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Advice Unsolicited | Ignore Your Social Circle
In this current McCarthyist state we’re playing around in, when met with your self-determined opinion (as opposed to following some strident party line) your social circle will likely turn to hyperbole and scorched earth rhetoric to both shame you into falling in line or paint the podcaster you listen to as evil.
Advice Unsolicited | Offense Is Definitely a Choice
First things first. It is and has always been a choice to take offense or not.
ALWAYS.
Your aunt has chosen to not be offended by a word that has become weapon used. You have chosen to be offended. Likewise, your aunt has chosen to be offended by being lectured and you choose to be offended that she is offended by your lecturing.
Advice Unsolicited | The Cost of Virtue
There’s a story in the Bible—I’m paraphrasing it here—where a woman goes to prayer every day and prays loudly and obviously. She makes such a noise in her show of virtue and piety that another woman goes to Jesus and asks if making that much of a show is going to get the signaler’s prays answered more quickly. “She has already received her reward, so fuck no. Here's a loaf of bread and a fish. Now scram.”
Advice Unsolicited | Your Job Isn’t High School
We all love binary thinking because it's easy. She's white, you're black. She's old, you're young. She's incompetent, you're competent. She's a liar, you are honest.
I like to use a different binary in these situations. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who focus on themselves, their work, their responsibilities and those who focus on the work and responsibilities of others.
Advice Unsolicited | It’s OK to Pretend Because Everyone is a Fraud
We are currently in an epic defined by people pretending to be someone they are not.
Advice Unsolicited | STAY AWAY FROM THE HOUSE!
The movies are fiction. Most of us know and accept this. While they are fiction, many can be instructive in our own non-fiction lives…