Honesty's a Lonely Word

Billy Joel has shared these words with us: Honesty is such a lonely word...Everyone is so untrue...Honesty is hardly ever heard...And mostly what I need from you.

My thoughts about honesty have evolved over time. I grew up with a dad who sometimes forced us kids to be dishonest. We had to make calls to people about why he couldn't follow through with plans made. We all hated doing that and it showed me a very ugly side of how it feels to be dishonest. Once I was an adult and living on my own, I made a commitment to always be honest. I figured I'm an adult and I make my own choices now so there's no reason to ever be dishonest.

Sometimes I make bad choices so being honest doesn't make me look good but there was still a reason why I made that choice so even if I look bad, I'll be honest 100% of the time. The older I get, the less I think life is black and white. Sometimes being honest hurts people. I could say, "Well, being honest is the right thing to do" and continue to be honest 100% of the time but hurting people isn't the right thing to do. When you're choosing between hurting somebody and being honest, what is the MOST right is less clear. I've also learned some people can handle honesty all of the time, even when it hurts but I would venture to say that more people CAN'T handle pure honesty. As soon as you get into the business of not being honest because you believe you are minimizing hurt to others though, it becomes a slippery slope.

Should you really be protecting them from the truth? Are you protecting them in the first place or are you just delaying an inevitable pain? What if they find out you weren't honest? Are you protecting somebody else with dishonesty or protecting yourself? Each situation will hold different answers and the answers get complex. It circles back to the only way to prevent these complications is to be honest 100% of the time.

However, being honest can cause some big problems and pains for other people and it can't be right to hurt people either. How does one find the balance? I have an example that caused me to process this. I have two friends that did what I would call an Intervention on me in the middle of January. I had turned down all their requests to get together. They threatened to kidnap me with my husband's knowledge and came pretty close to doing that. They asked me many questions I didn't want to answer and kind of wore me down until I shared a limited amount of information about some challenges I was facing. They told me what I should do about it and I disagreed. They said they'd be there for me as my support system and that they wanted to see me in a better place.

They never checked in on me (other than the "hi. how are you?" people use in passing) and never followed up until the end of August...7 1/2 months later. By then I had processed many complexities about myself, my situation, communication with them and other people. I knew that if they were truly concerned or if they truly wanted to help, it wouldn't take 7 1/2 months to follow up. By the time they did ask me how things we had talked about were going, I felt certain that the answer they wanted was not the truth. I chose to lie and said, "Everything's good. All those things we talked about have really turned around and it seems like the little details have kind of just worked themselves out." One of them noticably took a a huge sigh of relief. It could have been true relief for my sake but it seemed like relief that she wouldn't have to concern herself with any of my possible problems anymore.

It's been about 2 more months and I haven't heard from these people at all about anything other than little hellos. Overall, I feel like lying to them was the right thing. Idealistically, I still lean toward believing that lying was the wrong choice but as far as what I'm actually living with they seem happier after the lie and I feel happier seeing them relieved. This isn't a case of me lying about anything I'm doing such as drinking or abuse or any of those things-that is a whole separate can of worms. What I lied about is little things that I have no control over that don't affect them at all. I also want to mention that I don't have a problem with these friends. They are kind people who I believe want good things for all the people they know. Some people want the truth and won't be appeased with anything less but I believe that there are less people that desire to have that or even know what to do with it than there are people who don't want the whole truth. It's often called the Ugly Truth for a reason. I don't feel like a better person. I feel like I compromised something I believe in to protect other people but the feedback I received reinforced this evolved method of sharing (or not) truth with others. Billy Joel may have been right. Honesty might be an even lonelier word that I had thought it was.

It's the division that's killing me

The pandemic has been rough on everybody in some way. That's a guarantee. The thing that's killing me is the division. *Everybody should be wearing a mask vs. Nobody should force anybody to wear a mask.

*Everybody should get vaccinated vs. Nobody should say what goes into my body. *People who care about others get vaccinated vs. People who see past political facades stay unvaccinated. *People should be forced to vaccinate for the greater good vs. The government should never have the right to force vaccinations. *People who are unvaccinated are the reason this pandemic is still here vs. The truth is not being told about what dangers vaccinated people are facing.

