Facing choices in life and work

Ethics are needed where we face choices and there’s no one but ourselves to see what we do. If there are rules to follow, the choice is between compliance and rebellion. That isn’t an ethical matter. It depends on fear of punishment versus desire for whatever lies outside the rules.

If you face shame or scandal if you’re caught, that isn’t an ethical decision either. Prudence or fear decide the outcome. But if you face nothing beyond your own thoughts about living as you wish to live, you’re confronting a purely ethical decision.

The decision to gossip and pass on a rumor that will embarrass someone; the choice to go easy on a task and cut yourself some slack; the time spent chatting around the water cooler; using office phone lines, computers or stationery for your private needs; all are ethical decisions. No one will know what you’ve done (or they’re doing it themselves and in no position to point the finger).

These small, everyday instances of ethical decisions–are no different from the decision to win a deal by misleading the buyer, cheating a little on an expense claim (everyone does it, right?), or dropping a few words into a meeting that you know will mean someone you dislike will find him or herself under suspicion.
Continued

Maybe today’s financial crisis has an unexpected upside

That, at any rate, is the view of Terence Blacker, writing for Britain’s newpaper The Independent (“Reasons to be cheerful about the credit crunch”).

He cites a number of potential upsides: people realizing once again that a house is somewhere to live, not an investment opportunity or a source of never-ending income; less constant yakking about making money; a sense of disgust at some of the incomes of top executives; less indulgence in conspicuous spending; even a greater appreciation of what we all have today. Continued

Why do we get so hung up about consistency?

The US presidential campaign has thrown our obsession with consistency into sharp relief. Over and over again, the words ‘flip-flopping’ are brought into play as a form of attack. Past speeches and writings are combed for supposed — or even real — inconsistencies with what is being said today. Once found, these changes of opinion are waved over the candidate’s head like weapons. “Look, he once said this and now he’s saying this. He’s flip-flopping!”

If you stop to consider this, free from the synthetic excitement the media try to whip up, the only thing worth wondering about is the extent to which people’s opinions fail to change — even over long periods.

Times change. Contexts change. We learn new things, find new possibilities, ought to forget old grudges and hurts. Why shouldn’t our opinions change in line with the new realities?

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
~William Blake

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People may be born with intelligence, but that may not mean they keep it

Balmain Working Mens’ Institute
photo: J Bar

In the debate about what makes a country or a society competitive in the world, it would be interesting to know how much a decline in educational standards counts for. We tend to assume that children are usually better educated than their parents, since standards are rising constantly. What if this is not so in a country — say in the US?

Clive Crook, writing in the Financial Times reports this fact and is clearly of the opinion that it should be more widely reported and discussed than it has been so far:

A startling and profoundly important fact about the US economy has received surprisingly little attention. The educational quality of the country’s workers is starting to decline – not just relatively (because other countries are catching up and moving ahead) but also, for the first time, in absolute terms. Over the coming years, baby-boomers departing from the labour force will have better educational qualifications than the younger workers replacing them. If the ultimate source of an economy’s ability to grow and prosper is its human capital, the US is in trouble . . .

Between 1940 and 2000, the educational standard of people entering the US labor market rose markedly. While fewer than 5 per cent of the population had at least a four-year college education at the start of this period, more than 30 per cent did so by the end.

When the educated Baby Boomers retire

However, the children of the post-war Baby Boomers now have fewer post-graduate degrees than their parents’ generation. What happened? Have they lost interest? Does a good degree count for less in getting a job?

Whatever the immediate reason, there has been no such decline, it appears, in countries like South Korea, Japan, Canada and Russia. In fact, in many other countries, the proportion of people aged 25-34 with at least a college education is now as high as, or higher than, in the US — and still climbing. When the US Baby Boomers leave the labor force, as they are already starting to do, a good proportion of the educational attainments of the country will leave with them. Continued

We can still avoid worse to come

I’m sure you’ll understand why this article by Michele Hanson on British newspaper The Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ blog system appealed to me (“Everything is done at top speed. We need to slow down before we have a global nervous breakdown”).

Why are we so obsessed with speed? Does doing something faster truly make it better? I doubt it. The faster we rush through life, the less we are able to enjoy it. There’s no time to take in either the pleasures or the learning opportunities. Like someone gabbling the legal jargon at the end of a TV advert, it’s just about impossible to understand.

Road rage isn’t the only symptom of a society in which getting what I want now — the faster the better and don’t anyone get in my way — takes precedence over knowing whether it’s going to be any use to me when I do get it.

As Ms. Hanson says:

Everything now has to be done at top speed. We are all on a planet-sized bolting horse. No one can stop it. People are forever coming round here glaring crabbily at my computer because it isn’t fast enough. It takes one whole minute when it ought be taking a nano-second. They sit there, desperate to get online, and to them the huge seconds trundle by, each like the passing of the longest night. Unbearable. “You need a new computer,” they complain rattily. “This is ridiculous.”

Slowing down would do us all a great deal of good. For a start, we might begin to question our values and inquire into what our politicians are doing in our name. We would have time to think and time to consider alternatives. We might even have time to enjoy life, instead of rushing madly to the next task, convinced that any moments not spent on ‘getting things done’ are wasted.

