The Path Not Taken

We make concessions for a variety of reasons: when we don’t want to disappoint someone, when we don’t want to be seen as selfish, when we want to be ‘dutiful’, and sometimes, when we’ve given up on changing the world in either the grandest or slightest ways. It is when we’ve decided that it’s not worth it or too difficult to be contrary to the workings of the world.

I learned how easy it is to lie to yourself. How easy it is to tell yourself that “it’s worth it for the money.”

I was recently hired for a job, an opportunity I fell into unexpectedly. Lately, I had been scanning Craig’s List for some kind of light part-time work to take advantage of the holiday seasonal hiring blitz. There was a listing for a seasonal position in the menswear department of a national high-end department store. I clicked on the link to the online application and sent it in. Within the hour I received an email requesting that I schedule a phone interview with them… by clicking their link. I did so. Within an hour of the phone interview I was sent an email requesting an in-person interview to be scheduled by clicking on the attached link. The interview seemed to go better than even the interviewer had expected, because the next I knew I was being offered a full-time position selling their designer collections. It was a more prestigious position as far as retail goes, with a respectable salary and commission rate.

I guess I was flattered by the offer and agreed to meet the department manager, who was responsible for the ultimate decision. I met with her the next day. It went well and she scheduled for me an interview with the store manager the following day. I was impressed with the level of humanity in the questions, something that I hadn’t experienced in previous retail job interviews – “Would you consider yourself lucky?” My answer, by the way, was, “Yes, I do! I’m married to the love of my life and together we have a modest, yet full life, making the most of every moment.”

Upon returning home from the interview with the store manager, I found a voicemail on the phone from the department manager. I called her back and found her ‘excited’ to offer me a position on her team. I accepted. Wow, my highest paying job to date and the first job I’ve ever had that provided full BENEFITS. Benefits – it’s what everyone wants isn’t it? I was feeling pretty good about myself because of those benefits. I never really cared about them before. Somehow (by the grace of God perhaps) I had gotten by without them. But it’s a golden ring in this world and I finally have a grasp on it.

I was scheduled for 3 full days of training the following week. I was impressed by the professionalism, the enthusiasm, and the warmth of the company and everyone who represented it. This was a tight ship. I was proud to become a part of it. I felt honoured that they chose to include me in it. In a well-produced training video I watched in my class of new hires, someone said that the long-standing success of the company has been due to “the quality of people” they hire. Quality? That’s me!

Of course, in the back of my mind I knew I was being flattered and sold a pitch which I in turn was to sell to my customers. But, man, it was effective. There were moments when I felt that I, like many of the employees I had met, could give my life to this company. After all, they did seem happy and well-adjusted here. This must be the most humane retail corporation in America! They don’t employ sweatshops in third world countries, they use recyclable paper and plastic products in their cafes, and they offer benefits to their employees. Oh, yeah, and if they like me, then it's definitely a good company.

Then, during this first day of training, the store manager, by whom I’d previously been interviewed, addresses the class. She’s a very warm, unpretentious, intelligent woman. In her inspiring speech about her long, storied history with the company, how she came to “fall in love” with it, and how it has brought her to this place of success and satisfaction of her intellect and creativity, she mentioned how she had started out on a different path. She was a PR and political science major in college with aspirations to “change the world,” as she put it. She wanted to work with political parties, election campaigns and write speeches, until she discovered that this world that she wanted to change wasn’t a particularly amenable to the changes she wanted to make. She mentioned the dishonesty of politics, for example, and said, “I’m too happy” to be a part of it. So she gave up her dream of changing the world and found her way to this retailer who made her the success she is today.

I was pumped. I too could be a success at this!

On to day two of training:
I’m an attentive student. Teachers have always loved me for the way I was unwavering in my attentiveness. They have an unfailing audience in me. And I'm sure I was selling them on what a star employee I was eventually going to be. We were learning the cash registers – exciting stuff for 6 hours. After the class, each of the new hires were to go to our respective departments and ‘shadow’ one of the other salespeople.

I could go on here about how unimpressed I was with the work ethic of one of the salespeople in the department. The Teacher’s Pet/Company Man in me would have said, “This is an outrage. She’s not following the steps of selling!” I’ve done so much retail – stemming 16 years, I recently counted – that I know the drill. I know what works. But now, in retrospect, I wonder if she was just being a bit more self-honest than most of the people in that store. She was there for her paycheque, using the company as much as she felt she was being used by it. I guess she figured that if they like it, they'll buy it. She wasn't going to push. “She should give up her job to someone who would appreciate it,” we might say. “Jobs aren’t easy to come by and shouldn’t be taken for granted.”

I’m not sure I have a blanket contradiction for that. I just knew that it wasn’t for me either.

On that shift I also observed the top seller of the department. I liked him. He smiles with ease and looks you in the eye when you speak. I could see why this company hired him and why he’s so successful. He seems very genuine. And maybe he is. I can’t say.

One of his biggest customers came in. She comes in about once I week, he told me. Drops money like it's going out of style (and God forbid if she was ever caught out-of-style). Loves to talk to whoever will listen. She was clearly very attached to the salesperson – “He’s mine,” she told me. (After she left, he told me, "Aw... they cling to anyone.") He brought out an Armani coat she had purchased. She tried it on and we ooh’d and aahh’d about how marvelous it made her look. She really wasn’t particularly attractive – all her money wasn’t really serving her in the way she thought. Her clothes were clearly expensive, but verging on tacky. Each item represented the latest in trends, and were even the most knocked out versions of them. (Paige Denim jeans with the elaborate embroidered design on both rear pockets? Unnecessary. An unnecessary design feature which added value. Possibly an extra hundred dollars to the ticket price.) She spoke of a Fendi bag she had found in her closet, tags still attached. She had forgotten about it and returned it to the store. “I wasn’t even excited when I found it.”


