I’ve known a couple of really wealthy people. Top 1% guys. Yes, they had big homes and fancy toys, but the one thing I took away from knowing them was that their problems scaled. Wealth did not make them happier. But those people are a terrible example. They are anomalies born into their situations. Everyone else I’ve ever known who had money falling out of their pockets worked hard for it. And the funny thing about these people was that most of them were miserable. They traded their lives for the pursuit of money. For numbers. Now I’m not going to sit here and try to prove that the idea of money scientifically creates an illusion of happiness, but I will say this – money alone does not solve problems. At best, money is just numbers. And numbers don’t fix economies. Numbers, in the context of economics, are the reactive result of either good ideas, or bad ones.

The same concept is true for blogging. Numbers don’t mean quality content. Last week I saw a popular blogger tweet one of his posts titled, “Fifty-Seven Ways to Better Blogging,” or something like that. The key point was that he used the number fifty-seven. Not five. Not ten. Fifty-seven. His research has obviously proven that if you use numbers in your headlines, people will come. And the bigger the better. If you clicked on his link (and let’s face it – who wouldn’t want fifty-seven ways to do something better?) he counted your number along with all the other suckers, I mean visitors, and sold those numbers to advertisers who paid more numbers (money) to place a little rectangle on the right marginalia of his blog in hopes that the blogger’s genius headline would translate to even more numbers (clicks to their site) which would hopefully drive yet more numbers (sales). Whew. That’s a lot of numbers. And somehow, not one good idea.

I get it – everyone wants followers and subscribers and comments and Likes and shares because we have this twisted perception that numbers mean power. But they don’t. Numbers are just numbers. Passive little things that just sit there. Ideas are active. Ideas mean power. Democracy. Love. Anarchy. Revolution. Want power? Crack open an idea. If it’s good enough, the numbers will follow. Want to fix America? Nourish a culture of innovation where ideas are harvested like healthy crops. Want to be a better blogger? Focus on big ideas. Not word formulas that beget more numbers.

The internet advanced information. Social media advanced connectivity. Connectivity advances collaboration. Collaboration advances ideation. Ideas drive everything.

***

Jim Mitchem

I can’t believe she’s seeing me like this. Three years ago I was fielding balls in goal as she’d strike them one after the other. To her, I was more than a father; I was an invincible God. She was ten. I was forty seven. We had a perfect life.

Now she sits with me every waking hour she’s at home, and watches as I shrivel away before her eyes. A shell of her father, being taken by lung cancer. Slowly. But too soon.

I looked around the sunlit room from my place on the bed. There was a glass with water, my telephone and a myriad of pills on a nightstand to my left. On the dresser next to the window was a plush Mickey Mouse. Next to that, a picture from a few years before when me, Sophia and my wife Lauren were at the beach for one of our annual summer vacations. It was a brilliant photograph. We were all tanned and happy, framed by the glistening ocean.

On the other side of the bedroom door was a bookshelf filled with paperbacks by writers like Hemingway, Bierce and King along with manuscripts printed from parts of the book I’d been writing for twenty years – marked up for edits that never came. On another small shelf to the right of my bed, was my laptop.

Sophia returned with a coffee two minutes later. “I turned up the music. You like Jimmy Eat World. I downloaded their new album this morning.”

I smiled. She placed the coffee next to my water and sat on the edge of the bed. “Ok, I’ve got to go to school. I have my phone.” She then instinctively picked up my phone to ensure that it was turned on, and up. “I’ll call you after homeroom.”

“And then every hour after that. I get it.” I said, smiling. “Honey, you do not have to do that. I’m not going to die today.” This had become something of a mantra for us whenever she’d have to leave me alone. Promising not to die was the best thing I could say – whether it was true or not. For a child of thirteen, she was mature beyond her years. Mostly because she’d been thrust into maturity as the result of death.

