Remember the beginning of the movie Magnolia? The following 3 articles arrived on the Sunday paper for Seattle on April 27. Perhaps it is a coincidence that they were all slated for publication the same day. Or, perhaps it is some vast conspiracy to bleed every ounce of common sense from our brains. You be the judge, here they are:

1)      Daneen Skube (dr.skube@attbi.com) puts her employee readers in their place with (and I summarize): On getting a bad/unfair review “Being right won’t pay your bills,” and on controversy in the workplace “You’re better off finding something you can agree with in the other person” or else you will seem “argumentative.” My comments: this is good advice for people who are highly leveraged against their jobs, where the receipt of even one unemployment check would leave creditors howling. However, the advice those people really need is to un-leverage themselves. Once they’re stable, they can be unafraid to be the best employee possible. The best employees aren’t afraid to quit over something they think is true and just. (I have a friend who seriously considered quitting her job over the decimals rounding policy. I have other friends who actually did quit their jobs because of imagined or amplified personal slights: loss of budget, loss of recognition.) It’s impossible to judge these actions from the outside. I’ve found that each person is their own best witness. The second you start choking down the truth and second guessing yourself you’ll end up with a splitting case of cognitive dissonance which ruins you as an employee anyway. Here’s the icing: speaking your mind is fun when you don’t care about the consequences.

2)      Diana Kritsonis, a jobseeker, is profiled as the poster child for the underemployed, going from 70k/yr as a computer programmer to 832/mo. She has 3 kids to support. The article simply reports her story, including various labor statistics. The article does not go any farther, such as to say “be good at your job or this will happen to you.” It does not go as far to say “if you’re unemployed and think it can’t get any worse, it can.” However, any human being reading the article would get that unwritten message. The inevitable reaction is stress. Which brings us to:

3)      an article in the Lifestyle section called “How to Arm Yourself Against Stress.” It tells us to resist the demands on our time. “Don’t stay up late to finish projects,” the article reads, “Don’t check email from home.” This is fine advice for more stagnant personalities. But those with a trajectory will be more calmed by reaching closure on their task. If your work for today is one step on some big, obvious staircase that you know about, you will be energized, not drained, by working on your project. This is like telling a chronically exhausted person not to take up exercise because it will make them tired. Stress is being in the wrong place and not having any control over your circumstances to make it better. Involvement (aka “work”) is the anti-stress.

On Sunday mornings our minds are vulnerable and a little fuzzy. Words on a newspaper can often slip into your brain unnoticed. If this was to happen to you in Seattle on April 27, you’d a) vow to become more of a kiss-up at your job, b) weigh every action you took at your job against getting fired, and choose to not rock the boat, c) worry about the consequences of losing your job and what changes you’d have to make to your life in case you lost it, d) take your career (which is on the front burner already) and turn the heat up to high in an effort to scare yourself into success, e) don’t actually solve the problems behind a-d, because that would take time away from your personal life and that would be stressful. (Ignoring, of course, the inherent stressful nature of a-d.) The moral of the story is don’t read the newspaper, read weblogs.

comment []4:45:10 PM