10 Things I've Learned At Work I Didn't Learn at College

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(Also published on Medium, with slightly different words.)

I am the greenest of leaves when it comes to business expertise. Not only do I lack practical knowledge of the business machine, but I come at business from an idealistic consumer mindset. I'm fresh out of college, full of empty intelligence that I am just beginning to apply to practical ends. One of those practical ends is my job, which requires me use my writing to market products to a consumer base. It's for profit, but this doesn't scare my inner idealist. Why?

Because I have to pay my rent.

For the whole of my life up until this point, I mostly haven't had to pay for stuff. My parents gave me a ton of great stuff for free. For that reason, I could believe whatever I wanted about the good life, human nature, and morals. I have largely been an idealist. But after working in an office for just a few months, I am learning that it is hard to make money when you are an idealist. This is because you have to be a little bit evil to make money. Regardless of the reasons behind it or the process by which it occurs, you have to be willing to take people's money. And this brings me to my point:

People have to eat; therefore, businesses have to look for ways to make money.

I used to look at marketing and say, "This is just a bunch of lies that advertisers are telling me so that I give them my money, end of story." But that's only half of the picture.

The other half of the picture is that all those people trying to sell that product have lives that are full of hopes and dreams and unmet needs. The marketing that goes into selling a new product is a way of boosting profits, but those profits increase the chances that the employees who work for the company get to have a healthy dinner, send their children to good schools, and afford transportation and travel. In a way, when an ad convinces you to buy some shampoo that you don't really need, you're really giving a donation to a charity called "Carol the marketing director's children's college fund" without knowing it.

(You're also giving a donation to the CEO and the rest of the people who work there, and who knows what portion they take of the profits...)

The point is, everyone at every company has to eat (and pay bills or whatever), but instead of asking for charity directly, they are being creative, resourceful, and yes, 95% dishonest with you so that you will siphon some of your hard-earned cash to their bank accounts.

I used to call it lying, but now since I'm doing it to pay the rent I'll call it resourcefulness.

A problem arises, of course, when companies are so concerned about profits that they will sell anything to people. And, with good marketing, people will buy anything. Marketing is effective when it accesses the deep, emotional parts of people's souls. Most often, that means people's insecurities, fears, and secret wishes. To name a few:

1. Fear of death
2. Fear of rejection
3. Loneliness
4. Desire to be attractive
5. Social anxiety
6. Desire for belonging to a tribe
7. Desire for a sense of accomplishment
8. Background depression or existential boredom

When you know what drives people, and you know how to tap into those deep energy reserves while at the same time making them believe that you are acting in their best interest, you have 100% control over them.

(It's why people in close relationships often resort to emotional manipulation to get what they want; they can do that because they know their partner's insecurities and fears like the back of their hand. Is emotional manipulation just "marketing" to an audience of one?)

People in marketing, like me, don't have time to date all of their customers so that they can attach strings to their nipples and control them like marionettes. Instead, they do research: market analysis.

They do this to find their audience's nipples, so to speak, so they can start taping the electrodes. Once they have all the nipples covered with a comprehensive marketing campaign (which, I have learned, are planned for months before ever appearing to the consumer), they execute.

Or, should I say, they electrocute?

And, if everything goes according to plan, the electric current, so to speak, creates an influx of cash. The customers are happy because they believe they gain something from the product they purchase, the CEO is happy because her bottom line is fatter and juicier than it was last year, and all the marketers are happy because they get raises that year. Maybe after a few more campaigns they will have big enough salaries to send their kids to that private school...

You get the picture. Our economy works because marketers are good at increasing people's needs and creating cash flow. Here's the kicker, though: all of those marketers are consumers as well.

All marketers are also consumers.

Every person promoting an idea with clever marketing is doing so because they are hoping to meet needs given to them by other marketers. This creates an upward spiral of needs, a perpetual increase in our standard of living (another word for our "perceived needs"), and a hollow but booming economy driven by mass deception. Even the people doing the deceiving are themselves deceived.

In a way, marketers exist to dissatisfy people, and they pay their rent by making you unhappy. You could say that our economy is an unhappiness economy because, the more satisfied people are with their lives, the less likely they are to spend money to acquire some good or service. When people are happy, they feel they don't need anything. Obviously, this means they won't buy anything. That means that Carol the marketing director fails to increase sales, doesn't get a raise, and, down the road, doesn't get to send her kids to college. Poor Carol! But at least everyone else is happy...

