Category: Social Media

Valentine’s Day: A User’s Guide for Men

I’m probably the most romantic creature on this planet.  I cry during the love scene in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, for God’s sake!  However, it has recently come to my attention that Valentine’s Day has gotten way out of hand.  It used to be that the only people who were getting rich off romance were those grubbers down at Hallmark.  I’m not one to brag, but I’ve bought a card or two in my time.  These days, however, come February 14th, it seems like everybody’s got their hand in your pocket.  Cupid has gone commercial, and he’s charging megabucks for those arrows.

Back in the day, when love didn’t come at the end of an eHarmony questionnaire, people had love affairs.  (Relationships were what you had with your cousins and co-workers.)  For those of you under thirty, a love affair was that brilliant time when nothing mattered to you more than the dull ache of your heart, the sound of her breathing and the solitary sight of her in a crowded room.  In those days, no words remembered love, no action spoke its name and no credit card was its benefactor: the only cure was proximity.  Love meant close enough to touch, and when it didn’t — it hurt.  That was when Valentine’s Day was still special.  It was the unspoken promise that couples made to each other.  But enough about that: I’m here to bury St. Valentine, not to praise him.

(Before I go any further, and the politically correct crowd start organizing the lynch mob, I realize that relationships come in a variety of permutations and combinations.  Unfortunately, I have a limited working knowledge of much beyond the male side of male and female.  Therefore, that’s what I’m dealing with; anything else would be just guessing.  If you’re looking for all-inclusive or if heterosexual offends you, stop now and re-Google.  It will save us both a lot of time.)  Personally, I think it’s a sad day when people need to put a disclaimer on innocent stuff like Valentines, but such is the world we live in.  Anyway …

Recently, Valentine’s Day has taken a distinct turn for the worst.  It has gone from a simple “Be my Valentine” card at dinner to over-the-top romantic gymnastics that would make Casanova wonder WTF.   Here’s the problem.  Regardless of how much they lie to themselves and others, men do not know what women want.  They never did.  They’re never going to.  And that includes romance.  Yeah, yeah, yeah!  Men know all about the clichés: those moonlit walks everybody talks about, the candlelight, the roses and the hearts and angels’ music.  But when it gets down and dirty, single tear in the corner of the female eye, 99.99% of men are lost.  However, rather than admit that romance escapes them (like the last inmate going over the wall) they throw money at it.  This is a traditional male strategy that’s been backfiring since before Antony gave Cleopatra, Syria, Persia and all points east to make up for the annoying fact he wasn’t Julius Caesar.  Unfortunately, having once set these cash-eating bolas in motion, it was only a matter of time before they started spinning out of control.  These days, men are waking up on January 2nd, knowing that in six weeks, they better come up with something fantastic and poetic or ladylove is going to be pissed off until way past Labour Day.  And every guy older than Justin Bieber knows that that’s going to take some serious dinero.  It’s an anxiety trap that men have been building for themselves for the last decade, and it’s not pretty.

Therefore, since I am a public-spirited fellow and do not wish to see my brothers suffering needlessly, I’m going to let everybody in on a little secret.  I know what women want.  No, I’m not going to give that kind of information away free, but since I do have it, I can give all men a bit of advice.  Boys, put away your wallets and change your thinking.  Quit having a relationship, and try having a love affair.  Lovers don’t send bouquets of roses. (She’s not in love with the delivery man.)  They hand deliver a single flower.  Lovers don’t make reservations for romantic dinners, weeks in advance; they show up unexpectedly with a two hot dog lunch because it seems like a good idea at the time.  They don’t schedule together time with cooking classes, or dance lessons; they cook, they dance and they prefer the company of the one they love.  They don’t fit it in on Tuesday nights after yoga.  Yes, it’s a busy world, and there are kids and jobs and mortgages and insurance and on and on.  Big wow!  The truth remains that two people playing grab ass for a quick couple of minutes in the kitchen while the pasta’s cooking is worth more than any number of prefabricated date nights.  Lovers don’t have a script, and they don’t have a schedule.  They just enjoy each other’s company.

