AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUNG PROFESSIONALS!

 AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUNG PROFESSIONALS




James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.



© May 1, 2013



REFERENCE:



This is a rough draft of a piece to be included in the re-release of "The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain." The book when first published anticipated the dramatic rise of the professional in the workforce without a concomitant passion for the role demands or the recognition (and acceptance) of what that role or those demands would require. These professionals were interested in perks not performance. It was not totally their fault. They had been managed, motivated, manipulated and monitored in a way to make them passive and reactive rather than responsible and accountable. By the irony of this republication, a new generation is coming on the scene and the picture doesn't look to this observer that much different, and thus the reason for this missive to be included in the book.



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If you are nine months and twenty-one years of age, you are the newest generation. If you have just graduated from university, or about to graduate, and cannot find a job, don’t blame your parents, the government, in fact, don’t waste your time in projecting blame. You are into a new era where nobody knows what side is up.



We once thought we were a Christian nation in which everyone had freedom of religion. Now we apologize for calling Christmas, “Christmas,” and Easter, “Easter,” and saying “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Easter.”



We once thought English was our native language and now we apologize for not being able to speak or read Spanish.



We once thought marriage was between a man and a woman, and now we are ashamed to insist on this definition, as our clerics, politicians and media cave into the societal cultural demands to see marriage as otherwise.



We once abhorred premarital sex as much on pragmatic as religious grounds as it led to unwanted pregnancies, venereal diseases and disruptive sensibilities. Our bodies don’t have to be adult but our minds do to cope with life. Now, we feel self-conscious and even ashamed if we disclose we’re not active sexually before we are ready for the emotional baggage that can come with it. Instead, we hook up with relative strangers as if married couples or share our virtues with no social stigma in high school or earlier, and lead sexually active lives seeing no guilt or shame, much less consequences to sexual congress. We see it as being “adult” and sophisticated when this couldn’t be further from the case.

Once it was cool to smoke cigarettes surreptitiously justifying it because our parents did even though we might not yet be in our teens. Once, it was equally cool to have a nip of a beer, wine or whiskey left after our parent’s party before we were of age. Then it was gangbusters when we turned 18 or 21, whatever the legal age for smoking and drinking in our state.



If you are nine months and twenty-one years of age, you don’t have to look too far from where you’re sitting to see a mother or a father, uncle or aunt that has sclerosis, or cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema, coughing spells, unable to walk without a cane, or very far, or has a stint or two in their arteries to keep blood in their bodies flowing, or a double, triple, or quadruple heart bypass operations because after about nine months and twenty-one years, the time you have been alive, Nature’s revenge kicks in and levels loved ones who were simply doing what was cool.



t is not your fault that we are a pacifier nation. You didn’t ask for that pacifier when you cried and were hungry, had a little tummy ache, needed your diaper to be changed, or just felt restless. You couldn’t talk, didn’t have a language yet, but you could cry, as crying was your way to get attention to your discomfiture.



Nor was it your fault that when you were full of zest with an appetite for life and couldn’t sit still and wanted to be doing something, running, jumping, yelling, laughing, talking, shouting at your heart’s content, only to find that this was all wrong; that you were supposed to hold your spirit at bay and behave appropriately at meals, in church, at school, that when adults were talking you were to be seen but not heard, to behave like a mannequin, cute but unobtrusive.



As you reached school age, a new regiment of pacifiers was introduced to quiet your spirit. You now had language. You could process information. Only now you found school more inhibiting to your spirit then had home been. It puzzled you when so many of our spirited playmates simply kowtowed to the demands of their parents, teachers, nuns, priests and ministers. The drill was now to be polite, obedient, punctual, passive, attentive, focused, predictable, and lovable within the confines of well-documented tyrannical policies for behavior.



You had little choice but to rebel, to retrogress to that child before language was your outlet. Only now the pacifier was not the innocuous plastic sucking nipple, but a regiment of Ritalin or Adderall given even to prevent your rambunctious prepubescent spirit from kicking in.



If this were not enough, with no idea what it meant, you were labeled with Hawthorne’s “scarlet letter” in the form of being called an ADD or an ADHD child. With no say in the process, you had entered the world of psychiatric doublespeak and doublethink, where a pound of prevention is worth a ton of cure.



Small wonder by the time you are nine months and twenty-one years of age you have experimented with marijuana and other illegal recreation drugs to reach that same zombie state you remember as a child. If fact, many of these illegal recreational drugs are moving quickly in many states to legalization. Soon, it will be possible to be on a high and have your feet never touch the ground until you die. Of course, chances are you won’t be able to do anything too productive during the interim. But not to worry, psychiatry, medical science and pharmaceutical research is covering your back with apologies and placebos and the rationale that give credence to “Pacifier Nation.” These drugs will soon be labeled as mind expanders as was LSD several generations ago.



