Author: Vito Michienzi

I hear this expression pop up in conversation people have about their workplace or social groups. It points to this 70s-early 2000s motif that people have these super cliques and cast out or ignore those they don’t want a part of them. 

However, my observations in a high school over the past fifteen years show something different. 

High school, and the adolescent mind, has shifted a lot. Yes, some things will never change (and I don’t think we’d want them to), but the high school clique experience peaked around the time Mean Girls was released in theatres. 

Yes, students still have their groups and there’s still bullying, but the number of students who feel close to their parents, or consider them a role model, would make the 70s adage of not trusting anyone over 30 a laughable ideal. Then there’s the athletes who show up to Math club, the packed classrooms of Dungeons & Dragons games and the group chats for all graduates to participate in. 

On that note, the biggest drama that consistently happens revolve around prom dresses. Well, that and relationships. 

High school is a much different experience and if we’re still feeling our current situations reminds us of our own experience, it’s probably pointing to the stunted maturity of the people involved.

If you really want to be insulting, you might want to tell those people to grow up and act like kids today. Either that or wear the same outfit as one of them. 

A high school friend of mine once told me about a survival week he completed with air cadets. Equipped with nothing but a pocket knife and two matches, he had to survive in the wilderness for a week with the understanding he could give up at any time. 

Although impressive in its own right, what struck me was his reflection on what made the ordeal difficult:

“It wasn’t that you were hungry, or thirsty, or tired. It was boredom.”

He then went on to describe his ordeals, including giving names to sticks and having full fledged conversations with them. It should be noted that “Cast Away” with Tom Hanks hadn’t been released yet, so that movie made perfect sense to me when it came out. 

I find this to be a pertinent point often missed in survival groups or post-apocalyptic motifs. Sure, you can engineer a shelter, equipment and find sustenance, but so few people are mentally equipped to deal with isolation for extended periods of time. 

This presents a few options:

Learn to be bored, without the aid of any communication, mediums of entertainment or movement through populated areas

or

Strive to build solid communities with an interdependence on each other, recognizing survival isn’t possible without them. 

Unless we do more of the latter now, we will be forced to do more of the former. 

There’s this adage that when you’re young, you have your whole life ahead of you and there’s no need to worry about rushing into anything. Here’s the problem:

Tomorrow is not guaranteed to anyone.

I think it’s more fair to say that more opportunities will come your way when you’re young and uninhibited, but to meander aimlessly?

Unless there’s lessons to be learned in that meandering, all we’re really doing is delaying the maturation into adulthood. 

There’s always plenty of time, until there isn’t.

Consider the home you live in. 

It requires constant care just to maintain a level of comfort to keep being there. It’s also done in the anticipation of guests (maybe) and understanding this is the place you want to relax in. 

While prevention is always the better route, any repairs need to be attended to immediately. Otherwise, the problem exacerbates to the point of a costly overhaul. Of course, this doesn’t even account for those random events such as fire or floods that would require a complete rebuilding of whatever was lost. 

But we consider it worth it because it’s still our home and we need to live in it. We go to great lengths to take care of it and make it a place we want to be, even though it’s still just made of fragile building materials that are ephemeral. 

Yet, the home we should really be taking care of is the body we inhabit.

This is the home we live in for our entire life and while advances in medicine are allowing us to change out some of the parts, it can’t be replaced. Repairing it is tough, especially as we age, and ignoring the maintenance always comes back to hurt us. 

Yet, just like the dwellings we live in, we must strive to make our home a comfortable place to be. We should want to sit with it, enjoy it and every so often, put it to the test to see what it’s capable of.

And just like your dwelling, your body is going to function differently over time and what you need from it will change as circumstances change. However, maintenance is still needed. 

Don’t ignore the one home you can’t replace. 

A paradox of time travel, more like an issue, is this concept of the butterfly effect. Even the most minuscule of actions could seriously alter the future in some way and we could never be sure of the effect. 

Movies, shows, books, comics… this hypothetical situation plays out everywhere.  While it makes for fun musings, I want to consider another adjacent idea. 

Suppose this is true and any alterations to the past, no matter how minor, have serious consequences. Well, then what do our current actions do for the future?

Eventually we will get to a future that extends from our actions at some point, so what actions are you committing today? If even the smallest gesture or act can alter the world of tomorrow in a big way, wouldn’t it be wise to do as many good actions as possible?