These lonely women would be coming to me too for retail therapy, a form of therapy that is indisputably ineffective. But the way we flatter them convinces them otherwise. So they keep coming back for our acknowledgement, dropping thousands of dollars on things they don’t need, just to hear us ooh and aahh for a few minutes.

I really want to help others. This does not help. I think it causes more harm than good. It is lying to them. If I think it’s okay – after all, I’m giving them what they want - then I’m lying to myself as well.

The job also would have taken me over an hour to get to and over an hour to come back from, leaving me with only three barely-waking hours before I start the sleep-work cycle over again. The job is supposed to enhance my quality of life. If it fails to do that then it defeats the purpose and not worth the time. Besides, I live in the city for a couple of big reasons: to keep my carbon footprint low and to be close to the things of the city I enjoy.

In the end, it was the store manager’s speech which resonated with me, but in ways contrary to what she intended. It struck me that this job, this department store, is where those who have given up on ‘changing the world’ go. I didn’t want to be one of them. I still believe I can change the world.

"All the world's a stage" and Agency... a Paradox?

Seeking the approval of the other is not to be confused with love of the other or the selflessness of satisfying the other. To love another you simply just have to love the other. It shouldn’t matter whether this person reciprocates the love. To seek the approval of this person is therefore the effort to satisfy one’s own ego.

When we appropriate the interests, the values, and the actions of the other, we divest ourselves of our own unique selfhood. In doing this we surrender our own agency as a uniquely thinking, feeling, and doing individual and assume those of someone else. We do this with the expectation of earning the approval of the person(s) from whom we’ve derived our sense of self: the other’s identity becomes our identity. In our sloth, our intellectual laziness, we see this as a sure and easy way to be accepted, acknowledged, liked, loved, etc. It is most definitely an easier way than loving, which is an investment that entails risk, effort, sacrifice, generosity, and possibly pain.

Therefore, seeking the approval of this other is not an act of love or even admiration. It is an act of aggression. It is aggressive because a) as explained above, there is no love involved in this modus operandi, b) you are presenting and inauthentic self to this other person, and c) when this mode fails to bring you ultimate satisfaction, you will have someone to blame for it. By surrendering your agency, you surrender responsibility for yourself and the other person.

The irony is that if this mode successfully yields satisfaction for you, you will not responsible for it. It will be a success in spite of you. However, if this mode fails to yield satisfaction to all parties involved, it will be because of you. You will be responsible for the failure. This is because each of us has our own particular role to play in this life. This is what Shakespeare has meant by his “all the world’s a stage” aphorism. We each have a part to play in humanity shared endeavour to make this world a better place, to make paradise possible for us all.

"Ego-love" (not to be confused with love-of-self)

When someone loves their ego, they are unable to truly love anyone else. For this person self-interest will always trump the best interests of others. This is a learned tendency. The ego has learned to feed itself in times of starvation. In other words, when this person was unable to feel the love of others – particularly very significant people in her younger years – she has learned to compensate for this lack by loving herself above others. All the energy of her love had become self-directed, and she continues to move through life in this mode.

The one’s who have gone through life loving their ego most become the most difficult for others to love. The love of ego is a very durable condition. But there is a cure, an antidote to the durable ego, and it’s to shower this person with a love like they’ve never known before, one that is endless and without conditions. To love the ego-lover in this way can be an exercise in frustration, pain, and discouragement. Therefore it requires the loving one to be as ego-free as he can possibly muster. The ego-lover is the last person we should give up on – they are the reason why love and lovers exist. It is not love if we’re doing it for what we get out of it. It is meant to be given. Also, the condition of ego-love is highly contagious and must be extinguished wherever we find it.

Restore to them their naturally divine ability to love by being an example of it. Restore their faith in love and humanity.

Love and Practicality

‘Practicality’ and ‘love’ haven’t been known to keep one another company. Love is typically thought of as existing in the absence of practicality, as though love is beyond rationale, even devoid of usefulness. It has often been thought of as something to be enjoyed, a luxury, a bonus to this life. “It’s nice, if you’ve got it.” “It makes life sweeter.”

But I’m convinced that there can be no practicality without love and no love without practicality. They are necessarily codependent. One cannot exist without the other.

Let’s first look at practicality as requisite for love: love is more than a feeling. It is the sustained act of loving, however unwieldy. It is the continual practice of love, come what may. This, therefore, implies that the practicality of love – love in practice – is impossible without faith. Also, faith, by its nature, is unending. There is no such thing as ‘faith to a point’. If you have it, you have it all the way. It’s not ‘faith’ otherwise.

As for the inverse: one needs love in order to be practical, if ‘practical’ means doing what one can do in order to live. Yes, we do need love in order to survive. Anything – every little and big thing - we do must be done with the purpose of improving another’s life (whether it’s that of a husband, a child, a parent, a neighbour, a member of one’s community, or the community as a whole). If the deed is motivated by this desire, then it is motivated by love. This is authentic; it is part of authenticity of self. To do something for the purpose of only making one’s own life better is not a deed motivated by love, but rather by ego. Allegiance to the ego is not authentic. It is to worship of a ‘false idol’ (because you cannot be you without another, without the Other).

To try to persevere without love, the authenticity of self, is to exist without really living. If there is no authentic purpose, there is no meaning. Without this authenticity, we are merely the living dead - zombies. It is this ability to love which gives us our soul; it is our soul which gives us this ability. It’s not just what fills our lungs or what courses through our veins that makes us live. It’s this sense of purpose.

Destiny eventually reveals whether or not your motives were pure. It’s the ultimate litmus test of love.