Thankful for Something Something
From a personal standpoint, holidays such as Thanksgiving have always confused me. After all, it is an arbitrary holiday that’s slotted in a more or less convenient spot to either placate the plebs, or encourage copious amounts of consumer spending. I have no problems with this as I enjoy both placation and consumer spending. What confuses me most about these holidays is the sentimentality that I, a person with the capacity for emotion as an engineer a cockroach a rusty nail, attach to these occasions.
Take this weekend, for example: Canadian Thanksgiving. For pretty much the rest of the year, I would usually take everything I have for granted - my stable career, the freedom granted to me by this country, the friends and family that I keep, the crazy hijinks I wind myself into, et cetera et cetera. Come the second Monday of every October, though, I turn into this puddle of goop that not merely reflects on what I have [and for which I am thankful], but also on the things I don’t have nor will ever have. [The latter, however, can wait for another post.]
I was speaking with a friend earlier this week, and the notion truly hit home. We’re both young urbanites with stable jobs, strong ties to family and friends, and rich personal lives. However, both of us also forgot how little others have as well. For the past few days, I’ve been trying to figure out why this was so.
A lot of it, in my mind, stems from how much we’ve de-emphasize personal and professional achievement. I deserve my monthly wage. There will always be others who can help me regardless of how much of a douche bag I am. Rather than I earned this through honesty and integrity. or I worked hard to keep my friends and earn their trust.
I look around me at work, and for the most part, I feel the latter is true. Most of my co-workers are honest folks who want to do their best and achieve more. We want to grow the business and hire more staff. However, whenever we try to hire new employees, we perpetually run into the issue of young college and university graduates who expect the world handed to them on a silver platter. How can we expect to effective train young people for a new growing industry when they come in with preconceived notions of their jobs and egos larger than enlarged prostates, without the experience and practical training to back up those claims. The ones we do end up hiring is hit or miss too. We’ve had some very good hires we’ve kept, and there are lots of folks that we’ve fired [and want to fire] who are simply deadweight. I often wonder how much longer our society can continue functioning in this manner, and how soon we’ll see an exodus of the talented and capable a la Atlas Shrugged.
Looking back on all of this, I’m having serious trouble finding something in our society to be truly thankful for.
No, wait. I have something.
- I’m thankful for the problems in our society because it forces us to create new and innovative solutions.
- I’m thankful for the lies because it allows me to appreciate the truth even more.
- I’m thankful for the lazy, incapable and incompetent people because it makes me cherish my friends who aren’t any of those even more. [It also gives me a job.]
I really have a way to make even the most pleasant topics sound depressing, don’t I? [Just because I'm in marketing doesn't mean I can't/won't spin things negatively.]
Happy Thanksgiving, folks. Gobble a few turkeys for me.
sammee
X-Posted from the.blog @scwleung here
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