We live in an age of excess, that is, two billion souls on the planet do. The other five billion hardly have enough to keep body and soul together.



We in the West and the rising Third World East along with Brazil in South America have gravitated to addiction as the norm. This is not only in the sphere of recreational and prescription drug excess, but also in all our pursuits. We have come to burn the candle at both ends collapsing in the middle with a retinue of socially accepted maladies, including burn out, being bipolar, schizophrenia, asthma, obesity, heart disease, and having some kind of elected surgery which have come to belie what is construed as a state of normalcy. We have legitimized being sick as a socially acceptable way of retreat from the grind, or from life itself. On the other hand, should anyone initiate such a retreat, say “dropping out” while being totally healthy, chances are it would be whispered that he or she was sick in the head. This is further evidence that you at nine months and twenty-years of age are inheriting an upside down world. .



I doubt if anyone would suggest that this electronic boom we now enjoy was inevitable, but I do, admittedly, in retrospect. It took the renegade spirit of those of “Ritalin Nation” babies to ultimately rebel from that regiment and the society that sponsored it once they were of age.



We become what we think, but we also become what we hate as well. I imagine these Ritalin junkies couldn’t wait to escape the regiment of medication. They went off to college, and saw that sucked, looked around and decided what else could they do. They had always liked games, the more weird and demanding the better. So, they gravitated to crude games and toys on printed wire circuit boards, and voila! They were home!



A generation or two ago, those of Ritalin Nation were not serious students of anything but opportunists. Freud would say they weren’t looking for a career, weren’t looking to contribute to the common good. They were looking for a new pacifier that would pass muster and be conceived and perceived as something of value added, something that would allow them to retrogress to that earlier period of pacifier contentment.



And voila! Throwing caution to the wind and convention aside, they embarrassed Big Blue’s IBM and GM’s and GE’s lock on commerce, and miraculously turned toys into tools, and then tools back into toys as constant pacifier companions not unlike that plastic nipple remembered affectionately so long ago. God is no longer in the machine but in the latest electronic wonder, and as they say in sport, “You’ve not seen anything yet!”



It doesn’t stop with what we have in our ear, on our lap or in our hand, always something because we cannot stand not to be doing something, listening to something, or chatting with someone 24/7 because we cannot stand for one second to be alone. The fact that you can probably identify with this temperament shows how pervasive the condition.



My point is how can you ever relax if you are always on. We have only so much psychic as well as physical energy. Just as matter can neither be created nor destroyed but only changed in its state of existence, so also is the case with us. You cannot cheat or change Nature. In Nature everything is connected to everything else. Everything in Nature has to go somewhere. Nature knows best. There are no free lunches in Nature. Science has proven this on innumerable occasions yet people try.



Athletes take steroids to get an edge, which destroys as it builds muscle and ultimately leads to entropic damage and even on occasion to an early death. Now we have energy drinks to enhance workers’ performance but with no idea what it is doing to their bodies. With food manufacturers, the worry is not what is ethical but what is legal. This finds them producing candy coated caffeine capsules or caffeine loaded energy drinks, and advertising them as safe as drinking water.



You may ignore these references as the utterances of a cranky old man, but few would deny we are in unchartered waters with little more than our optimism and hubris in support of our fancies. The world is quickly moving away from a white American-European dominated society, which is inevitable. What is not ineluctable is to go passively forward with no sense that there is any point of going against the current, when there is, and the reason for this open letter. You of nine months and twenty-one years of age can change the course of history if you but have the will to do so.



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If you are nine months and twenty-one years of age, you may be an unwed mother, an absent father; you may be into drugs, alcohol, gambling, licentiousness or a myriad of counterproductive excesses that everyone reading this of any age knows of such hazards either personally, or within their family history or amongst their friends.





If you are using the shibboleths of codes to establish distinction from older generations, know all the celebration and integration, all the electronic Aps to networking, all the apprehension and disenchantment, actually differs little with that of your elders, as there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to fear, self-disgust, self-loathing and self-doubt, much less to isolation, disconnection and loneliness. We are a social animal but we need breathing room, too, which comes only when we have had some time with ourselves, alone, something that in the present age is in short supply.



In every age in the marketplace of ideas, despair resides, but there is no law that says you must buy into the despair because seemingly everyone else does. Existentially, self-alienation differs little from one generation to the next. It is just given different names: “the lost generation,” “the beat generation,” “the baby boomers,” the “yuppies,” “the me generation,” and so on.