And so on and so forth. That's not so incredibly different from the normal flow of whatever is going on in the world, even if it's a little more intense. What I'm really struggling with though is people within my own religion tearing people to pieces over these differences, publically saying how wrong the other side is, how right they are, who's the wheat and who's the tares, etc. It's fine to disagree. My experience in life almost makes me feel like a disagreement ambassador. People have always disagreed. They will always disagree. You can disagree without dividing. It just requires both sides respecting the other. What I see is many saying, "That's fine. You can have that opinion" and then saying or posting things to other friends belittling the opinion you have or the conclusions you've drawn.

I see people posting about disagreements they've had with people on social media and "I just wish I could get them to see it this way" type of comments. Why? If you feel so comfortable with the conclusions you've come to, why do you have time and energy to spend attacking somebody's conclusions that are different? Don't you have other things to worry about? You can belong to the same religion, come to different conclusions about many social or political issues and neither one of you have to be labeled right or wrong, righteous or apostate, caring or careless, humble or proud, etc. Really respecting and loving other people means that you still hold them in high regard, even if they have different opinions and approaches. You don't suddenly put them in a category of "people who are wrong or less or unrighteous or whatever". I'm just exhausted from the division. That's all.

Reading

I'm currently reading The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel. It states this: "There's danger in being principled in the midst of a war, but I believe that it's more dangerous not to be."

What beautiful words!!! There is a war going on right now where people are being used as weapons. I believe people are (mostly) unknowingly assaulting others while turning a blind eye to the truth. People don't know who to trust or where to get reliable information. Uncertainty makes soldiers out of those who are reluctant to take a stand. It feels like a great escape to read about a "real" war, a more tangible war where each side is labeled and aware that a fight is afoot. I'm 40% of the way through the book and look forward to reading more. -------------------------------------------------------

Speaking of reading, it can be a clever teacher. I checked out a book, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, from the library and knew I would not understand a great deal of it but I wanted to take on a challenge. I read a huge chunk of it word for word and did learn a little bit but decided to skim the rest of the topics. This way, I could get an idea of all the topics broadly without trying to push so much in areas that I didn't have enough knowledge to dive deeper into. I feel like I learned quite a bit this way. One thing that really stuck with me was a small blurb about the ghost town of Pripyat in Ukraine, a town evacuated after radioactive material was released in 1986. I wished I could know more about this town and what it was like today. Later that day, I was substituting a chemistry class and the teacher was having the class watch a video about uranium, which is radioactive. A bit into the video, the host visits Pripyat!!! I got to hear more about the situation, see the town as it is today, learn about radioactive levels there currently, and just get more insight about the whole thing. I couldn't believe it! I read more about it, too, when I got home and found out Pripyat is the town linked to Chernobyl, which is a place I had heard about.

Tipsies

Modern day tips baffle me. When it comes to tipping a server, I'm aware that they make such a small hourly wage that they really depend on tips to get by. I've always tipped as well as I can. When I have a really bad server and tip just 15% (only in dire situations where something went really wrong), I still feel a little bad. That's how I communicate service was bad. I don't just skip out on a tip altogether or anything like that. My hubster is the same. My daughter at times worries me she'll go homeless because she'd rather tip REALLY well than be able to afford her own groceries.

We don't have a problem with any of that. I have a job with Uber Eats and don't even make minimum wage unless people tip decent so I depend on tips to make any actual money. Even then, I know people pay a lot just to get their food delivered so if they don't tip, I don't take it personal. At times I work much less just because it can feel like I'm not making any money and I understand how much people can depend on tips to make out okay financially.

However, when I go someplace where it's $12 for a basic-sized sandwich and the worker specifically asks you for a tip, I hesitate. I'll be honest, I usually tip if I'm asked directly but I'm not proud of this. I feel bullied into tipping. I've met somebody who works for this particular sandwich shop and they make pretty good money for the industry as an hourly wage. They are not a waiter coming to my table to bring me things, checking up to see how things are going, or even cleaning up after me. I clean up after myself and throw my own garbage away. If they needed tips to survive, that's one thing but when they ask for tips on top of making a good wage and I just overpaid for a sandwich, I don't feel great about that combination. I was hesitant about paying for the sandwich there and don't go very often but if you add a tip, I really can't afford to ever eat there.