Eighteen months before, just three months before I was diagnosed, her mother Lauren was killed in a car accident a block from our house. She’d just left for work and was blindsided by a person texting and driving through a red light. She was killed instantly. We heard the crash from inside our house. Somehow, I knew what had happened. I rushed outside and saw her car on its side in the center of a neighbor’s yard. After pulling her from the wreck, I laid in the grass with her body until two policemen physically pulled me away while from her as the EMT placed her on a gurney and covered her with a white blanket. When I looked back toward our house, I saw Sophia standing at the edge of our yard – staring blankly. I’d forgotten about her.

“Daddy, I’m fine checking in on you.” She said as she picked up her backpack and flung it over a shoulder. “Besides, I have to remind you to take these pills.” She then reached down and grabbed two large blue pills, “These. Ok?”

A few weeks ago I took a regimen of pills in an incorrect order resulting in an unexpected trip to the hospital to have my stomach pumped. “Ok, ok.” I said, smiling. “They will be taken.” She smiled, bent down, and kissed my forehead. Then she left.

A minute after I heard the lock turn, I slipped into a dream.

I was boarding the Amazon Belle on the Jungle Cruise at Disney World with a group of strangers. Mostly adults. The river pilot started cracking familiar jokes, and the boat embarked on its journey. We rode past the huge plastic butterflies when the guide asked whether anyone would like to drive the boat. My hand shot up. He pointed at me and called me up, by name. I was wearing a nametag shaped like a cloud with my name handwritten in the middle. It wasn’t my handwriting. According to the pilot’s gold-embossed nametag, he was Gabe. And he was from Toronto. I had never driven a boat before, but understood that there were tracks on the bottom of the river and that all I really had to do was spin the wheel. Except, there were no tracks. And the current was strong. I gripped the wheel like Bogart through the rapids. Then, as I steered the boat around a bend, rather than a family of animatronic gorillas playing in a ransacked hut on the riverbank, there stood my childhood home. In flames. When I looked over at Gabe, he was focused on the passengers and pointing at the hippos just up ahead in the water. I turned back to my old house burning, but an elephant was standing directly in front of the boat. A real elephant. A Bull, I think they’re called. Anyway, I jerked the wheel to the left, and just missed the beast, but ran directly into the fake hippos in the water. Then everything got real slow. I heard the sound of cracking plastic as the hull snapped the first of the big hippos. Then Gabe turned to me with terror in his eyes. He screamed and reached for wheel. More cracking sounds from below. Two people jumped overboard and started collecting the broken pieces of plastic. When Gabe reached the wheel, I’d already had the ship under control and was steering it up river away from the hippos. The people in the water waved goodbye and continued working to gather the floating debris.  The river turned again and the scene on the riverbank this time was bus station where I was sitting on a bench outside, reading. Alone. There was a green suitcase next to me. Gabe’s voice faded away and was replaced by laughter. I turned to the shiny-faced passengers and then to Gabe who was pointing his fake gun at the me sitting outside the bus station. Except, it was a real gun. A Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolver. The passengers started to chant, “Do-it! Do-it!” so I jerked the wheel and Gabe’s shot missed high. The me at the bus station heard the gunshot, grabbed my suitcase and ran inside the empty terminal. I was peeking around a window as our boat passed to the next scene -  which was my daughter’s middle school. Suddenly, tracks grabbed the hull, “Step away from the wheel, Jim.” Gabe said, holstering his piece. “We’re here.” I jumped out of the boat and started to make my way up the hill to the school when heard laughter behind me. When I looked back, there was only the woods that border her school. I was now dressed in black. I walked past the front desk and along a corridor where teachers and staff peeked at me from doorways. They all smiled and nodded. I smiled and nodded back. Then I stopped in front of a door, and opened it. Inside were thirty students intently listening to a teacher. Among them, my Sophia. No one noticed me enter. I slowly walked across the room toward my daughter when I noticed through the windows that a fog had risen. Standing next to Sophia, I studied her face. High cheekbones splashed with fresh summer freckles. Deep brown eyes. Light brows. A truly beautiful child. I reached out but stopped just short of touching her golden hair when her expression changed. She sat up, as if distracted from the lecture. She looked around the room and then reached into her backpack for her phone. I walked to the back of the room and opened the door leading into the fog. I looked back at my daughter one last time and smiled. Then I stepped, blindly. Someone grabbed my hand and began leading me along. After a few moments, the fog cleared to reveal the most brilliant sunlit day I’d ever seen. I was standing at the side of a glistening ocean. And standing next to me holding my hand, was my wife.

