Putting the letters "THEY"after your name

Congratulations on your masters degree in marketing. You are now entitled to append the letters "THEY" to your name on official correspondence, business cards and the like to celebrate your new status and humble and intimidate all before you.

You are now officially "they" and your professional output is now known as "that's what they say".

The most important thing for you to take away from your studies is that there is no such thing as "society". The great unwashed and uneducated bandy about phrases like "society expects" and "society promotes" as if an abstract concept could have it's own opinions; rather like a standard deviation having a preference for blondes. Deep down, they know this and use the phrase "society is to blame" as a way of palming-off responsibility onto no one. This idea is synonymous with an enquiry into an Oscar-winning cock-up by a government official returning a finding of "systemic failure" - resonates as a sound conclusion built on thorough analysis but is really just a way of blaming it all on the dark side of the force and defining transparency to mean "you can see right through to the other side without allowing inconvenient culprits to get in your way."

Other than this special case,  the public will use societal expectations to assuage their conscience when they do something terrible,  or to support their frankly alarming decision to inflict that pair of pants on passers-by or to attempt to subsist on a diet of sea-water and recycled wheat germ.

But there is no "society", no carefully considered body of collective wisdom,  no omniscient government agency that wouldn't let them publish it if it wasn't true.

There's just you.

While people are desperately casting around for an opinion, hoping with sphincter-clenching anxiety that you don't notice them doing it and fending off others with mocking laughter and sly sideways glances at their own particular choice of pants,  you step in with the wholesome, pre-canned soup of social expectation,  ready to eat right out of the microwave. They'll love you for it.

Tell them what their body shape should be,  what car they should drive,  what they should eat to prevent cancer and live forever.  You can even give them fashionable ailments to suffer from; there's nothing as affirming as being able to blame your inadequacies on a new syndrome that all the best specialists in Hollywood are treating the stars for.

And have fun doing it. Have a few glasses of chardonnay and get into a bet with other THEYs about how stupid a thing you can get people to think is expected of them.  Previous winners of this informal professional contest have included lycra, bubble skirts,  mullets, anorexia,  stilettos, plating up and the paleo diet.

You're the next generation of THEY;  the future's in your hands now.

Good luck.

Quizonesty

I wonder what sort of feedback you'd get from social media quizzes if they weren't trying to sell you something?

What sort of person are you?

Dull. Based on your Facebook posts you haven't had an original thought in the last 2 years.  You just share other people's stuff and mildly funny YouTube clips.  You're probably one of those people in the pub whose sole contributions to the night out are carrying the ice bucket and laughing at other people's jokes.

Alcoholic. Liberal use of the acronym "lol" is not fooling anyone.  Three times a week you make jokes about how much wine you need to get over the day, and your spelling after 9pm degenerates from bad to teenager before sliding further into that green text from the Matrix as midnight approaches.

Single.  Two thirds of the photos you post are of cats.  There's no way anyone is living with you surrounded by that much fur and malevolence.

Aggravating. Lay off the preaching. No one is going to be converted to Zoroastrianism through Twitter. Holy writ has to be longer than 80 characters.  And your god is more or less defunct anyway.  He's on the verge of being downgraded from "polite respect" to "embarrassing lunatic fringe" and seems well on his way to "B-grade Marvel hero".

Whippy. (A portmanteau word for "wishful hippy"). You work in an accounting office preparing tax returns but there is a part of your soul that would like to be, robe clad, on a mountaintop in Nepal -  provided you could still get a good latte each morning. Your profile is littered with vague truthlets and obvious aphorisms masquerading as profundity, backlit by the rays of the rising sun or the fairy colours of the rainbow. Not that it's doing you any good. Your blood pressure is still 140/95 and your spelling is still deteriorating after 9 pm (xref Alcoholic).

Chris Lilley. You think you're funny but you're not.  It's painful to watch. I'm sure it's hilarious in your head but your stream of consciousness seems badly polluted and if Facebook had a "buttock clenching cringe" button,  your friends would use it liberally.

Insincere. Sure, you click "like" on the photo of someone's kid getting a ballet award on Pinterest or their story of woe on Facebook but you never comment do you? The truth is you couldn't care less. Social media for you is just another Machiavellian way to make yourself seem less sociopathic, isn't that right?

Illiterate. Being generous about it,  you probably think that overusing z to make plurals and 'a' instead of 'er' (e.g. sista) makes you sound like Oprah in the 'hood but you aren't an annoyingly asinine black American woman nor yet a bling bro - you're a weedy 21 year old apprentice from Dubbo. You graduated from primary school; please write comprehensibly.