Tomorrow, guys, remember Valentine’s Day is for lovers – full stop.  It isn’t for people in “a relationship” who “have feelings for” each other.  That’s just a generous way of saying, “Maybe I don’t love you all that much.”  And of all the things that women want, that’s not one of them.

Talkin’ ’bout the i-Generation!

If you’re reading this, chances are good you were born in the 20th century.  If you weren’t, put this down, you precocious little beast, and go out and play.  For the rest of us, the 20th century was the cradle, the nursery, and probably most of the education of our existence.  As Herman Raucher once said, “It is our time, and we’ll never leave it.”  To us, it’s our life.  It’s not history; it’s memory.  The great events we witnessed are coupled with our birthdays, divorces, new cars and houses.  However, in a couple of hundred years (or maybe a thousand) when people look at our time, they’re going to draw a sharp line between the 20th and 21st centuries.  They’re going to separate us like exhibits in a museum.  Right now, we exist simultaneously in both centuries, like two pages of a book — totally different, yet intimately touching at every point and completely useless without the other.  In the future, however, we are going to be one thing and those precocious little beasts poking away at their iPads are going to be another.

As much as most people would like to deny it, we are the cumulative result of history.  There is a direct line from you and me back to the dim reaches of time, when the epic human struggle was merely to stand on our own two feet.  For example, if I wanted to be an intellectual smart-ass, I could trace the birth of our world back to shoddy obstetrics in the Imperial court of Prussia in 1859.  Or I could research (plagiarize is such a hard word) Paul Johnson and go back even further to a Frenchman’s hemorrhoids at the dawn of the 19th century.   My point, of course, is that there is no start to history — only final judgements passed on the results.

Our current 21st century’s i-Generation is a perfect example.  These are the kids who are adapting our world to Facebook and Google, one app at a time.  They’ve changed Wikipedia from a slightly tawdry secret to a tolerated research tool.  They are intent on sharing, not personal experience, but data with the world.  In the future, they will be judged in isolation.  Nobody will bother looking at the seeds and shallow roots provided for them.  Their obsession with consumption rather than creation will be seen as a character flaw – an aberration which was always destined to kill or cure our fat, wheezing planet.  Yet, the i-Generation didn’t just appear one day like Athena springing from the head of Zeus, nor is it even fully grown yet.  It still depends on Generation Y for its existence.

Generation Y! — those 80’s babies who can’t seem to decide if they are a stand-alone product of the Baby Boom or only just an echo.  Constantly harassed about the dangers awaiting them, these are the folks whose abilities have always outshone their underdeveloped egos.  They risk little and expect much.  Their literature is the graphic novel; their art, the expressive font; and their technological advances are made on the playing fields of virtual reality.  Generation Y stands alone — with its devices connected to the planet but they, themselves utterly isolated from it.  Not since the Dark Ages have humans been so devoid of contact with the outside world.  Generation Y lives and works in a series of separate technological villages, timidly toiling like Copeland’s microserfs, afraid to venture beyond their firewalls.  But they, too, did not arrive fully formed like a Botticelli Venus rising from the ocean’s foam.  They are the children of Generation X.

Generation X, the first generation of the Age of Entertainment.  They showed up just in time to see America leave the Moon, never to return, and George Lucas unleash his Jedi to battle the Death Star.  Raised on Sesame Street and Cocoa Puff cartoons, Generation X has never understood why the world doesn’t play nice like its television friends do.  Completely overshadowed, Gen X was forgotten and left to fend for itself.  As it saw the brave old world bending under the weight of its uber-ego parents, it could only step back in fear of the imminent collapse of power, oil and profit and seek salvation in Spielberg and Scorsese.  Still, we must remember Generation X was never abandoned like the solitary child of the goddess Hera, twice tossed from heaven. It was born into the rarified air of the Baby Boom.  It cut its teeth on impending disaster, with only discredited institutions and disassembled Gods to comfort it.

And so it goes; back and back, each generation shaped by the wants and fears of the ones preceding it.  If history judges the early 21th century harshly, it will be because the i-Generation believes that clicking Like on Facebook can change the world.  Yet, it is we, from the 20th century, who taught them that.  I-Gen is the product of two generations of constraint and constriction.  The Xs and Ys watched the world of their parents and grandparents falter, assailed on all sides by everything from financial ruin to pandemic disease.  So they taught their children to be wary, to keep their distance and to “Stay strong.”