***

Jim Mitchem

Yes. A thousand times, yes.

***

Jim Mitchem

“Happily?” I asked a colleague at the law firm where I worked. He recommended I forget about her. But I had no choice. From the moment our eyes met – I knew she was the one. The funny thing about this epiphany was that I was finally at a place in my life where I was completely comfortable being alone. I’d just come out of a good relationship that was about to get serious but that I didn’t want to become serious. My heart just wasn’t in it. So I walked away. In the month between leaving that relationship and meeting my future wife, I felt stronger and more confident than at any point in my life. I needed no one. I was perfectly fine standing on my own.

And then she appeared on my first day at a new job. And my heart jumped out of my chest. I knew. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. She was the one.

She’ll tell you that even though she thought I was cute, she didn’t have the same lightning strike that I had. Because she was married, I didn’t pursue her. I wasn’t a home wrecker, after all. I let nature take its course.

Nature was on a fast track. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, about two months after meeting, we were in love. But controversy swirled around us like sharks on chum. I was sober about a year and a half and everyone I knew told me to stay away from her because pursuing a married woman would only lead to relapse. And because she was reluctant to share her feelings for me with anyone in her inner circles, I had to bear the brunt of her apprehension as well. A task that I was somehow up for.

At our firm’s annual Christmas party, everything came to a head. She arrived with her husband and sat at a table with other paralegals and associates. I sat on the opposite side of the room, across a dance floor, with other guys from the copy room. My table was full raucous banter, but for when the firm’s partners would stop by to slap us on the backs and wish us a Merry Christmas. Despite the joviality, I wasn’t feeling it. Instead, I spent the night staring across the dance floor at the table where my future wife sat with her current husband. I tried hating him, but couldn’t. I had nothing against him. He just married the wrong person. So I tried thinking of ways for me to be a romantic hero and sweep her off her feet. I considered walking over and inviting him to a duel. Because he didn’t know I existed, I would have had the upper hand. I felt bad for him as I watched him from afar. He wasn’t a bad looking man. He wore glasses. And I noticed that he never once touched her. Not even to hold her hand or touch her back as he leaned in to hear something she’d say. Every minute or so, she would look over in my direction. I knew that she too was enduring the same gut-wrenching pain that was tearing me apart. After a couple of hours of this, and before the drunk, white lawyers gathered on the dance floor for a synchronized routine, I left. Being in the same room with the person I loved and not being able to touch her, or smell her, or talk to her was too much. I wasn’t worried about the husband. He was a non-factor. I was worried whether my heart was true and whether the most powerful emotion I’d ever known was really just a lie. I didn’t want a drink. I wanted to be alone.

As I started across the parking lot, she emerged from the building behind me, ran up and threw her arms around my neck. She was crying. “I love you so much,” she said. “I want to leave with you. Please take me with you.” We stood there, embracing in the cold for what seemed like forever.

Level heads prevailed that night. But within a month, she left her husband and moved in with me. I never did pick up a drink, and nearly 20 years later, we have two daughters together. And we all live happily ever after.

My wife is the bravest person I’ve ever known. 

In case you were wondering, yes, this story is true. This post is something like an excerpt from a chapter of a book I’m writing called Minor King (about the many miracles of my simple life.) 