Our economy is an unhappiness economy.

If everyone were happy in our economy, there would be no growth, no "business development," minimal sales, and a lot of impotent marketing. If everyone is happy, then it means no one is trying to steal anything from anyone. Marketing becomes purposeless because trades are honest and fair, and people are content with a simple life, where everyone eats the same spaghetti and meatballs. 

How far that is from our world!

I do not say this to criticize the United States because, to me, this is how the world works right now. This is how human beings are right now. We thrive on other people's suffering in a deep, important way that puts food on the table, pays our bills, and sends our kids to college. Our system honors the great manipulators as "successful," when they have only been the most willing to treat others as cattle and milk them for all they're worth.

But, as Nietzsche says, all great things exist to overcome themselves.

Our economy is a great machine with many parts, but if this machine sends enough people to college, eventually it will create a cultural critic strong enough to inspire a new vision of humanity. That person will show us a way out of "the way things are" right now. That person will show us an economy that suffers when its people suffer, that thrives when its people are content. It will change our concept of growth and our concept of business. And people will look back on this era as a dark age, a time when we didn't know any better, a time when we animals reveled in cruelty.

Or, maybe I'm just another idealist.

The Reasoning Behind My Last 5 Posts

I would be lying to you if I said that there was a reason behind everything that I do. I believe I'm not unlike most animals on this planet: driven by unconscious impulse (no matter how reflective I might seem).

I won't get into consciousness here.

But for a good number of the things that I do, there's some underlying thought. And, however small the ratio of thoughtful to thoughtless may be, all of the past 5 blog posts managed to nestle themselves into it. Here's how they did it.

A Letter From the Universe to You

I wrote this letter on my phone while riding the 501 bus from the Financial District in Boston to my home. When I wrote it, I was missing the caffeine high that I had felt during the large part of the previous two days. In all honesty, I wanted to write something that would help me to get back into that bigger, calmer mindset that I tend to take on when I'm feeling on top of the world. If I could take myself to that calm at will, I thought, I would have achieved something highly valuable, maybe a habit I could practice for life.

Often, when I'm feeling sad or hopeless—which is not rare—I will do some positive self-talk. When I do this, I usually talk to myself in the voice of a loving mother or girlfriend (let's not get into how Freudian that is), and I start to tell myself any of the following things:

• It's OK to feel sad.
• I'm here for you.
• I think you did a great job.
• I'm proud of you.
• Just take a big, deep breath.
• I love you.

And that last one, for me, in my most depressed moments, is extremely helpful.

This letter, for me, was a form of positive self-talk. In my journey away from Christianity and through many forms of nihilism, positive self-talk has replaced God and prayer as a means to emotional calm and spiritual centering. Coupled with my belief that (1) there really is only one thing in the universe, and (2) we (who appear to be many different things and people), are all one thing—this letter was my way of talking myself out of a bad mood and reminding myself that there really is nothing to be afraid of in life.

Let me know if you found it helpful—or weird.

Memories from Childhood

I started writing this post just to write something. That might be obvious from the post's lack of structure, but I will admit that this post was just a straight shot from start to finish without any planning or editing.

That said, it developed an intention about halfway through: to tell stories from my childhood, and to reinforce a belief that the stories of my life (even the little ones about watermelon slush) are things that are worth telling. Whether that's true doesn't really matter to me, because the fact that a story is told means that it was worth telling on some level. And if it was worth telling for one person, that's good enough.

The only person who can decide whether your life was a story worth telling is you.

Love your story, embellish the hell out of it, and tell it like the epic it is.

I Can't Watch TV

After writing this post, I realized that it's not really true. That happens from time to time.

(Is anything I say on here true?)

What I don't watch on TV per se I watch in the form of YouTube videos, and the "precious time" I'm saving by avoiding the screen I'm spending (wisely or foolishly, I'm not sure) swiping on Tinder and scrolling through my Facebook feed.

There, that's my #confession for the day.

When I was writing this post, I think I was trying to preserve some sense of being a special snowflake or a reason why I'm different from everyone else my age. We all like to feel special, and I think my snowflake brain wrote this one. Since high school, I've given the snowflakey part of my brain a lot of say in what I say and do. (Whether that's healthy is something I'll figure out along the way, for sure.)

What you can't hear right now is the special snowflake in me squealing in discomfort. It has this small, squeaky voice like the mice from Babe, and it's desperately trying to take itself seriously right now.