Creepy. You're peeping at far too many people through the e-keyhole. Be honest.  How many people's profiles have you browsed without befriending them? Would your partner be happy to know you'd looked up all those men?  I thought not.  The police are opening a file on you tomorrow morning.

Temporary. Post one more minion meme, "elf yourself" video or remind me one more time of the number of shopping days 'til Christmas and bad things will happen to you.  That's not a prognostication,  it's a promise. That's not the sound of Santa coming down the chimney, that's the sound of ruthless, trained killers rappelling down your wall, about to smash through your windows.

Merry Christmas!

Our thoughts and prayers

In the aftermath of anything tragic, it is inevitable that someone will say "our thoughts and prayers are with them." Now that many people do not believe in a god or practice any religion, it can - and often is in a lily-livered quaking in fear of offence kind of way - be abbreviated to "our thoughts are with them".

What the hell does that mean?

A thought, considered from the biological viewpoint, is a series of electrical impulses and neuron firings. No great amount of voltage involved, very little current, not enough to illuminate an actual lightbulb - let alone make one manifest in the air above your head. And not the kind of energy that one can transfer to a person in need - even if I did have jumper leads attached to my ears. My thoughts are not with them in this sense.

Perhaps my thoughts are with them in that they share my mental imagery? I sure hope not, for their sake. In particular, when tragedy strikes some people, if my thoughts were shared with them, their self-esteem might take a hit because they would start to believe that it couldn't have happened to a nicer person. Even if I do like them, my thoughts at any given time are unlikely to be uncomplicated as regards them - or indeed as regards anything. If our thoughts were with other people,  I don't know that it would do them much good in their time of need - or indeed by conducive to ongoing friendships.

Taking the less literal and more empathetic view, it seems to mean that we care and are concerned. If this is the case, then why "our thoughts and prayers are with them"? Someone making sympathetic noises at you is, on the whole, fairly useless and, beyond a momentary feeling of mild human warmth, doesn't do much to solve the actual problem. Much less so if the person isn't making the sympathetic noises at you but are informing others that they would, if you happened to be present, be making sympathetic noises at you. Or, perhaps, that they've thought hard about the kind of sympathetic noise that they might make, were you to be present. And they've done so with a sincere expression on their face.

Someone hoping I get better soon is at least directing their ineffective, childlike wishes in my direction. Saying "our thoughts are with them" is like saying "I hoped he gets well".

Even if we add "and prayers" back into the original phrase, it doesn't get much better. What that amounts to is "I have asked a possibly mythical being who, apparently, has the power to intervene and do - what I'm not sure but something vaguely interventiony, to conduct such an intervention despite the fact that she didn't, or couldn't, or wasn't motivated by sufficient toadying to intervene in the first place to prevent the catastrophe from happening". Given the inherent changeability of such a deity, one might equally fear that drawing attention to the crisis might just as readily bring down further catastrophe on the heads of the victims as solve the problem.

On the whole, "our thoughts and prayers are with them" is just another one of those things we say to prove to our fellow human beings that we are not psychopathic; that we share some basic level of empathy for other people. It's not doing the victims any good.

Just for fun

In a post-purpose first world where all our real problems have been solved and the angst of knowing where our next meal is coming from has been replaced with agonising non-decisions about which coffee cart makes the best cappuccino, and guilt ridden recycling of paper cup (with those baby-sipper-cup lids on them for the fundamentally maladroit) the search for meaning and reason to our everyday activities has become somewhat desperate. It is fairly unlikely that our children will go hungry, that our country will be invaded or that any of Pauline Hanson's strange mindless rants will evolve into a genuinely threatening fascist ideology. There's not much left to do that means anything or that would matter to the fundamental heart of the universe if we didn't do it.

So we have to find a way to assign meaning to even the most banal activities and, to that end, we have come to the point of banning doing anything just for fun.

Want to go on one of the those pilgrimage style, find yourself in the silence, long walks around the country or across the desert as a bucket list item? Just because you can? That's the kind of silly self-indulgent thing that men your age do just to get away from their responsibilities for a while. That kind of thing is not acceptable. You need to assign it some meaning. So find yourself a charity -there are something like 60,000 of them in Australia so you can take your pick - and use the activity to raise money. Now it's gone from pilgrimage to crusade. You're selflessly dedicating your free time and effort, sweating your way across endless miles of shimmering asphalt - all for the kids (or the puppies, or the old people or the scientists or some other minority, under-funded group). You've taken indulgence and given it purpose. Well done!

Thinking of a bit of physical activity. A mind-freeing amble along the seafront? Perhaps just go an chuck the frisbee around with a few mates? I don't think so. That's purposeless fun and you need all the meaning you can engineer into your life. You need a personal trainer, 50g or so of strap-on guilt (aka a FitBit), and a plan with goals and milestones.

