Tag Archives: work

Cigar-smoking attention-seeking hedonists, it’s who we are

Posted on by
4

When one of my daughters was 12, it was time to teach her the facts of life. I took her out on the front porch to teach her how to smoke a cigar.

I didn’t intend to teach the girl any other facts of life, of course. As a dad, that wasn’t my job.

Like all cigar smokers, and especially the occasional kind, I treasured this big ritual. You light the cigar in a certain way, which isn’t as hard as they pretend – the thing is designed to burn, you know. Then you keep it lit, which isn’t hard, either – it’s not like keeping smoked salmon lit. Then you puff on it, which is harder than it sounds – it’s not natural to put smoke in your mouth, and it’s even less natural to pretend you enjoy it.

Like other rituals, cigar smoking is best if you have an audience. It’s something like a preacher in front of his congregation or a professor in front of his class. It’s not as much fun all alone.

In my case, it was a dad in front of his daughter. A middle-aged blow-hard in front of a captive audience with the pretense of educating and the goal of impressing. Sort of like that preacher and that professor.

In the ritual of cigar smoking, the highest achievement is the miracle of blowing smoke rings. They look difficult, and they are.  

A half hour into our dad/daughter porch lesson on cigar smoking, I started blowing smoke rings. Big beautiful ones. I wasn’t able to make shapes other than rings – no pirate ships or dragons – but the rings were pretty good ones. The daughter was duly impressed.

Ah, but smoke rings pit two of cigar-smoking rules against one another. The first rule is, smoke rings are cool. The second rule is, don’t inhale. (Bill Clinton’s smoking rituals come to mind, but that’s another column.)

You see, a smoke ring requires a fair quantity of smoke, sometimes more than a mouthful. But if you inhale cigar smoke into your lungs, well, bad things can happen.

And they did. After 20 minutes of impressive smoke rings on the porch, I went down to the lawn and puked my guts out. To this day, my daughter credits me with an ingenious lesson to teach her the perils of smoking.

If only I’d been that ingenious, rather than that stupid. But I’ll take the credit. To this day, the daughter doesn’t smoke, anything.

And so, here we are in America circa 2026, blowing smoke rings. We don’t call them that, of course. Just as “smoke rings” is a euphemism for inhaling into your lungs the hot ash of burning vegetable compost in order to make a show of a small and arbitrary talent, we’ve invented euphemisms.  

There’s the euphemism of “Balancing Work with Life.” This euphemism is more tempting than breathing burning vegetable compost, because it treats work as a vice and laziness as a virtue.

But this nice-sounding euphemism (who can object to balance?) is designed to obscure a basic human weakness: laziness. A corollary could be “The Road to Happiness is Paved with Pleasure.”  

But it’s not so. Ironically, but predictably, people seduced by this notion that pleasure is the road to happiness are invariably quite unhappy. Doubly ironic is that they blame their unhappiness on their meager work, and so they double down on their goal (to the extend they have goals) of doing less of it.

They get a lot of emotional support in that quest. Many people who “work” eight months a year, to whom we entrust much of our children’s daytime lives, teach and profess this notion that work is unhealthy or even evil for the purpose of validating their own unhappy choices.   

And then there’s the euphemism of “women’s liberation.” Invented by men, this one pretends that free sex for men somehow liberates women.

Yeah, it “liberates” women from men who help raise children, it “liberates” women from men who hang around after the pregnancy occurs, and it “liberates” women from men who are still in bed with them the next morning.  

It would be inequitable for us to forget “equity.” That’s the euphemism that says it’s unfair when the consequences to a person correlate with his efforts and achievements.

And the euphemism of “gender affirmation” as if unhappy men can be transformed into happy women by lopping off their genitals.

And the euphemism of “DEI” as if racial discrimination is right, not wrong, so long as the chosen races are the right ones, not the wrong ones.

All this euphemistic pleasure-seeking and virtue-signaling has replaced values that humanity held dear for millennia – work, responsibility, dedication, duty, love, commitment, and, yes, truth, justice and beauty.