Or maybe you don’t have to concern yourself with the grand displays and focus on what’s in front of you, knowing it does have a big impact in the grand scheme of things. To be honest, it’s probably the only thing we can handle right now anyway. 

Being a high school teacher allows for a glimpse into the evolving lexicon of teenage expression. While I don’t pretend to keep up, nor care to in most cases, they have one particular phrase that I love:

Get out and touch grass, bro.

Put away the devices, get off social media, turn off the news and head outside. Go talk with your neighbours, explore a nearby trail, pick up that hobby that’s been gathering dust—anything that doesn’t keep you glued to the marketed gloom and doom. 

While fun to just say, this expression also points to a bigger consideration we often fail to realize in our always connected world and that’s simply that what we need to touch base with reality. The filtered sound bytes and rage filled algorithms promoting a minuscule portion of the population who are stuck in an echo chamber can blind us to the fact that most of the world just wants to live out their days. 

On summer days, if you sit out front of your place with a cooler of drinks beside you and invite neighbours to grab a seat, they will. During the winters here, if you’re stuck in the snow, people run out to help you push your vehicle.

Sometimes we need to remember the world isn’t as divided at the personal level. We certainly have our differences, but we rarely engage in tribal warfare over it. 

These divisions are games played by psychopathic power mongers who do this for their own gratification and narcissistic sense of self-worth. Please don’t mistake this for hyperbole as Jon Ronson wrote a book called The Psychopath Test, which illustrates those who rise to levels of power (business, government, etc.) tend to be charismatic, egocentric and good at manipulating others.

This is also why I don’t care for which colour or party a politician says they are—they’re all playing the same game and cheating the system just as much as the next person.

While it’s tough to completely ignore what’s happening, we have to keep in mind that our biology was only wired to care for what happened within our tribe. At most, this represents 150 people, which is infinitesimally smaller and less frequent than the entire world all the time. It’s also key to remember our media is only interested in showing extreme outliers and catastrophizing every event because that’s what sells. It wants to convince you this is everyone, everywhere, all the time.

The reality is we need some wilful ignorance to protect our own health.

As I tell my students at the beginning of my ethics course, some people just suck. But if you cling to the belief that everyone sucks, your whole life will be filtered through a negative lens of paranoia, bitterness and anger. 

Pick your battles, then go touch grass and enjoy the days.

“Ambition is a sanctioned drug, that society wants to see us overdose on.”

• Pursuit of Wonder

In 2009, I released a co-written book called “How to Slack Your Way to Success.” While juvenile in its execution (we all have to grow up sometime), it’s remarkable how relevant its message would be for today. 

I was part of a generation that grew up with the constant messaging that we could be whatever we wanted and that we should all be striving to change the world. My friends have aptly coined this “greatness syndrome” and its effects are damaging because it cranks your ambition to unhealthy levels while causing massive anxiety for not achieving your unrealistic goals. 

Steve Jobs didn’t help temper this when he told a graduating class to leave their dent in the universe, which was echoed by every person looking to offer guidance to others. 

Slack Your Way to Success was the antithesis to this idea. A real push back:

You only have so much time and energy, so put your focus into a few things and ignore the rest. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with being a content, nameless person in this world who simply enjoys their life. While that core message stands, we would add an addendum that says to never settle for less than you’re capable. 

Unfortunately, the examples we hold up and the messaging today has skyrocketed the impetus for greatness syndrome today. People are made to feel like “sheep,” failures or on the road to success (you never get there because the goal posts keep moving). All it really does is make people feel invisible, which is why so many attempt to justify their existence through hollow likes on social media. 

Guess what? It’s okay. 

Very few ever end up in a history book (and often, you don’t want to appear there anyway). The world will keep changing and all you gotta do is ask yourself some questions:

Did I do my best?
Did I enjoy my time?
Did I attempt to make the world a little better, no matter how small of a gesture?

You can’t find an ambition greater than that. 

“There’ll be time to rest when you’re dead.”

That particular quote has been attributed to a few people throughout history, including Catholic saints, Greek philosophers and Robert De Niro, but it always brushed me the wrong way.

The idea of rest being a reward, instead of a requirement, strikes me as one of the worst and poorly executed ideas to take root in human culture. And one doesn’t have to look too far to see some horrendous ideas we’ve been privy to throughout history.