Our family has a drink establishment that we have been known to frequent. Their drinks are over-priced, just like most of the places where you would buy drinks outside of a grocery store. Their drinks are also delicious and difficult to replicate-we've tried!!! Not to mention, sometimes going there is a little about the drink and a lot about just going out for a drink or taking the kids for something special. We've reckoned with this and tried to find a balance with our visits and finances.

They recently started directly asking for tips when you order. Because one of our sons worked there this year, I know for a fact they pay decent wages. This makes me uncomfortable and I usually tip $1 if our order's less than $10 or 10% if it's more but I never feel good about it. I feel bullied into tipping when they make a living wage without tips. They have a tip jar. In the past, I have tipped several times when they seem like they really tried to help us have a good experience. Those are tips I feel great about. It's my way of communicating that they really did a good job. I didn't do it every time because they don't do a great job every time. Now I'm supposed to hand over extra money, before I even know how well they will do just because they asked for more? This makes going here anymore a near deal-breaker for me. I don't know what to do though. Are other people being guilted into tips, too? It seems a little cruel to the waiters that actually need tips to get by but this is just a dilemma I haven't totally figured out. The good news is that I'm not the most frequent visitor because I can't often afford the food prices to start with.

Group Mentality

I'm reading an amazing book, Quiet-The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. I checked it out of the library but because I want to re-read and underline SO MANY things already, I really need to buy it.

Right now, there's one particularly influential section of the book I want to summarize to remember. Solomon Asch did experiments in the 1950s about the dangers of group influence.

He gave individuals a simple test in which 95% of the testers answered all questions right. Influencers were planted in the groups to confidently give wrong answers and only 25% of the testers now answered everything correctly. In 2005 Gregory Berns decided to revise the study and do his own research with an fMRI machine. This way, we wouldn't just see whether people answered differently in a group than as individuals but we could also see brain activity to know about WHY people answer differently in groups.

Did people know they were giving the wrong answers and just conform or were people's perceptions altered? When people answered individually, there was activity in the occipital cortex and the parietal cortex, which are linked with visual & spacial perception and in the frontal cortex, which is linked with decision-making. IF people were knowingly conforming, the brain scans would show more activity in prefrontal cortex to show that they were making the decision to conform.

However what actually happened was activity was heightened more in the areas affecting perception and less in the frontal brain regions. Susan Cain, the author writes, "These early findings suggest that groups are like mind-altering substances. If the group thinks the answer is A, you're much more likely to believe that A is correct, too. It's not that you're saying consciously, "Hmm, I'm not sure, but they all think the answer's A, so I'll go with that." Nor are you saying, "I want them to like me, so I'll just pretend that the answer's A." No, you are doing something much more unexpected-and dangerous. Most of Bern's volunteers reported having gone along with the group because "they thought that they had arrived serendipitously at the same correct answer." They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them...

Remember that the volunteers in the Asch and Berns studies didn't always conform. Sometimes they picked the right answer despite their peers' influence. And Berns and his team found something very interesting about these moments. They linked heightened activation in the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with upsetting emotions such as the fear of rejection...Many of our most important civic institutions, from elections to jury trials to the very idea of majority rule, depend on dissenting voices. But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions,

and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think." -------------------------This applies to certain aspects of my life right now that weigh on my mind but I want to remember this because I think it could be helpful in so many other situations, too. As a sidenote, the book doesn't bash on all group activities, it provides examples of when a group can be beneficial. This just shows that there is science and research to suggest that groups making big decisions as a group might not always yield the greatest results. It's funny that just after reading this, I was at church in a class that usually runs in a lecture-style format. This week, however, the teacher told everybody to get into groups of 3-5 people and I was the only one there from my family. "Get into a group..." are some of the most dreaded words of my life. I hated it all through the regular school years. I was relieved to go to college, only to discover many professors said those dreaded words there as well. When it gets said at church, I about have a breakdown because you should be free from that there...I not only survived the grouping but it actually turned out to be a good experience this time. For me, that amygdala activity and feeling negative emotions starts before the group even begins. When I hear that we have to get into a group, negative emotions flow. That situation is covered much more in depth in the book. It's a good one.