***

Jim Mitchem

According to site statistics, you spend an average of 3 minutes and 22 seconds to read my posts. Usually, these posts are between 400 and 700 words. I stick to this length because this is about all the attention I can muster to think about a thing. I also hate to read. Note, not ‘hate to learn,’ but hate to read. I’m way too  nervous to sit still for very long. My posts usually take about 20 minutes to write, edit and publish. I write a few times a week as a way to stay fresh and as a way to release creative energy. I named this blog ‘Obsessed with Conformity’ as irony. There’s no niche. No theme. Just whatever pops into my head that I want to spend 20 minutes with. Because here’s the deal – I’m no expert on anything. I’m just a guy who likes to break things apart to see what’s there. It’s not brain surgery. I am writing a book – but that is hard. Not hard in terms of telling a story, but hard in terms of carving out the time necessary to tell it. It’s fairly emotional, and requires that I immerse myself in certain dark things. And you just don’t do that in 20-minute bursts at 2:34 pm before you run out to get your kids, or run into a meeting about seo. And so I beat myself up because I can’t just ‘jump in’ there and write the really important stuff whenever I have twenty minutes to spare. I have this idea that I need to escape somewhere to be completely alone for a while in order to write the book. And that’s not happening, either since I’m just a rat stuck in the machine. But – I am still a writer, and so this blog is where I put my thinking. In short blog posts that range from fiction to personal stories to serious business. Note – this is not the best way to establish an audience as a writer. Usually one must focus on a niche topic and then stick to it. Still, I feel like I’m developing an audience for my ‘style’ of writing that perhaps one day I can parlay into reading a book I write.

3:22. Maybe I write this length because I’m a trained copywriter and happen to think in small periods of time? It’s like this, when I would write a billboard back in the day, I’d get 2.2 seconds to say something to you that you remember. But now you stay on my blog for a few minutes at a time. And you like it. And I think how lucky I am to have your attention that long. I mean, brands fight for your attention all day. Do you know how much they’d pay to have your exclusive attention for three and a half minutes? That’s like, wow. Anyway, I assume that you’ve got better things to do than read a long ass blog post, so these short ones seem to work for both of us. Besides, unlike a book, posts this length offer me something like immediate closure.

Thank you for visiting and taking the time to read my words. Really. Thanks. You give me hope.

***

Jim Mitchem

I want this. I must have that. I want. Want. WANT. Now the whole world can know what it is we want. Because since we can’t actually have most of the things we desire, we’re in a state of perpetual longing – and Pinterest helps fill that void. Now, instead of being known for who we are, what we create, and generally what we stand for as humans, now our disciples, er, followers can know what kind of person we’d RATHER be. Based on the things we don’t have, but that we want.

Pinterest plays on our egos. It’s stone cold brilliant. I thought Twitter was brilliant with its integration of things like follower numbers, lists numbers, etc. (because numbers play on our ego as well), but Pinterest is even better. Mostly because you can tweet links to the stuff you want. And you can send it to Facebook too. Because everyone who follows you around the world in all your social media silos NEEDS to know what kind of person you aspire to be in a fantasy world where you get everything you want. Besides, there are already hundreds of social media guru blog posts on how good Pinterest is for businesses. So it must be a #realthing.

It’s time for dinner. My wife made spaghetti. But I feel like Pad Thai. Maybe I’ll find a good article on the best Pad Thai in the world and pin it. Because it’s what I want.

***

Jim Mitchem

What a different world it was back then. I remember this show being on in our house when I was a kid. It came on right after the Vietnam war news. I remember Archie Bunker bickering with his son in-law – Meathead. An nickname that made its way to me by my step father. A term of endearment, as it were.

“Do you really like this show?” I just asked.

“Yeah. And he reminds me of you.” she replied.

Nice.

(also – the commercials on this station are basically one big infomercial for The Scooter Store. Nice.)

***

Jim Mitchem - aka meathead

I hate to break this to you, but it’s not that tough. Yes, there are days early on when you might look around at the brightly colored plastic blocks strewn about your home and think, ‘what happened to my life?’ But mostly parenting is just a shift in perception. You have to care less about yourself, and more about this new humanoid. And if you aren’t down with that, I beg you not to have children. Because your own selfishness will rub off on them. And the last thing the human race needs is a planet full of people who focus exclusively on their own selfish desires.

But it’s happening. After having been around kids now for a decade, I can say with total confidence that selfish people are breeding and raising selfish children. Of the non-scientific research conducted by me over the past decade – only 50% of children I know use terms like “please” and “thank you.” The rest just give commands and don’t take time out to show gratitude.