Going right back to antiquity, the gift of the Genesis creation story is it showcases this omniscient, all-powerful Creator of the Universe who rests on the seventh day. This gave birth to the Sabbath, and ultimately the weekend, because if God needs to rest, then we sure as hell better do it as well.

Take a look at what all our advances in biology have shown:

Best thing you can do for your physical and mental health? Good night’s sleep.
Want to grow stronger? Rest your muscles for a day.
Need your brain to be more focused? Rest it for a while.

The closest activities we have to the benefits of rest are walking and proper nutrition.

Yet, we persist in this insane idea that rest should be something that happens later. We’ve been duped into the damaging ideology that we should be constantly moving, hustling, working until…

we die?

Consider how quickly people age when they retire from their workplaces and have nothing to keep them occupied. Having never learned to rest, or even pursue hobbies for pure leisure, they often find death knocking at their door pretty quickly. Understanding there are various other reasons this happens, the sudden lack of purpose in their lives is damaging.

My biggest angst is the influx of technology, all designed to help us do things faster and easier to “free up time.” Yet, instead of completing tasks in a fraction of the time and using the rest to enjoy life, we’ve accepted an accelerated work schedule that now requires us to create tools to free up time for the tools we’re already using that were meant to free up time in the first place! I mean, instead of implementing “AI Responses to emails to get through them quickly,” maybe we should ask why we’re even fielding so many emails in the first place.

Now, it is understandable why this idea percolated in our consciousness.

People who rest have time to think. They have to time to connect with each other. To re-align themselves. They have time to recognize their life isn’t meant to be indentured to others, that a bigger picture exists and life is more than being a busy bee (who, by the way, only live weeks to a few months).

The most dangerous idea that could come out of all of this is they could fall in line with the existentialists and create their own purpose in life, rather than accepting the one that’s been given to them.

All this would be horrible to those who have tried to control the narrative of our lives.

When it comes time to do the work, do it.

But when it comes time to rest, take it. Defend it. Protect it.

And don’t let anyone make you feel guilty for it.

This requires a great deal of humility on my part and I’m happy to eat that pie as I delve into matters that have weighed on me recently. 

Growing up, I was a shy and grossly insecure kid who wanted nothing more than to be accepted by others. I was extremely hard on myself and could never live up to my own expectations, which is why I could never accept compliments as they came—even though I cherished them. 

My social decorum was largely dictated by my observations of others who I felt had a better handle on how to naturally be around people. To say I didn’t know how to read a room would be a gross understatement and if I were to dictate my inner dialogue at the time, someone might accuse me of being on the spectrum.

The thing is, I was socially awkward, but spent great swaths of energy hiding it. It was a complete facade, but the veneer was transparent and you all saw through it. 

Yet, despite seeing my act, you still enjoyed the show. While I interpreted everything through a negative lens and made the worst assumptions of what you thought of me, you treated me very well. 

In fact, you were overly supportive and encouraging. I couldn’t see it at the time because I was stuck in my own world of inadequacy, but you were really amazing towards me. 

When people speak about advantages in life, I recognize now I was miles ahead of others not because of any financial birthright, but by the incredible people who surrounded me. You encouraged, pushed and inspired me to pursue life to its fullest potential and despite recognizing it decades later, I still want to say thank you. 

To my English teachers, who I always held in high esteem but held contempt towards, please forgive my misguided anger. At the mention of me wanting to be a writer, you encouraged me instead to pursue computers and I always held that as tinder to fuel my writing goals. What I recognize now is you weren’t swaying me away from the written word. You simply didn’t see how deeply buried that passion was versus the passion I was visibly showing for the computer field. 

To the few who actually bullied and made fun of me, I’ve let that go a long time ago. You don’t get any space in my life or thoughts, but I do hope you’ve matured. If you haven’t or continue to relish in those days, then please politely go perform extremities upon yourself.

To those random strangers who would engage me in the wildest conversations, you certainly made my upbringing interesting as it taught me the wild variance of ways people see the world. I always wondered why you felt comfortable just chatting with me, but I appreciate the kindness in the exchange. 

Some people had it real tough growing up and while I faced my own challenges, I think it’s fair to say the only tough part of my early years was never being able to get out of my own way. And now that I’ve removed that roadblock from my existence, I finally see you all there cheering me on. 

For that, I love you and I thank you.