Life Changing

I have a brother who I talk with about money dreams. We buy lottery tickets together and enter contests to win houses from HGTV together and we like to talk about what we'd do if we won either. The homes are less money than the lottery but would still drastically alter what's possible for us and our families in our lifetime. He told me a while back that most people believe $10,000 would be a life-altering amount of money. I've been thinking about that lately.

$10,000 is a LOT of money, that's for sure. However, in my opinion, it can't set most people up for life. You can't pay off your house or take a long leave from employment or even travel for very long or very far before the money runs out. There are many educational programs it could pay for or pay a good chunk of and it's possible that could alter a life. Perhaps if you're in on some kind of entrepreneurial efforts or golden investment opportunity, that could turn out to be life changing.

I've been watching a lot of episodes of Undercover Boss. Lots of bosses have gifted people $10,000-$30,000. Most people use the money to buy reliable cars (which IS life-changing to an extent! After having unreliable cars for years, I can vouch for the value of that!) or they pay off medical bills. They take trips and pay for education. They start educational funds for their kids or pay for weddings. Those are consistent ways the money gets spent. I've had one time in my life that my husband and I each had that much money and could choose what to do with it. Our whole HVAC system in our home had to be replaced and for the most part, that's what my husband spent the money on. For my portion of the money, we spent months trying to find decent property for that price. We spent so many weekends checking out properties. Sadly, anything in the state that was under $15,000 was not really usable. It either was too remote to access or on too much of a slope to utilize or had other issues. We both loved the idea of having some property somewhere but it just never ended up being enough money to purchase property that could be used for anything practical without a significant amount of additional money being put into the pot.

In the end, I paid off a few personal accounts and got a couple smaller things for our kids that we can't normally get. I made a small investment, which is currently worth 9 times what I put in and spent the rest taking my family to New York and Canada to check seeing certain things together off my bucket list. I was careful in planning the trip and we went with a tour group and ended up also seeing some of Pennsylvania and Ohio, including a little bit of Amish country. On the way home, we got to stop in the Chicago Airport, which gave us one more state to be in for the trip. We really did get a lot of bang for our buck. I had priced it out if we had gone on our own without a tour group and it would have cost much more to see and experience all that we got to do. Being with a group saved money but had other downsides, such as we had no control whatsoever over what we saw or where we went or the timeline.

If I had the same amount of money again, what would I do with it? I don't know. I spent more than a year deciding and following through on everything the first time around and everything we did seemed like the best way to enrich and improve our lives as possible at the time. I have no regrets. Was it life-changing? I guess in some ways it was. I don't feel like we have a lot of tangible things from the money but we got to do things together that there simply was no other way to ever experience together otherwise. I could have never come up with that amount of money in my normal day-to-day life to do that. Is our life much different today than it was then because of the money? No. Our day-to-day living is still pretty much the same as it was before the money. I am indescribably grateful for the money and what it did for us. I would welcome the chance to have that kind of money again any day of the week. It's wonderful & helpful & exciting. Sometimes it just feels amazing to have some control over a little bit of what's possible in life for a while and planning how to use the funds feels like a hopeful time. My mind sometimes thinks if it was that wonderful to spend that amount of money, what would it feel like to actually win a house or the lottery? On a smaller scale though and for now, I'm interested in how other people would spend $10,000-$30,000.

It's even fun to see what other people would do with $100 extra. How does it change if it's $100 more every month? How about $1,000? Etc. My daughter said to me that she hears a lot of rich people say that money doesn't solve their problems and that they have the same amount of problems. She says she would really like to have money then, too so she could have the same amount of problems but could also have money. Ha ha ha!

Frugal vs. Cheap

I love all the shows about people saving money from extreme couponers to the newer "So Freakin' Cheap" and everything in between. I have a beautiful matriarchal lineage of women who know how to enjoy life with very little funding. The thing all of these shows make clear to me is this: you can live an amazing life & be frugal, always being creative & resourceful to stretch every penny. However when saving money comes at the expense of people's feelings, you're just being cheap & not enriching life experiences. There are people that want you to spend until you're broke & that still won't be enough & that's not what I mean. If your kids or spouse live in constant embarrassment by all of your money-saving tactics or you draw unnecessary negative attention to them by going extreme to save marginal amounts of money, that's just being cheap. Teaching your kids the value of money & how to make it feel like more while loving them & considering their feelings is a great way to be frugal.