Utter nonsense! What’s the point of getting anything done if you haven’t considered what it is, why it matters or whether you’ll like the result? Or if you’ll have no time when it is done to experience the results, for good or ill?

Our world has become manic-depressive: bipolar, if you prefer that term. We’re either running around furiously, convinced the good times will never end, or sunk in deepest gloom, watching our savings drop into oblivion and most of our income going to buy a tank of gas.

Is there still time to stop the madness? I hope so, but we’d better start soon.

Technorati Tags: haste, speed, stress, obsession with speed, choice, time to enjoy life, slowing down, setting priorities, getting out of the rat race

What are you wishing on your children?

Perfectionism is a form of control that lasts a lifetime. Parents who seek too much from their children leave them emotionally and mentally crippled. Adults who demand too much of themselves increase their stress, ruin their health, and destroy most of their relationships. Organizations that demand too much of their employees produce burnout, increased turnover and a corporate culture riddled with no-holds-barred competitiveness — and often dishonesty too.

The killer that lurks within perfectionism is that constant sense of criticism: the knowledge that whatever you do is never going to be quite good enough; the sense that every achievement will create an instant demand to do better. It is, in the words of Hara Estroff Marano, author of A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, in Psychology Today (“Pitfalls of Perfectionism”):

. . . an endless report card; it keeps people completely self-absorbed, engaged in perpetual self-evaluation—reaping relentless frustration and doomed to anxiety and depression.

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A world without trust is a world most people don’t want to live in

Part of what makes life livable is a sense that there are some people whom you can trust pretty much all the time. We all know that there are cheats in the world, as well as confidence tricksters, liars and many other kinds of untrustworthy people. Nevertheless, we have to trust others to make it possible to trade, govern and be governed and know what to believe and how to live our lives. If no one is trustworthy, any kind of civilized life becomes impossible.

That’s what this report by The International Herald Tribune on the incidence of scientific fraud in the United States is so worrying (“Scientific Fraud: There’s more of it than you think”). Most of us believe that one mark of being a ‘professional’ is adherence to a set of ethical standards. Scientists are honor-bound to report their results truthfully, abide by proper standards of research and objectivity, and provide an honest statement of their findings. Since their findings can have a massive impact on many aspects of people’s lives, from health to career direction, we need to trust them. Indeed, in our technology-obsessed world, people and governments seem to place almost an unquestioning reliance on the statements of the people in white lab coats. Continued

Coaching and counseling may be getting out of hand in Australia

The ‘Modern Times’ blog for The Age, an Australian newspaper, has an article weighing in against the rise in counselors and the situations where their help is invoked. As the author says: “Is there a counsellor in the house? Bleeding well hope so because the counsellor is the new apple. You need at least one a day.”

Is the increase in the use of counseling a sensible response to the stresses of modern times? Or is it like the euphemisms everyone uses to get around saying things that sound ‘nasty’: a way of sending unhappy, feckless or angry people far, far away, where they can’t upset us; while managing at the same time to convince ourselves that we’re helping them — just so long as we don’t have to deal with them ourselves, naturally. Continued

You can’t avoid the truth by avoiding plain speaking

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

George Carlin, the American comedian, died recently. He was famous for his no-nonsense, sometimes crude attacks on all kinds of hypocrisy in society. One of his strongest dislikes was the use of euphemisms to avoid speaking the truth about aspects of life people don’t like to think about. Life, he proclaimed, is sometimes nasty and brutal. Sometimes it sucks. Pretending it doesn’t won’t help you avoid the bad times or find a way out of the difficulties.

Whether it was the indignities of aging, the rich manipulating the poor, the hilarious oddities of sex, or that ultimate taboo, death, Carlin pushed his audiences’ noses into the creative muck that life is made of — and most of them loved it. Continued

In tough financial times, the traits of the chronic under-earner carry as heavy a penalty as those of the continual over-spender

Continental Congress Lottery Ticket
Source: Wikipedia

Over-spending is never a good idea and we’ve heard a great deal recently about the ways that people have been tempted into spending far too much by cheap and easy credit. Cutting back on your spending is certainly one way to cope with the financial downturn; one that many people are obviously taking, given the howls of anguish from industries facing lower sales. But what about under-earning? What if you find yourself in continual financial straits, not because you spend too much because you don’t earn enough?

Writing in BusinessWeek, Michelle Conlin suggests that “for every obscenely piggish ceo pay package, there’s legions of underearners crawling all over Corporate America. ” She bases her article on the book by Jerrold Mundis, Earn What You Deserve: How to Stop Underearning & Start Thriving. There’s also Barbara Stanny’s book, Overcoming Underearning: Overcome Your Money Fears and Earn What You Deserve.

In summary, under-earners may do great work, but they rarely get the financial recognition they deserve for it, mostly because they don’t believe their employers will pay them more. A few have the idealistic idea that money goes only to people who compromise their essential humanity or sell out their creativity to get it. Many simply won’t take responsibility for the problem or are too fearful to stand up for themselves. Continued