Blinded by Success

I know I haven’t been posting a lot here for a while now. Fact is, my book reviews and my thoughts about writing and storytelling go on my Writer’s Blog. Social stuff which heavily involves or revolves around women and women’s rights goes on Feminism Wow. There’s little left for this blog, my first on. Although, perhaps I’ll start doing game reviews here again. Subnautica and Sims 4 come to mind, as does Stardew Valley (a game I have sunk more hours into than I should admit). But the topic I want to tackle right now doesn’t fit with either of my other blogs, so it goes here.

I got into an argument with a guy of FB today which showed me again that people sometimes get completely blinded by their own success - or what they perceive as their own success. Now, this is not about the topic we argued about so much - the question of why minimum wage is not a living wage in most places, although it should be -, but about the way his personal success blinded him to what other people can and can’t achieve.

You most often hear people like that guy chiming in on two topics: success at work and success at weight loss. Those people have either managed to work their way up the career ladder from humble beginnings to somewhere in management or they have lost a lot of weight in a short time. The problem with them is not the success as a such, success is recommendable, especially when self-achieved. But here’s already where things can go awry.

Let’s have a look at the definition of ‘success.’ A promotion at work surely is to be counted as a success, it’s something to strive for and something to be proud of when it happens. Same goes for losing weight and becoming more healthy and fit. But how much of the success is really self-achieved?

Surely, if they lose weight through dieting and working out, it’s their success. And, yes, in the weight-loss category, success usually is self-achieved (unless they got a liposuction, of course). However, there are quite some factors they can’t influence which can help or hinder their success. Such as certain diseases which will either make it easier or harder to lose weight. Such as the fact that some bodies lose weight easier than others on the whole. Such as having the money for a personal coach and someone to make diet food for you. Such as having gained the weight in a short time (which often makes it easier to lose it again as well). Don’t misunderstand me - even in the most unfortunate cases, it’s still possible to lose weight permanently, but it might be a lot harder than in others.

And as far as business is concerned, there’s a lot of things outside of the successful person’s control which play into the success. First of all, all qualification and hard work won’t do them any good if there’s no free position. Or if their boss has a favourite subordinate which they are not. In such cases, they might still be looking for a new job for a long time, since most companies first try to fill positions higher up the ladder with their own people and reach out to the job market only after having exhausted their own resources. Entry-level jobs are easy to find, those higher up require more luck. A lot more luck in some cases. Vitamin B helps, of course (or is that Vitamin R in English?). Knowing the right people can tremendously expand their chances for a better position, inside and outside the company where they’re working at the moment.

In those cases listed above, success might have been easier than the person thought it was, simply because factors outside of their control were in their favour.

The problem, however, is not that those people were successful. The problem is that their personal success (or what they perceive as their personal success) has blinded them to the problems of others.

That guy I mentioned above simply continuously stated that because he’d been successful, everyone else could be, too (a staple of people with that problem). If people didn’t have his work ethics or weren’t prepared to work as hard as he had, they, essentially, deserved not having a living wage. That is a general opinion of those blinded by success. They were successful and everyone who doesn’t want to do as well as they did deserves their fate. When I asked him what would happen if everyone were as hard-working as he was and had his work ethics, if everyone qualified for better jobs and got their promotion, he didn’t answer my question. Because my point was that society actually relies a lot on there being people to do minimum wage jobs. Our society wouldn’t continue for a long time without waiters, cleaners, and many other minimum-wage workers. His point only was ‘I was successful and they’re just lazy and that’s why they’re not.’ And while that might be a possible interpretation, it’s far from being the only or the most realistic one.

The same kind of discussion can also happen if you talk to someone who lost a lot of weight quickly (and, perhaps, even made a career out of it). They are blinded by the success they had and don’t understand that not everyone will have the same success with the same method. Some people can lose weight the same way, others have a body chemistry which makes this an impossible or near impossible way to lose weight. Some people can’t dedicate that much time to their weight loss (which might mean not having as much workout in their day or sometimes eating less-than-ideal meals). Some people have other things interfering (like family life).