My parents didn’t do a whole lot right. They were very young and I was the first born (aka the guinea pig). I don’t hold this against them. As parenting goes, most of us just do the best we can. But one thing my parents did right was instill in us a deep respect for other people. Especially for adults. We said “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir” and “Please” and “Thank you” and “May I?” and “You’re welcome.”  And if we didn’t, we got a switch. The two humans my wife and I currently raise don’t get switches. So we’ve had to drill the concept of gratitude over selfishness into them by being persistent. And you know what? They say “please” and “thank you,” etc. Our friends routinely remark at how polite our children are in this way. They’re good kids. Sure, they’ve got their own selfish agendas. We all do. That’s human. But they are always aware of others. And I’m proud of that.

Before you read any farther, I want to make this next part as clear as possible – THIS POST WAS NOT WRITTEN TO ILLUSTRATE OUR SUPERIOR PARENTING SKILLS so that you comment about what great parents we are. I don’t care whether you think I’m a good parent or not. Social approval has no influence on me. As parents, my wife and I make mistakes like everyone else. But one thing we’re most weary of is our responsibility to the planet to integrate humans into the village who are as selfless as possible. I honestly believe that this our primary function as parents.

Look, selfish people break laws. Every crime you can conjure up in your brain is based in selfishness. Murder = I want someone gone. Rape = I want to satisfy my sexual appetite. Theft = I want a thing. Running a red light = I want to make it to the place I’m going on time. Yes, every crime is based in the concept selfishness. Even Jean Valjean’s theft of bread, while innocuous on the surface, was an act of selfishness. He didn’t have the means to buy the bread and yet he wanted to feed his sister’s children. The key word here being “want.”

There are people who will tell you that the young people entering the workforce today are an ‘entitlement’ generation. (And yes, it’s true that some politicians will twist the term entitlement to make you think this only means poor black people who feel entitled to free government programs that they will milk and which keep them in their current state of helplessness with no way out. Whatever. I happen to think those people need those kinds of programs – but they also need the kinds of programs that provide hope as a way to escape their hopelessness. One without the other only keeps them in a hole.) Anyway, the type of entitlement I’m talking about is more like, “l went to college, so I deserve a high paying job at a big company RIGHT NOW! And I want a million dollars.” But, as anyone over the age of 30 knows, that’s now how it works. Not in corporate America, anyway. And eventually, most of us come to understand that the world doesn’t owe us a goddamn thing.

Which begs the question – where does this feeling of entitlement come from? How is it that so many people believe that just because they’re breathing in and out and not walking around breaking (major) laws means that they’re entitled to a life of prosperity? I think it’s parenting. In fact, I would bet that all people, regardless of age, gender or ethnicity, who walk around with this chip of entitlement on their shoulders are the result of parents who didn’t make them say “please” and “thank you” when they were children. Don’t laugh. Instilling these simple phrases into a child’s lexicon may seem meaningless for the first ten years or so, but eventually they get it. They start to see that people they engage with act differently when they show respect to them. Think about it – if someone says, “pass the ketchup” – you’re less likely to respond as pleasantly as when someone says, “please pass the ketchup.” Life is an echo chamber. You emit positive vibes, you get positive vibes back. The opposite, however, is also true.

In Plato’s Republic, he talks about how society should be broken down into very specific jobs. Leaders should only be required to think. They should have no want of money or material possessions. There should be workers who are only required to do very specific jobs in order to positively contribute to society. There should be guardians who do nothing but protect the Republic. And there should be people who only raise children. His vision was something like this: you’re welcome to do your biological duty and procreate, but after that, you give up your children to people who know how to mold children into productive members of a society. Children are too important to risk on bad parenting. Society, and the future of the Republic, is too important.

But, we don’t live in a Utopia.

If your idea of giving a child the best future possible means teaching them to go hard after whatever they “want” – and to push people down in order to get it, because that’s the only way you know how to do life, then you’d basically be adding to the problems of the world by raising criminals who will do nothing to positively contribute to the human race.

If you’re not prepared to be selfless as a parent, please – don’t have children. And if you already are a parent, take the time to teach your children to use terms like “please” and “thank you.” Instill in them a sense of gratitude and selflessness. Because if you’re not doing these things, then you’re failing as a parent by raising selfish human beings. And the last thing this planet needs is more selfishness.