At one time the greatest form of subtle torture was to strap a person to a chair to the constant dripping of water with no recourse to do anything about it but go mad. Today, there is no need to strap anyone to a chair because the constant drip through a myriad of media outlets, not to mention the personal ones as well, texting and tweeting, disenfranchises us from our normal lights. The irony is that no one notices as they are strapped voluntarily to the same kinds of electronic devices, and I haven’t even mentioned the subliminal torment that is a constant cacophonic roar to our subconscious.



Consequently, we go forward looking for answers outside ourselves when they all exist within us. We attempt to be everyone’s friend ending up being no one’s friends, because when we try to be everything to everyone we end up being nothing to anyone, including ourselves. It is a hard idea to digest but not everyone will ever love us; nor can we solve anyone’s problems but our own



Each generation looks expectantly to its elders with the demand, “Show me something new?” Well, there isn’t anything new. Despite all the technological progress of one generation to the next, people remain essentially the same only the toys change.



Each generation experiences success and failure, surprise and disappointment, pain and pleasure in the moment, and each generation differs as to how it embraces or rejects that experience. There is a dread of every generation to contemplate the future or to deny its hold on them.



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If you think this is my preamble to give you some sage advice, and how to deal with the future, you would be wrong. Instead, I have some questions I would like to ask you.



What is it you would like to do?



Why would you like to do that rather than something else?



What is the relationship of your essence to your personality?



Chances are you don’t have a clue as to the answer to the first two questions. Few of us did when we were your age. We stumbled into the future ending up doing something or other, which proved either adequate or inadequate, more a matter of attitude than aptitude.



Our problem in my generation was more a matter of the third question, which is a balance or imbalance between “who we are” (essence) and “who we think we are” (personality).



Essence is what you are born with; personality is what you acquire. Essence is your DNA, which is cumulative, not only of your parents, but also of many generations in your family tree that preceded them, and contributed to the human being you happen to be in terms of potential. Essence is your exclusivity, your uniqueness. Essence you own. Personality is what you only rent because you cannot own what you can only acquire.



You may be inclined to disregard your essence, your potential, because of what sociologist Dr. Billy G. Gunter calls “ambient deficiency motivation.” ADM finds many of us, strangely, attracted to what we are not or what is the antithesis of what we actually are. That is to say, the emphasis is placed on our personality, or what seems thrilling or importance or being with it, in a word, being esteemed. Consequently, in this rag tag bone of the heart, we may be attracted to what we are not and what we do not own and cannot rightly possess.



For example, the romanticism of being a priest may have special appeal to the profligate sinner; the idea of being an academic may fascinate when you have little interest in study or reading books; the desire to have a position of authority and be your own boss may be precluded by your incapacity for risk, responsibility or accountability, or you may aspire to be a parent to have your ego ideal manifested in another human being, but lack an interest in what parenting requires.



Essence, however, is not enough. We must also develop our personality. We start acquiring personality from birth. As a baby, we discover what works with our caregivers and what doesn’t; what results in satisfaction and what does not. The baby calibrates the benefit to pouting, tantrums, and tears, and uses them judiciously to its desired ends.



We also learn the power of guilt, shame and embarrassment in getting what we want, which is not necessarily congruent with what we need to grow and develop consistent with our essence.



It is no accident that several generations since the middle of the 20th century have been suspended in terminal adolescence as a result of learned helplessness, looking outside themselves for their security and total well being.



Our bloated and deficit economy is the best indicator of what those of nine months and twenty-one years of age are now to inherit. True, like Kafka’s Mr. K, they can claim they have done nothing wrong, but that will not augur well for them in the future.



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If I am advocating anything here, it is better balance between our essence and personality. The fact that you as a young professional are entering a celebrity culture suggests that personality has become dominant at the expense of essence. It is now more important "who you are" than "what you are." The evidence is rather apparent when you consider the many masks we are forced to wear, as we go through life to accommodate constantly changing role demands (our jobs) and self-demands (our self-regard).



Masks are so much a part of our culture and personality that the masks we wear in public differ little from the masks we wear in private. In other words, we are constantly on, constantly adjusting our masks to be consistent with how we perceive the situation. We are still calibrating like that baby we were nine months and twenty-one years ago. Seldom, if ever, do we abandon our masks for fear others will see us as we are. Indeed, we change our masks so quickly, in private as well as public, that the naked eye cannot capture the change.



Some of these masks work for us, at one stage of our lives, but not at another stage. It is beholden to us to know which masks are most effective and in which situations, and to adjust these masks accordingly. To take the stand, that “I don’t wear a mask,” or to declare wearing a mask is disingenuous is to be naïve to the extreme. You know people are talking about masks when they say about another person not present, “He’s a nice guy but just a tic off.”



If this seems confounding, take heart in knowing that the mask you wear will consistently be appropriate if you don’t let external factors dictate your internal integrity. You have your best interests always at heart when you have a sense of humor about yourself and start treating yourself as your very best friend.



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