And in some cases (less with the weight-loss and more with the career), people might not even want a success. They might know they will never qualify for something better (because, for instance, they have a learning disability). They might like the overall work (because, for instance, they like physical work much more than mental work). They might simply have a life outside of work which demands the resources (mostly time and money) which ‘successful in business’ has invested in their success. They might be caring for a sick or simply elderly relative, they might have a big family, they might be following a project outside of work (like remodelling a house or creating art) which takes their time and money. There’s many reasons why not everyone can work their way up in business. And, again, would it be good if they did? If everyone was over-qualified for the low-level jobs? The jobs on minimum wage?

Women are often ‘accused’ of not putting as much time and energy into advancing at work. Of being more comfortable with the job they’re doing, even though they could do better. A lot of the time this is down to women having another focus outside of work. A focus on society, family, other projects. At the same time, it’s seen as more normal if a woman doesn’t do her best to advance at work than if a man doesn’t. Men are supposed to be focused on success, on getting on, on advancing through the ranks. So to a man who has done his ‘duty’ of succeeding, men who don’t may seem even more lazy than women who don’t. The whole ‘if you weren’t so lazy, you wouldn’t have to do this job’ discussion is getting us nowhere.

Neither is the ‘if I succeeded, you can as well’ attitude of some people. It’s an attitude which assumes everyone is living the same life (and, hence, has the chance to distribute free time and money the same way), has the same life goals, and has the same chance of success. Neither of these three things is true.

Even two people who seem to have the same life (same marriage status, same income, same area they live in, same job), most of the time don’t really have that same life. One of them might have to pay off an old debt (car, house, student loan, etc.). One of them might have a relative in the same job who they’re on good terms with. One of them might have another passion than work which they need time and, perhaps, money for. One of them might get on better with their immediate superior. They do not really have the same life. The one in debt doesn’t have as much disposable income as the other one. The one with the relative in the same line of work doesn’t have to invest as much money in a new qualification, because he gets the training ‘for free’ (or, perhaps, a few lunches and beers). The one with the other passion isn’t as driven in business matters and will spent less time and money on a qualification and do less overtime. The one who gets on better with the superior will be more likely to be chosen for promotion if there’s several candidates.

And even if they’re similar in the question of spare time and money, they might have different goals in life. Not everyone is totally focused on their career. And even if they initially are, life has a way of changing things. One might suddenly find themselves in a situation in which they need to put their personal life above the career. Or they might realize they don’t want to spend the rests of their life in that job. There’s a lot of things which can change a life goal. Epiphanies are more common than people often realize. So they ‘slack off’ in the eyes of the one blinded by success and are no longer worthy of that person’s support.

Finally, not everyone is born with the same chance to succeed. If you’re born into middle-class, you have more chances to succeed than someone born into the lower class (it goes without saying that the rich and wealthy have it easy to succeed, not to mention some of them don’t even have to succeed something else than their parents). If you can afford college after school (and go to a good school in a good area), your chances are much higher than those of someone who does evening courses to get their college degree. If you manage to get into a certain line of work to begin with, you have much more of a chance to promotion. Some jobs simply don’t have a big career ladder.

If you’ve been successful in your line of work or consider yourself very successful in another aspect of your life, please try to keep in mind that life isn’t ‘one fits all’ and you shouldn’t stop caring about your fellow humans just because they seem to ‘slack off,’ unlike you.

Easier than getting a law passed

Okay, I had decided after my burnout that I didn’t want to get annoyed about things again that easily, but after quite some recent stuff about people denying services of various kinds to others based on their race/gender/sexual orientation, I have something to say about the topic myself.

If you have a problem with serving a person in your job because said person is, according to your eyes or to that personal belief system of yours, the wrong race/gender/sexual orientation or whatever, there is a much easier solution than passing laws: Don’t work in a service job. Yes, it is that easy.

