Category: Editorials

In college, we studied the film 2001, as a monumental statement of man’s lack of vitality in the future, and some would say the present too, that of course would lead to machines not only working to make our lives easier, but in effect ending our lives too as they saw fit. In today’s Internet connected world, the planet seems smaller, and there is a lot of communication going out, (like this weblog), but there’s also static. The system eventually gets inundated with all the messages going back and forth, to the point that we become nothing more than peers: clients, customers, users, nodes, ip addresses, etc. We lose our identity and become a number. When that realization smacks up against you on your computer monitor, all of a sudden our instincts take over and we want out of The Matrix. Eventually our senses calm us down and we settle back into our cooperative and normal operating procedure, we just live with it.

This brings me to my own personal email inbox and the occasional annoying spam email. It annoys me because someone sent me an email about something, when I never asked them to at all. The fact is pretty clear that it is also worse than this, they don’t really know me at all, to them I am just a number, an email address, and even if I contacted them, I would be identified as email address so and so, still no recognition of who I really am. Somewhere out there a script or program ran and it grouped me from a list of addresses and emailed me. There really is nothing personal about the whole thing. Imagine if a complete stranger walked by you and threw a piece of paper in your face. You’d most likely smack him back, but in the digital world you can’t.

You start to think, well if a machine did this to me, I can just correct it in a matter of seconds, right? I just go to the website and input my email address and tell the machine to no longer email me right? And I do just that, and the message that my monitor comes up with is, “Please allow up to 2 weeks for this change to take effect…“! You are kidding me right? The computer took probably less than a minute to add my name to an email and send it to me, and I am really to believe it takes the same computer 2 weeks to remove my name from it’s database! I hardly doubt there is a person who is going through all these email names and removing them one by one. The truth is that the machine does not know what I am or what responses I can have. It does not care if I get angry or am happy. It just executes the commands it has been told.

I am a number. Yet I am not a number.

It’s hard to think about real love. No I’m not talking about self-absorbed reality TV love, where only the beautiful face the supposedly arduous task of finding compatibility, compatibility being wealth, good looks, and material possessions, no what I’m talking about is average people with average looks looking to find someone who cares enough about them to take notice of them. But in the age of instant gratification, where entertainment is so accessible, men are finding the challenge of courtship to be the one game that they are no longer willing to invest in.

Sure, I may be exaggerating, there are some men who still rather go out on a date than play Halo2 or GrandTheftAuto, but more and more, what I see is men in their thirties and twenties, plain giving up. Remarkably the same problems I had as a teenager are still abundant in my thirties. Men still lack charisma, self respect, and identity. We go around neither understanding women, nor investing time in the problem of women, yet we spend every day, almost every hour communicating and thinking about them! This is in fact what makes life so interesting, for whatever other facet of your life you partake in, arguably the most challenging is still your significant other. Sometimes I think women manufacture conflict on purpose, why else would they bother you during some of your most important moments? Whatever their intentions may be, women are essentially the problem, without them life would be mundane and more like a video game you have beaten countless time.

This brings me to why some men really do give up on women and don’t try to court them anymore. It’s insecurity. The feeling that you are being scrutinized, (which of course you are), along with the prospect that you are failing miserably, is what deters men. They hate that feeling, and I certainly have felt that way ever since 5th grade, when I realized that it was girls who had this effect on me and that it was not an allergic reaction.

However, for a lucky few men, there are some very engaging and determined women who do pursue them and who eventually get their man. On average though, the man has to be the hunter, and the woman usually has to make him think that he is just that, even though she knows this is more of an exaggeration to help the man’s ego out. In essence the game of courtship is quite complicated, as men we need to understand this, and play up to the challenge of it, understanding our own insecurities is the first step in realizing that we are indeed serious about this thing called: Love.

For my generation Michael Jordan was the standard of what you can achieve, namely greatness. It was not until I got older that I realized what one teacher told me was true, that you can’t be Michael Jordan. Now most people would say that is a terrible thing to say to kids, because everyone feels more comfortable with the more positive message of be all you can be, which I guess even the US Army found to be lacking, cause now they use the more modern message of Army of One. Now in my thirties, I see that life is full of obstacles and that for as many times that I have tried, I have had only moderate success or worse failed miserably. This brings me to Nike’s new advertisement campaign where they have kids listening to the greatness of Michael Jordan and all the adversity that he overcame. The newer commercial features a kid paying tribute to Jordan’s legacy, and then ending with a challenge, that the next Michael Jordan is coming, and that the newer one will be better than the original, because that’s life and that’s how things work, you see the challenge and you overcome it. Yet for most kids, they will never be as good as Jordan and may never come close at all. That is the hard truth, but does that mean you should never try to be anything?

If you have ever watched the Jordan MAX DVD or paid attention to the Nike commercial, Jordan himself answers this by saying, “I can accept failure, but I can’t accept not trying.” And he’s totally right. When I look at the next generation of kids, I see potential and that is what matters.

No we can’t all be Michael Jordan, but that does not mean we should stop trying to be. We must accept that eventually our limits will hinder us and that we can’t be great at everything, and that playing in the game (whatever that game may be) is what we love more than being number 1.

I probably will never be the world’s greatest father and I can accept that, but I need to try to be the best father I can to my kids, because giving up is never an option.