It’s All The Same Horror

At work I’m reviewing resumes and applications for a position on my staff.

Back when this blog started, eleven years ago, I had just had the company I had worked for for 30+ years shut down and I was looking for a new position myself.

Twenty-five years ago, as a single dad, I got back into the dating game and looked for a new partner.

Now we’re about three years into a search for a new house, having looked at countless Zillow listings, and now ramping up the intensity of the search by actually getting out and looking at potential houses.

It occurred to me today that all of these endeavours, house hunting, dating, and job hunting are just different facets of the same horrible game.

We’re making life-altering decisions which are fraught with peril, where a mistake can have massive negative consequences but the correct choice can have equally massive positive results. Yet we are working in the dark with insufficient or even incorrect information, hoping for the best, praying for the very best, and terrified of the worst. It would be fantastic to just get out of the game, to be safe, but that doesn’t work either.

So it’s like the Three Laws of Thermodynamics, which can be colloquially phrased as, “You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game.”

The potential upside is what makes it worthwhile, at least in theory. The chance to build a team, to have someone who will have your back, to be stronger as a team than the individuals in it, to have better tools and more capabilities.

Just be careful if you make the mistake of turning on the news…

A hell of a day, wasn’t it? Speaking of “horror.” But today we might have won one, despite what’s being said tonight by Faux News and the GOP “leadership.”

So we need to celebrate our victories, even if they’re not 100% complete and to the satisfaction of our dreams of a better world. We celebrate and we move on.

We can’t get out of the game. But we can keep playing hard and fighting the horrors.