It's really great. Wish you could be here to witness it.

Everything Happened Right

I used to feel this kind of ecstasy while worshiping the good lord Jesus Christ. For reasons that may or may not be obvious, I've stopped that sort of thing. However, the feeling of magnificent elation still comes and goes without calling itself the Holy Spirit. Now I feel it when I think of how all the tiny, tiny details of my life fit together in the present moment, and how, despite the moments of hopelessness and despair that have really dragged me down, I found a light at the end of the tunnel.

It's a far cry from Christian doctrine, but I can't help but wonder what Jesus meant when he said that he was the way, the truth, and the life. Which word was emphasized in that sentence?

Maybe it was the "I."

What if, for each of us, the conscious subjective experience—the "I"—is the way, the truth, and the life? What if the answers to all the questions we ever ask ourselves are inside us?

The point behind this post was to explain, in part, the feeling of relief that I feel after going through a long period of questioning and despair. It's to explain the peace that I've found knowing that the meaning of my life is my own creation and mine alone. It's to explain the relief of being free from the old constraints on the meaning of my life—the religiosity and the strict way of thinking of morality.

My Ass Glowing in Spandex, Plus Death

Being content to die is a virtue in my life. Not because life is bad or a burden or anything, but because death is one of the only two known points in our lives. The other point is right here, right now.

My thinking is, if you know where you are and you know where you're going, you can figure out the best route to travel. That route is your life philosophy. That's how simple philosophy is.

For me, I know where I'm going. I'm going to die. Some people are going to heaven to spend eternity with the good lord Jesus Christ, some people are going to the club later this Friday, some people are going to class in about an hour, but for me, it's clear that I'm going to die. (Actually, it's not 100% clear, but it's probably going to happen.) Because I know where I'm going, or I think I do, I can make informed decisions about how to spend my time while I'm alive.

When I wrote this post, I was celebrating one of those times when I felt like I was on the right path, and that, if I died in that moment, I would have felt like my life was complete. Whether other people would agree with that is beside the point.

To quote Roberta Sparrow,

Every living thing dies alone.

If you're going to die happy, you have to be happy being alone. And as I lay on the mat in my yoga class, sweaty and exhausted, I felt pretty happy.

This post

I really wanted to give a solid caption to that picture.

Thanks for taking time out of your day to breathe with me today.

Everything Happened Right

I look back on my 23 little years of existence on this planet, and I am utterly awestruck. Putting all the uncertainties and daily stresses aside, and all the hurt that comes and goes, and the unanswerable questions that I could wrestle with for the rest of my life...there's this core of light that remains. That core is the tiny tiny lightbulb of my awareness that for 23 years has told an evolving, changing story.

And it has been an amazing story.

I grew up in the Christian Church and loved Jesus from age 13 to age 20. During that time I lived the life of a teenage boy, complete with its hormonal ups and downs, social trial by fire, and all of its anxieties and depressions. I ran Cross Country, was a leader for my class, made friends, lost friends, and then, after what seemed like a lifetime, graduated, went to college, and entered the next unknown.

In college I stopped loving Jesus. Jesus became an obstacle between me and my true self, so I pushed him out of the way, made my way to the edge of the cliff of despair (High Horse Cliff), and jumped, hoping I would land somewhere on the soft, grassy knoll between Daoism, Humanism, and Nihilism---a space I, for lack of a better name, like to call Davidism.

(Read more about Davidism here.)

(Or here.)

(Or.... here.)

While I was falling from High Horse Cliff I saw all sorts of spirits. Some were terrible and told me that life was meaningless and that there was no point in going on. Some chastised me and told me I was bad and evil for pushing Jesus away, and they taunted me from a high cliff face to which I could never ascend. Some were kind, though, and said nothing. They held me in warm, soft hands and pulled me close, cooling the chill of the wind with the fire of their breath. When I did eventually land, I kissed each of these kind spirits goodbye, and I knelt down and pressed my hands into the dirt, warmed by the sun.

This is home, I said.

I've fallen in love with the air here. The earth is firm and forgiving and goes down and down onto an endless bedrock, and water gushes from the openings in its mantle. Cool streams flow into placid lakes, and I wander their edges and hold hands with the sun while it dances across the sky. From time to time the sounds of music touch my ears, and I'm reminded of the spirits who loved me while I floated down from "Heaven." Always I will remember how they breathed their love on me, and one day I will become a spirit, too, and breathe my love on someone as she falls from grace.