Dream chasers

I have watched a couple documentaries this past week about MMA fighters and bodybuilders.  It is always interesting to me to examine the extremes that particular cultures will go to when you examine the most ardent members of those cultures and these did not disappoint.  The shows were full of examples of champions bragging about their victories, desperate to convince the world of their superiority, and down on their luck people struggling to stay in the game despite losses, injury, and despair.

It makes me think that chasing your dreams is a terrible way to live.

Probably more accurately, chasing the wrong dreams is a terrible way to live.  Looking at this reminds me of the Stoic philosophies I read about a lot years ago.  One of their core ideas was that you should strive to compete against yourself, not against other people.  There is no happiness that comes from measuring your self worth by how many people you defeat - there will always be people that beat you, no matter what you do, and then you are betting your happiness on random chance.  You might lose via your opponents cheating, you may lose by genetic lottery, or you might lose by any number of other instances of pure back luck.  Why stake everything on luck when you don't have to?  Measure yourself against yourself, and no one else.

All the people in these documentaries who were struggling to defeat others in competition got their quick highs of victory, but then they had to deal with crushing defeat.  They also inevitably end up broken, damaged, and out of the game.  The ones who actually seemed happy were always those on the fringes of competition, just doing a job.  The people that found joy in these communities seemed to be the trainers, judges, referees, and other behind the scenes types.

The trainers didn't end up getting an injury and then spend years desperately trying to get back into fighting shape, suffering constant sadness and frustration, to inevitably fail anyway.  They just did their job as well as possible and lived their lives.

I have made this choice in my life.  I could have chased Magic, poker, or professional game design, trying to make it in a field full of desperate people.  I don't think that is the way to be happy though. 

There are times when the shining lights and glitter of stardom pulls at me.  I absolutely get the appeal of being one of the names that everybody knows.  But the world isn't fair.  Even if I was excellent in terms of skill and work, even if I gave it my all, plenty of other people are too.  There would be any number of reasons why I could and would lose even if I do everything right.

I am not special.  I have talent, sure, but there is nothing in the world guaranteeing my victory.  The fact that I am the star of my own story means jack shit to the universe at large.

When I look at people like those MMA fighters and bodybuilders I see desperation and misery.  They struggle so hard to fill a hole in themselves and they refuse to see that no matter how many wins they rack up that emptiness will never be gone.

Pick something you love.  Do it a lot until you are great at it.  Become the best at it that you can be.  Forget about how good other people are at it, because that doesn't matter.  Stake your happiness on the striving, not on the victory, because striving is something you can succeed at forever.  Beating your opponents is not.

Put the shotgun away

When I think about Pinkie Pie eventually dating people my mind is filled with images from movies and shows where a teenage girl's father brandishes weapons and menacingly threatens the boys she is going on dates with.  Of course Pinkie Pie may not be dating boys, or at all, but this is what springs to mind when I think about it.

It is horrible, really.

I read a great article about this and it agreed with my views on the subject completely.  The idea that I must threaten people she cares about and chooses to associate with is insane.  Just as absurd is the idea that I should explode with rage should her heart get broken.  While I would spring into action to defend Pinkie Pie from some kind of physical assault I find the idea that I must get revenge on anyone who causes her heartache completely absurd.

Love hurts.  Sometimes it hurts just being there, and it usually hurts when it ends.  That is just a part of the price of being vulnerable and seeking big wonderful feelings.  Figuring out how to navigate that is a part of growing up, and there is no room in that education for angry fathers bent on revenge.

It is practically inevitable that she will feel hurt, cause pain to others, and have relationships that are messy and messed up.  Welcome to humanity.  While I do not wish her to be abused, I know that meddling directly in these sorts of things isn't going to help, and if anything it will hinder her growth.

I know plenty of adults who haven't learned how to navigate protecting themselves while opening up to other people, and I have a distinctly non scientific sense that parents inserting themselves into people's relationships helps create these problems.  You gotta suck, fail, and suffer to figure that shit out, is my experience, and you learn best when you make the decisions yourself and cope with the fallout.

So I won't be caressing a shotgun or sharpening an axe when Pinkie Pie's first romantic partners meet me.  I won't make veiled threats or overreact when they do something stupid and hurt her feelings.  All you can do, if you want to help your kids, is love them and pick them back up when they fall.  Even if blustering threats worked to prevent pain, which it doesn't, it is a shitty thing to do.

An education

Pinkie Pie and I are beginning a new phase of life together.  She has been struggling with mental illness for all of 2018 so far, and school has become completely untenable.  She struggles with much of regular life too, but school is the thing that has fallen totally apart.  It is tough to hear from teachers that your kid is polite and gentle and kind and great in all the ways... but she doesn't do anything in school, and if this were the good ole days she would fail grade 6.  Not because she isn't clever enough, but simply because she doesn't do things.