If you take a job in service, no matter whether as a cashier, a pharmacist, a doctor (technically, doctors and nurses also work in service, since they provide health service), a pizza baker, or something else, you will have to be ready to serve everyone - as long as they are ready to uphold their part of the deal and hand you money for it. It doesn’t matter what your religious book or your preacher or your conscience has to say about it. If your conscience tells you to absolutely not do it again, then get another job, one where you don’t have to do that again.

And if you consider yourself a Christian, you might want to read all of your holy book one of these days, not just the part that justifies your prejudices. It’s going to take a while, especially if you read all of it, Old and New Testament. You might be shocked by the content especially of the New Testament. You see, this guy called Jesus whom you believe in, he had a strange way of seeing things. In essence, he only wanted people to do one thing: be nice to others. He sided with the poorest, with the outcasts of society. And he said there was only one rule to follow: love others like you love yourself (or, in some cases of extreme self-loathing, perhaps a little more than yourself).

The same, by the way, goes for the religious organisations operating public places over here in Germany, like kindergartens, schools, or hospitals. Stop looking down on people who you think have done the wrong thing. Stop choosing your employees merely by their religious belief and their marital status (nobody who got divorced and remarried is allowed to work in a Roman-Catholic kindergarten, school, or hospital). You want to serve society? You want to actually get people to listen to what you say? You want your slice of the cake? Then act like a responsible part of society and accept its reality. Divorce is reality, religious freedom is reality. Deal with it!

You don’t need to make laws to allow people to discriminate against others based on their personal belief. What you need, is to make laws to forbid people to discriminate against others for whatever reason (religious belief, race, gender, sexual orientation, whatever).

Not so Creative Design

I live in a country in which the government gathers the taxes for the church. I also live in a country in which at least two major parties (well, on the highest level they’re one party) keep the word “Christian” in their name. And yet, it is a country in which Creative Design is – rightfully – banned from school.

Now, to whoever is reading it: you might actually believe in Creative Design and thus say that Darwin got it all wrong.

The main problem with evolution – at least to some of the more fundamentalist Christian groups – is that it doesn’t require a deity of any kind to work. That’s right, Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest, and all that comes with it, works without any kind of god.

And Creative Design is such a good argument of ‘how God does His work’. Because everything in this world fits together so nicely, there must be some kind of intelligence involved in it. Someone (guess who) must have designed everything.

European Christians have found a way around the religious problem of evolution, by claiming that the ways in which evolution works, the natural laws, are God’s design. That would mean God is far more curious than we give Him credit for. He basically pushed the first domino and is now watching what has become of the chain reaction. I hope He enjoys it.

There is a wonder in evolution, too. The wonder is how life came to be. We know that no other planet in our solar system – no, not even Mars – is inhabited. As far as we can say, we are a statistical error in this universe. Life isn’t something a lot of planets have developed. Yet, somehow, here on Earth, while our atmosphere developed and the molten structures turned to stone, some random molecules came together and became the first living cell.

By all rights, this cell should have died. It was merely a little thing in a huge, dangerous and still poisonous world. But life proved strong and determined. The cell split, split again and started a process of change and development which – after a very long time – developed into me and you and every person you know and every other person on this planet and all the animals and all the plants and the bacteria and everything else that I might have forgotten to mention here.

Is this anything less of a wonder than a God creating every single species from scratch?

In Germany, Creative Design is not taught in school (unlike religion). You either get the religious part or the science part, but not both in one go. And as Creative Design is not plausible from a scientific angle, it is not considered science.

Science today knows how species evolved. Quite some ‘in-betweens’ have been found. And, as much as some people hate to hear it, humans are just a species of animals as well. We’re clever, yes, but our big brains and intelligence only serve to help us stay alive. We don’t have all that many natural weapons.

The idea ‘everything was put together by an intelligent force’ is nice, but where’s the prove? Don’t say Paley’s Watch, okay? If you find a watch while wandering around in the wildness, you know it has not grown there. You know it’s not a natural structure, but a construct. It is not alive. If you put two watches in a drawer, they will not produce any offspring. And watches don’t die, even though they may become dysfunctional. But you can repair a watch and, in theory, make it run forever. You can’t ‘repair’ a dead dog or a dead human and make them live forever.