And it's not just adults. Kids can't be allowed to play any more. Childhood was, once, that brief period of joy before the real, meaningful work of adulthood kicked in and you had to take up the yoke of bitter responsibility and necessary toil. Now, if we let them just play - given the inherent meaninglessness of modern adulthood - they might just play for the rest of their lives. We need to get them into retrofitted meaning and artificial purpose right from the get go. To that end, develop an early years learning framework and note their ability to build block stacks as evidence of gross motor skills, their ability to sort paper circles into piles by colour as gross numeracy skills and their ability to pick their noses as just plain gross. Childhood play now has meaning and purpose. Our children can be proud that they have started as they must continue - learning to pretend that there is a necessary and higher purpose to the things they would otherwise do anyway.

Certainly fun is out of the question

Putting two and two together and coming up with Hallelujah

When I started working, back in the pre-cappuccino hell of the 1980s, my father gave me some basic advice, which I have often thought worth heeding, that, while at work, you should do what your boss asks you to do.

Seems fairly straightforward.  I give them four hours of my life and do the things they ask me to do during that time and, in return, they give me a pay packet. And yes, you young fellows, it was actually little yellow envelope containing cash. What's cash? Those things you saw pictures of in your primary school maths lessons and which, on odd occasions, your parents have in their wallets for more than 24 hours. They're used at the start of cricket games too.

And this model worked fine for a while but then came the day when the boss didn't actually tell me what he wanted done. I was there, bedecked in my red vest, "can I help you" badge and equally sincere smile but there was nothing to do and no suckers customers that required my help.

Parental advice (advanced class): Initiative. Grab a broom and sweep something. Tidy up a bit.

Good. So I do that. Worked OK for a while.

Now, due to some miscalculation on the part of the authorities, it seems I've become an adult and I work in a professional type occupation and the situation has become massively more complicated.

Firstly, it appears that, if the boss tells you what to do, it will only be in the most general terms. They're far too busy to be spending time giving you instructions in detail; you're a professional now and one of the skills of a professional is to "fill in the gaps" - ostensibly in the space between where you are now and what the boss wants but, often it's more likely to be the gaps in the boss' thinking (she didnt' think it out properly) or the holes in the fabric of spacetime and causality that would need to be created to get what she wants done in the time allotted.

Secondly, you can't count on the fact that the boss has asked you to do something meaning that she, or indeed anyone else in the company, is going to support you. As a professional, you need to "own the project". This often means that the project was about as popular as a shipment of nuclear waste at a tourist resort to begin with and that "taking ownership" translates as "taking blame". By becoming a "champion" or "advocate" for your project, it basically becomes your problem and you need to be ready to defend the project against all comers, even the boss herself.

So here you are with goals that you can't understand, or which you can understand but which are impossible to implement, or which could be implemented if this became a hero project of the Soviet Union and you could kill a million peasants to get it done. But, as the project champion, it turns out that Stalin in High Heels isn't going to supply peasants to you and that you're going to have to raid the gulag for resources along with everyone else.

But even that's not enough in the modern corporate world. You have to believe! You have to truly believe!

Work used to be a financial contract. I work, you pay. Now, it's a church. The company has to have a philosophy, a mission, a vision and values. And you, the supplicant, need to show how you are living the values and aligning your work to the corporate vision splendid.  Your annual performance appraisal being your opportunity to confront your sins and to seek absolution; "Forgive me father for I have sinned, it's been six months since my last performance review."

And, like all churches, it has a clergy. Trained at the Harvard Business School, or other leading theological colleges, these vicars are imbued with the spirit of the gospels according to Kellogg and the Letters of St Covey to the Plebians  and will gather the faithful about them and lead them to the promised land of corporate success, flowing with cheap coffee and empty promises of bonuses.

But remember that other great truth of all religions - the faith changes. When certain bits of the holy scriptures become a bit too unmarketable, they become metaphorical and what you need to believe is whatever your priest tells you is a tenet of the faith - this week. And, for God's sake, don't remind them of what they said you were to believe last week. That was never true and she certainly never said that and any suggestion that she's anything other than fully orthodox is just malicious gossip that she won't put up with.

And the priesthood are not bound by the rules. The faithful must abide by the commandments but the clergy can do as they please; whatever is necessary to advance the flag of the faith and deliver widgets across all the Earth.

So, kids, I'm sorry. As far as I can see, work in the modern world is a cross between MiniTrue and an apocalyptic cult. What can I say?

Hallelujah.