This isn't laziness.  Hell, I don't even know if laziness really exists.  Read this article if you want to see where I am coming from.  This is a huge struggle Pinkie Pie has with herself and the world and grinding out assignments in school to get grades just isn't something she can do right now.

The best solution available to us now is homeschooling.  This certainly isn't a thing I thought I would do and quite frankly the prospect is intimidating and even terrifying.  Strangely being a teacher isn't scary in the same way because that at least is a structured environment where my duties are monitored by others.  I could be a teacher just fine.

But homeschooling is different.  It is like entrepreneurship for education and entrepreneurship has always terrified me.  I want a company to set my pay, give me a job, and expect a good 40 hours a week.  Same thing here.  The trouble is that there isn't any bar I can set where my teaching is enough.  I could always do more, always make it better, and I think this is going to leave me constantly anxious that I am not doing enough.  Elli's particular struggles exacerbate this because she isn't up to the kind or amount of teaching that a school would supply so I will never, ever measure up.  I can't just finish my official day and then clock out and walk away, and that separation is important for me.

As long as I am doing this I will be failing.

Rationally I know that when your kid has troubles you should judge their progress by their own standards, not ones imposed from outside.  You need to help them do their own best, not measure them against benchmarks created for 'the average child'.

But knowing that and managing to make myself believe it viscerally are two very different things.  I know I am going to constantly struggle with finding the right line to walk between letting her slack off too much and getting nowhere, and pushing too hard on her to do things she just can't do right now.  There simply won't be some easy way, some correct decision, that will lead me to the results I hope for.  I will always fall short in my own eyes.

This was a hard decision because it was so clear to me that homeschooling is the best thing for her, but by far the hardest for me.  It isn't something I ever thought I would do, or a thing I think I am suited to.  I can see myself doing that thing people do when their job is something they can't handle and they just long for the time when they can grab a drink and let alcohol take their angst and sadness away.  I had to balance that sense that this my future with the certainty that school is making Pinkie Pie miserable and offering her nothing in return.

It is easy, in my head, to come up with scenarios where I defend Pinkie Pie from some kind of danger.  If she were threatened by an attacker, a fire, or a storm, I would fling myself into mortal danger to protect her without hesitation.  But this thing is so much harder than any of that because it lasts, and it will grind me down.  It isn't temporary bravery that I need, because this might well last six years, and I don't know that I have the strength for that.

It isn't as though homeschooling is a horror for most people.  Lots of people would enjoy it, or at the very least wouldn't mind it.  It is a hard thing for me though, and it is a challenge I had never thought would be mine to face.

In writing this I am not looking for advice.  If you happen to desperately need to give that advice, fine, but respect that you have no idea about the details of my situation and as such your advice will almost certainly be ignored.  I am writing this to get my feelings out, not seeking opinions.

The big sad

Many of my friends are sad these days.  The provincial election did not go as we had hoped and our new government will be a Conservative one.  The people of Ontario decided to elect a party that never published a complete platform, made promises that are completely impossible, and is led by a buffoon, Doug Ford.  I wouldn't vote Conservative in any case, but there was a whole list of other contenders for leader I would have been vastly less harsh on.

I am sure people have lots of reasons for voting Conservative.  Mostly they seem to be terror at what a left wing party would do; these are usually pitched as fiscal concerns.  Many people claim that their Conservative vote was to protect Ontario's finances from the NDP.

I don't buy that crap.

The NDP published a properly costed platform.  The Conservatives published a list of promises that didn't even come close to adding up.  Economists on all political sides agreed that the Conservative promises were ridiculous and would lead to enormous deficits, higher than the other parties'.  If the Conservatives had actually published their numbers then perhaps they could have refuted these criticisms, but since they did not, we can only go with our best guesses.

You could also look at the party's history and see that they have no track record of financial responsibility.  Across North America deficits and foolish spending are not attached to any particular political party or even a leaning, left or right.  I would love to say that left wing governments are better this way, but we all know that every party wastes money and has financial scandals, and the data supports this.

You *can* choose how parties throw your money around though.  Right wingers will tend to throw it at rich people and shareholders, while left wingers will throw it at poor people.

I know which way I would prefer it, and I don't stand to benefit from helping the poor, quite the opposite.

So why vote Conservative?  Well, there are three reasons, I think.  Bigotry first among them.  Ford in particular is terrible for promoting bigotry and I am sure the fact that the three party leaders were two women and one man did some extra heavy lifting to get the misogyny vote out.  Lots of people want to vote for bigotry but few will actually admit it; these people of course often defend their position with "But what about fiscal responsibility?" and ignore the fact that there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that the Conservatives are better that way in general, and in this particular election they are far worse.

Some people really do vote for fiscal responsibility, and it isn't just a shield for bigotry.  These people are just misinformed or ignorant of the facts of the case here; I am sure there are times when you would actually be voting in a more fiscally responsible government by voting for the right, but this certainly wasn't one of those times.