It makes me want to run out to the lawn to puke my guts out.

Poor people have too much money

Posted on by
6

What do the following have in common?

  • Sports gambling
  • Prescription drug TV advertisements
  • Thousand-dollar concert tickets
  • Monster pickup trucks
  • Monster RVs
  • Monster waistlines
  • Monster wives
  • Monster children
  • Cigarettes
  • Soda pop
  • Fingernails
  • Credit card debt
  • Lottery tickets
  • Fast food
  • Pot
  • Tattoos
  • Expensive phones
  • Fast food

The answer is this: The consumers of these goods and services are often relatively poor. Poor people are bad at both making money and spending money. They make too little of it and they spend too much of it – on things that are wasteful or even harmful to themselves and to society. Much of what they spend is on credit cards with 22% interest rates.

It’s as if their poor spending habits and poor earning habits share a common cause. I wonder what that might be.

As for the poor earning habits of poor people, I can’t think of easy ways to help them. But as for their poor spending habits, I can.  

Make it harder to buy some of these things. Some of them should be banned, others should be heavily taxed, and still others should be socially shunned.

The ones we should ban include sports gambling, prescription drug TV ads, cigarettes, lottery tickets and pot. Those things impose a burden not just on the consumers of them, but also on society at large. The cost to taxpayers for Medicare and Medicaid treatment of diseases related to cigarettes and pot, for example, amounts to billions of dollars.

The ones we should heavily tax are expensive concert tickets, soda pop, tattoos, monster pickup trucks and monster RVs. Those items entail no societal benefit. Some, such as soda pop, are a real detriment to society. Their nutritional value is worse than zero.

The ones that should be shunned are fake fingernails, monster waistlines, monster wives and monster children.

Until those bans, taxes and shuns happen, and even after, expect to hear the incessant whining of society’s losers that they can’t afford everything they want to buy because wealth is shared unequally and – gasp! – inequitably.

Expect to hear the complaints of Generation Z – which has air conditioning, luxurious automobiles, the world at their fingertips in magical phones, ten paid sick days along with additional “mental health” days, paternity, maternity and no-ternity leave, four weeks of vacation and eleven paid holidays including Juneteenth and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and shelves of cheap trophies for having participated in whatever – that life is very tough for them.

They work sooooo hard, they claim that they need to cut back. They need to balance what they call “work,” which is really half-assed, part-time fooling around, with what they call “life,” which is buying foolish things and endless meaningless recreation.

The end result is that they fail at both “work” and “life.”

I first visited Europe when I was 29. It was on a four-day business trip that stretched into nine. I worked all but one day. I didn’t see the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or Big Ben or the Roman Coliseum. Instead, I saw the inside of a suburban office building where I negotiated a deal against four hard-bitten, tag-teaming, middle-aged Germans working for Siemens AG.

In contrast, my children had been to Europe half a dozen times, all on vacations, by the time they were 29. Their negotiations with Germans were limited to discussing chocolate cake.  

I’m glad to see that my children came out splendidly despite the spoils of German confections, and that I seldom hear complaints from them about how tough things are. I wish I could say the same about the rest of their generation.

If you strive for “work-life balance” you’ll fail at both

Posted on by
9

This Labor Day, the new buzz is about balancing work with life.

It comes at a time when fewer people are employed than before the pandemic, and many of those who are employed are gaming the system by “working” from home in their PJs while surfing the internet and doing house work (oops, no, they pay others to clean their house). Productivity figures still lag pre-pandemic times.

Weirdly, they think even their part-time, disengaged, goal-less so-called work, in the absence of any accountability or supervision, is too much. It interferes with what they call life.

I think they protest too much. They’re not really trying to reduce their work – they’ve already done that. What they’re really doing is trying to justify what they’ve done, or, rather, failed to do.

They do this by glorifying laziness. They deem lazy people like themselves morally superior to hard-working people. The hard-working people just have work, but they – they! – have a . . . drum roll . . . LIFE!

Continue reading →