John F. Kennedy spoke of his generation (what we call “The Greatest Generation”) as “born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.”  I don’t have many regrets, but I do regret not being able to hear what the i-Generation will eventually say about itself.

Self-Help and the Modern World

Have you ever noticed that people who buy Self-Help books never buy just one?  They always have three or four of them kicking around.  Usually they’re all on the same subject, but sometimes — and this is really scary — they’re all over the map.  There are people (we all know them) who could use a little help, self or otherwise.  There are also people who genuinely want to improve themselves; their outlook, their personality, their world, in general.  There’s nothing wrong with that!  In fact, most of us could do with a tuneup every once in a while.  However, this is the basis of the Self-Help industry.  They know, that we know, that there’s something wrong with us.  All they have to do is sell us the cure.  And that’s the reason people buy so many Self-Help books: they are a cure — that doesn’t work.

Self improvement is not a recent innovation.  There is probably something called A Slave’s Guide to Better Cowering written in hieroglyphics on a papyrus scroll, buried in the Nile Delta somewhere.  However, Self-Help is less than a hundred years old.  Its rapid development into a multimillion dollar industry runs exactly parallel with the development of our contemporary society.

There are two reasons Self-Help has become such a lucrative business.  First, we are losing our sense of family, and secondly we have lost our sense of community.

As we head off into the 21st century, our homes are no longer multigenerational.  Our parents and grandparents do not return to the family in old age.  Increasingly, they are warehoused, first in retirement communities, and then in care facilities.  Likewise, as most families consist of one or more working adults, childcare is outsourced, first to Daycare then the public school system.  Although these may be excellent institutions, they simply do not have a personal, vested interest in either education or development (beyond immediate behavioural problems.)  In other words, it’s a lot easier to fly right if you have grandma looking over your shoulder — or Dad — because they have an emotional attachment to you and pretty much everything you do.  You are the centre of their world, and they genuinely want to help you find your way around.  Likewise, as you grow older, your emotional connection to your parents and grandparents is strengthened by, if nothing else, proximity.  Nobody in a multigenerational family is left on their own to fend for themselves.  It isn’t in anybody’s emotional best interest.   Just as an aside, I know there are excellent care facilities everywhere with expertly trained staff, and I cast no aspersions on them.  However, at the end of the day, nobody wants you to succeed at life as much as grandma and grandpa do — and that lasts forever.  As we continue to replace the functioning parts of our multigenerational families with multi-task, care-for-hire personal assistants, we are turning ourselves into individual entities, relying on the kindness of strangers for our well-being.

It works the same for neighbourhoods.  In the old days, for better or for worse, the multigenerational family actually cared what the neighbours thought.  This was simply because they knew who the neighbours were.  They didn’t merely share the back fence; they shared community values and responsibilities.  Neighbours were involved with the comings and goings of the neighbourhood, which included Bob’s diet or Janet’s quit smoking plan.  People were available to help, and they did.  In essence, neighbours were all in it together.  However, as that community disappears, we are not only becoming physically isolated in the world; we are now increasingly psychologically alone.

The mantras of the Self-Help crowd are “Show personal responsibility” and “Take ownership of your problems.”  This is just a sugar-coated way of saying, “Good luck!  You’re on your own!”  Since we no longer believe we can rely on the traditional community to support us, we go looking elsewhere for help.  Invariably, this means throwing money at the problem; either through professional assistance or Self-Help.  And there we are again, back at that one-size-fits-all guide to personal growth, wealth and happiness: the Self-Help book.

Somehow, I find it impossible to believe that somebody sitting in their converted laundry room cranking out 800 words a day, has any connection to my quest to quit procrastinating.  They may have a good plan.  It may have worked wonders for them.   However, unless they know my heavy schedule of avoidance behaviour, I’m afraid they’re going to come up short.  By the same token (and I’m sure this worked for you, too) no three-chapter discussion of “How to Dress for Success” ever trumped my mother telling me to wash my hair and put on a tie.

Sometimes, the best self-help comes with some sharp-tongued maternal assistance.