myself?
• What qualities and skills would I rather leave behind?

Once answered, we could dismiss societal pressures to be somebody else simply based on the fact that we aren’t that person – being that person isn’t right for us at this time. Easier said than done, I know, but it’s a start. Moreover, we can then gather the right people to us who help us further these goals we’ve set and who don’t criticize the decisions we’ve made.

We must, of course, be open to amending these ideas from time to time. A person should have many different answers to “What’s right for me now?” over the course of their lifetime. We must also be ready for our nearest and dearest to likewise go through these changes!

So, who do you want to be?