***

Jim Mitchem

Note: That’s our daughter Cozette in the picture above. Between our two daughters, we had fun trying to snap the ultimate ‘brat’ picture. Lots of good outtakes. 

As she told me her story, I grew angry at my fathers. And my wife’s fathers. We each had two. And none of them stuck around. Men who turned their backs on their families, and on life. And it doesn’t stop with our fathers. Men abandoning their wives and children for selfish, destructive desires is a pattern that goes back a few generations in our families. Both our mothers had to fend for themselves for most of their lives. Their mothers too.

When I quit drinking 20 years ago, I didn’t really think I’d make it a week. I thought I was destined to die alone. This concept seemed to be part of my DNA and so for about 10 years in my early adulthood, I lived like I was going to die young. Now that I’ve got children of my own, I sometimes wish I’d have started to have them earlier – so that I could have more. But then I remember the man I used to be – and if I had become a father sooner, I would have probably abandoned my wife and kids too. Because doing that was just part of me.

One of the things I’m most proud of today is that I’m here for my family. It’s so simple. And yet, despite what you might think of me from what I share in this blog, the truth is that I’m far from being a great dad. I make a ton of mistakes. I lack patience. I have a short temper. I can’t fish. But the one mistake I haven’t made is giving up on my family. And unless something terrible happens, like waking some slumbering demon inside of me, my daughters will never think of me as absent. And who knows – maybe one day I’ll be a grandfather to their children so that this issue never comes up again in our family. Ever.

Because being a man means more than following selfish desires. It means being a man.

***

Jim Mitchem

Once we grasp Twitter’s core concept of connectivity, we enter something called the ‘euphoria’ stage of hyper connecting. We follow people from all over the world who share our interests. And eventually it leads us to considering how we can commercialize the medium. Look, Twitter was no dummy when they named the service. Birds of a feather flock together. Strength in numbers. All that. When enough people gather together, we anoint leaders. As a result, these people usually have large numbers of followers and are considered experts on whatever topic that the group flocking together is flocking around. That’s why there so many gurus. Even (especially) on the topic of the medium itself.

The euphoria stage can last a while, but then you notice new patterns emerge. ‘Leaders’ are given more power than they deserve. Guidelines are published on how anyone can be an expert if they just follow a few simple rules – which include recognizing and promoting the established experts. As new people come into the medium, you see how this pattern snowballs. The smartest people start sharing less while the power-hungry people start sharing more. Except – they mostly share things that only advance their status as experts. And it’s almost always the same things over and over. It’s then that you notice life being sucked out of the medium and being replaced with how-to manuals. Idol worship becomes commerce. At this point you enter the ‘bitter twitter’ stage and you stand back and watch regular people become whores for attention as they’re flown to places like Calcutta and Jakarta to speak to emerging markets on topics that they basically invent. Oratory skills become sharp knives that the Neuvo Experto use to carve up the Euphoric on the backs of those who desire power.

The next stage is the ‘I am losing interest – fast’ stage. After three plus years here, Twitter’s not nearly as important to me as it used to be. Yes, there are good things going on here. Yes, I follow a diverse range of people – so its not like I’m inundated with gurus in my stream. And yes, I try to share what I think is important. It’s just that what I think is important keeps changing. And it almost never has to do with the silos of marketing and social media. Except, of course, for posts like this one. I’m a writer. I like to share stories – not give advice. And I’m not half bad at storytelling. But when I write blog posts about my daughter getting braces and the real, human effect of that on me as a parent, it’s not nearly as important on Twitter as the guru who posts “5 ways to be a smarter Twitter user.” I just can’t bring myself to routinely write about social media or marketing (two things I do for a living) – even though they’re invariably the most viewed posts on my blog. I’m not in this for my status as a guru. And no, I’m not bitter at those who are – everyone has to make a living. I just find it interesting how the idea of power affects our ego – and how opportunity recycles itself as mindless minutia rather than big, human ideas.

I’m pretty sure that one day, it will be considered normal to go completely dark here. To walk away from all the hyper connecting. And it feels like that day is approaching fast.

***

Jim Mitchem