Evolution is a difficult process which humans still not understand completely. But it is far from simple ‘accident’. Things develop into a new form over time, provided the first time this form appears, it proves useful. The necks of giraffes became longer over time, because it was an advantage. They could feed from places other animals could not reach. Flying developed various times throughout earth history, because it’s a great way to travel far over long distances, not matter whether you are an insect, a dinosaur, a bird or a bat. Whales and dolphins returned to the sea, because it proved useful for them. And they slowly ‘lost’ their legs, because they didn’t need them in the water. Fins were far more practical there. Yet the process of evolution is far too slow for humans to see. It takes generations upon generations to turn one animal into another. We can only see the developments that have taken part in the past. We can’t see those that are occurring at the moment.

Evolution is not destroying the wonder of life, it merely gives another explanation for the fact that we’re walking around on our hind legs and using our big brain to change the environment instead of changing with it. Creative Design is not the only solution to combine natural science with religion!

Prejudices

Usually they’re making my blood boil: Prejudices. But I have given some thought to the question why some of them stick around for so long. This is what I found out.

There actually is a use to prejudices of any kind. To a certain degree we all operate on them, using experiences to judge new situations. That’s a prejudice, because we’re judging a situation not based on the situation itself, but based on other situations we perceive as being similar.

Human life doesn’t work without prejudices, it seems. We need to rely on things being just like other things in order to get on with our lives. The world is just too difficult and complex to be faced without the aid and protection a prejudice can give.

I usually try to avoid acting on them, especially if it’s the kind of prejudice that’s solely based on somebody’s look. As I’m overweight, I know how it is to be merely judge by the shape of your body (or the colour of your hair or any other obvious physical attribute). I try not to do that when I’m face with people I’ve never met before. Some days I don’t manage it, sometimes I judge someone by his or her looks. But every time I do it - and realize it - I try to do better next time.

On the other hand, I’m sometimes a bit over-carful when it comes to prejudices people could have about me. For instance, I still have a problem with eating in public (like picking up a snack on the street while travelling). I always get the feeling that people think “typical, fat already and always eating”, even though the sandwich I just bought might very well be the first thing I’m eating since breakfast seven or eight hours ago. Maybe that’s just in my mind - I’m not a mind-reader, after all -, but it makes long trips a bit more difficult than they would be otherwise.

I try not to stand out in a crowd too much, either, but keep somewhere in the background (which has led to one of my colleagues remarking that webmasters normally look a bit more freaky than me - although those I’ve met during the seminars surely didn’t look much different than I do). I could, theoretically, dye my hair green (or red or blue), put on a pound of make-up and wear tight clothes - but I would feel dreadful then. I don’t like using much make-up and I don’t like figure-hugging clothes (more than enough figure to hug on me, anyway). I could live with green hair, though, but I’m not spending 100 Euros merely to look freaky. On the whole, I like to watch, not to be watched.

And my colleagues idea about how webmasters should look is a prejudice, too. My personal guess is that his acquaintances probably work in companies where people look freaky (like fashion companies, advertisement companies and so on) and do not look freaky because they’re webmasters, but because they work in a surrounding in which ‘looking freaky’ is the norm. (In that case, looking normal would be freaky, sort of.) Or maybe they just like looking freaky. After all, my colleague is 21 and I guess most of his acquaintances are the same age. At 21 I didn’t look that invisible and normal, either. (Though I didn’t have green hair then, that was only fashionable for punks when I was 21 and I wasn’t one.)

There’s loads of prejudices around. There’s loads of ways to judge someone without knowing that person. Where the person comes from and how the person looks are the most common ways. We perceive someone as less intelligent just because he or she is from a certain country. We think someone is easily fooled just because he or she has a certain hair colour. That’s a trap, most of the time, but it works out every now and then. Sometimes someone from a certain country is a bit slow (there’s stupid people around everywhere). Sometimes a blonde girl is naïve enough to be easily fooled.

Every time it doesn’t work out, we forget about it. But when it works out, we remember. That’s why the prejudices continue to work. That’s why they stay alive.