And then there are those that vote for the right simply because they always have.  It is a tribal thing, and has nothing to do with policy of any sort.  There are simply people that always vote one way, and these folks are found in all parties.  I think their way of deciding who to vote for is terrible, but I am not the sort of person who is particularly into tribalism as moral compass.

Hard to say how much of what elected the Conservatives is evil, how much is clueless, and how much is random tribalism.  No matter the case, it makes me sad.  It won't affect me much directly, except insofar as they wreck the finances of the province, but it makes me so mad that they clearly intend to go after those who are vulnerable to placate the part of the electorate who did vote for them on the basis of bigotry.

We will get through this - there have been plenty of Conservative governments before, with similar goals.  But still I wish that the people of my province were better than this.

Every election is a critical election

Every election people try to convince one another that this is the critical one.  This time we really, really have to stop the bad people from getting into power.  I don't think that is reflective of reality; every election we need to stop the bad people from getting into power.  It is probably a useful tool for getting people out to vote though, as generating excitement and fear is a significant motivator.

This time around I am hoping any of you that can vote in Ontario's election will vote NDP.  Really I will be quite pleased if you vote for anyone that isn't the Conservative candidate, but the NDP is neck and neck with the Conservatives and if the people that are terrified of or angry at the Conservatives get together and vote NDP, the result will be a foregone conclusion.

I voted this afternoon and it was easy as anything.  I didn't get my voter card in the mail so I just walked in with my ID and everything was all set up within 1 minute or so and off I went.  The Liberals traditionally do really well in my riding but I voted NDP anyway, as I hate the idea of strategic voting and I want it to die in a fire.

The strategic voting calculator I checked tells me the Liberals are going to win my riding so my vote for the NDP is not likely to matter.  Still, they are the ones I want to win.

The Conservatives have declined to post a complete platform this election.  They brought in a bigoted, foolish, bombastic buffoon as their leader.  He has a pathetic record as a politician, made ridiculous and contradictory promises, and clearly did not prepare for this race.  Even if you are someone who likes Conservative principles there is every reason to think that voting for them this time is a disaster.  If a party can't be bothered to figure out how they will spend your money prior to being elected, they clearly are not organized enough to govern.

I hope Ontario is sensible enough to see that Trump 2.0 is not the right choice to run our province.  Now I suppose I just need to sit here and wait and see if we can actually live up to my expectations.

Down with jobs!

A little while ago Wendy linked me to a great piece on the debate between universal basic income and guaranteed jobs.  The first is the plan of simply giving every adult money regardless of their situation, the second is the plan of giving everyone a job, no matter their qualifications.  I have been long sold on the idea of UBI but this concept of guaranteed jobs is new to me, and the article does a great job of demolishing the idea that guaranteed jobs are of any use.

(The site I linked to often has stuff I disagree with, but I think this particular article was bang on.)

There are all kinds of reasons why guaranteed jobs are a disaster.  You can't give the guy living under a bridge who yells GRUNNNGH at everyone who passes by a job.  That guy will destroy more value that he could ever generate.  Also guaranteed jobs are a gigantic problem in areas with low population density - a guaranteed job may work in a big city where there is probably something you can bus to, but it is worthless out in the country where you might have to travel hours just to get to your government supplied job.

Guaranteed jobs don't help people who are trying to care for ill relatives, or parents staying home with children, or entrepreneurs, or the disabled.  They do one thing really well though - they give the rich the satisfaction of punishing the poor.  As we all know, there is a lot of desire out there to punish the poor, particularly if you are going to give them enough money to stay alive.

UBI is a gigantic break from that mindset.  Instead of begrudgingly giving poor people money and making them suffer to earn it, you just give everyone enough to have a basic subsistence.  Disabled people don't have to go through the circus of qualifying for aid, and if they can work a part time job or something then they can just add that on to their UBI, which helps them contribute while also having more control over their lives.

On UBI people doing useful but non monetized work like raising kids or caring for elders get to live.  They can work some, if possible, but their efforts towards supporting society aren't expected to be strictly supported by other family members.

I remember years ago when such a thing was being talked about here - making welfare recipients work for their money.  At the time it seemed like a reasonable plan to me, because when I thought of people on welfare I thought of perfectly able bodied, average people who were just lazy and wanting to watch TV all day instead of working.  I was young, admittedly, and foolish.  I wasn't aware yet just how few welfare recipients actually fit that profile. 

Wanting people to contribute to some extent to society is a perfectly reasonable desire.  But guaranteed jobs only ensure that people are clocking in, not that they do anything useful.  Digging holes and filling them back in again is worthless, and certainly not better than taking care of other people or even just creating something new, whether it be a business or an idea or art.  We need to get away from the idea that everyone has to clock in to some damn thing or other to warrant being alive, and set up our world so that we all get enough to get along, and that clocking in is one way to get all the other fancy stuff you want.