Dinkets for Lorna Doone

There was a time I frequently fielded calls from the CEO of a company I worked for in the middle of the night. He was, and by contemporaneous accounts, remains one of those self-described luminaries^[1] who, rather than work through issues for any amount of time, instead operate in flashes of brilliance. His time, being of course extraordinarily valuable, he would impulsively call his peon du jour and rattle off ideas for as long as could be considered tolerable. When this first started happening to me, I was early in my career and found it exciting, or even intoxicating. I could not yet comprehend the value of my personal time, nor the firmament between work and life.

I felt like I could relate to my boss because I had not yet come to terms with the cruel reality that the “ideas guy” is a fiction; such characters are tolerated in the workplace only because they are otherwise well-positioned. I’ll risk indicting myself and admit that until relatively recently in my professional life, I would openly refer to sitting quietly at my desk to work for a few hours as “going Saint Mode.”

It took many failures, but eventually I came to understand that if there were such a thing as a respectable “ideas guy,” I had never met him, and he would not be me. Somewhere along the path to enlightenment, I came to view the luminaries with a healthy skepticism that occasionally erred into the realm of contempt.

But because I still had to make enough money to afford the kind of soda that I like, I nonetheless continued mhmming my way through the calls and reserved my animus for agitated couch colloquies with my roommates.

As I’ve slowly come to better understand just what sort of approach I want to take to my work, I’ve come to notice that many view the modern working person as existing at or near one of two extremes.

One sort appears to be manmoding their way through an onerous career because they are either wholly convinced of the literal importance of the SaaS company they work for, or because they think perhaps more reasonably that it will pay out for them in the long term.

The other sort is decidedly anti-work. To them, the employer is the enemy. Be it for the state, the bank, or the small-business tyrant, work is to be done begrudgingly and only because the rent must be paid.

You might be tempted to argue that the difference between these two archetypal modern employees is political. I would argue instead that we are talking about a rift in perception as to the present-day value of self-respect.

If the grinder’s view is that he must do more because it would be better for him if he did, the anti-worker must do as little as possible, saving what strength he has left for himself.

Neither of these characters seems to grasp that self-respect must, in some way, be fungible. Not only can it be accrued, but it can be drawn from the well and spent where it is needed. Most importantly, it cannot be taken with you. When you do finally go, you'll have littered the earth with your many baubles, but whatever you left in the tank cannot be bequeathed like one would a solid gold money clip.

Your knee-jerk reaction to the above notion might reasonably be that your self-respect– your dignity– is something to be guarded with the sort of zealous tenacity you might most often associate with a nesting predatory bird. But you may find upon reflection that you are, in actuality, swiping the SR^[2] card on a near-daily basis.

When you find yourself nodding in rhythm to a manager’s lunatic ideation, or redoing an internal deck for the benefit of a colleague’s sensitivity to sans-serif fonts, you are making a transaction. The workplace, though the most obvious place where this sort of thing occurs, is not the only place.

How many times over the course of a relationship, be it a valuable friendship or a romantic entanglement, do you do, say, or not do or not say something for the benefit of the relationship? If you were planning your second date with Lorna Doone,^[3] and she wanted to go to the restaurant you had sworn off years ago, following a minor but very personal-feeling transgression by a member of the waitstaff, what would you do?

You could, and would probably rather explain to her that eight years ago, you had been there on a brunch date, wherein you had ordered an iced coffee, that when the server brought over a hot coffee, you very politely indicated that you had actually ordered it iced, and that instead of just taking the coffee back they said something like “if you had wanted an iced coffee you should have ordered an iced coffee.”

But this is Lorna Doone we’re talking about. You know, from the cookie box. Because you reasonably believe that you only get one chance with Lorna Doone, you’re probably just going to end up hitting her back with a “yeah, sounds great, I love that place.”

But aren’t you compromising yourself here? Yeah, but that’s probably a good thing at the right dosage. That isn’t to say that you should give up on whatever well-founded and firmly held beliefs make up your moral core, but that you can chill out about your preference for rye over bourbon if it reduces friction.

Let me stop you right there because I know what you’re going to say. That you can spend something does not make it less precious, sacred, or whatever. If anything it makes it more valuable on account of its dynamic quality.

Recently I was at a dinner where the place seemed to be out of everything. The guy who was hosting kept trying to order things, and they kept being out of it. Multiple times, he would order something from the menu, only for the server to come back fifteen minutes later to inform him that, regretfully, they were out of that thing. He had wanted lobster, and ended up with a chopped salad. It never even crossed my mind that he was somehow compromising his dignity by getting something he really didn’t want for dinner– rather, I was struck by his agreeability and affability in the face of a disappointing, annoying situation.

One of the two things I remember any professor from my undergraduate studies ever telling me^[4] was that you should “never let them see you rattled.” It would be easy to read that as a sort of Miyagi-ism in the vein of “be like water,” but it's not. The advice is not to let the indignities roll over you as if they did not occur, but to take them in, process them, and react outwardly only if you really have to.

The most formidable person you'll ever meet is non-reactive. They laugh off minor slights and are difficult to offend. This is not because they have no self-respect, but rather a near-limitless pool. A sin eater of such grandeur is not ignorant nor forgetful as to the countless indignities of life, but merely understands that those indignities often don't warrant a response. They dole out dinkets of their own dignity with the shocking freedom of one who knows they will never run out.

So when you inevitably do find yourself planning your next rendezvous with your personal Lorna Doone (she is just the kind of cookie that you like), and that same server comes by with that same hot coffee that you never would have ordered at a brunch pizza joint on a 76-degree day, maybe you’ll start to think that you’ve done something right.