Rubber Stamping a Toxic Culture

Audio version now available.

I bought a rubber stamp from a door-to-door rubber stamp salesman once. It was early in our whole grain bread bakery career–maybe 2005. He was wearing a suit and tie long after Friday business casual had seeped into the other four days of the week. He carried a brief case that he opened on our bakery counter. It didn’t actually have briefs in it at all. He had dozens of rubber stamps in little molded foam compartments. He had big stamps that said, “PAST DUE,” in all caps, and small round stamps that said, “Have a nice Day!” in letters arched around a smiley face. He had stamps with rotating numbers so you could adjust the date, and stamps with custom corporate logos. Of course, he had bottles of various colors of ink, and ink pads with lids to keep the ink from drying out.

I pictured a woman sitting on a green vinyl swivel chair at a formica desk logging checks into a triplicate-paper ledger, then stamping an invoice, “Paid in Full,” trifolding it, and stuffing it into an envelope that she addressed by typewriter. It seems my daydreams are sexist, but since the salesman was from the 1950s, the accounting clerk kinda had to be a woman, didn’t she?

I wonder how many doors in how many strip malls and three-story office buildings that salesman had slammed in his face between sales. Were his dry spells measured in months or in years? Could I have been his first sale of the decade? Since it was 2005, would that make me his first, maybe only, paying customer of the millennium? Did my order save him from going into the alley behind the bakery and drinking all of his toxic ink?

In spite of my callous jokes, that story makes me sad because I have learned how much self-esteem and identity, men especially, get from our careers. That was not the suit, tie, and faux-leather display case of a man who was in on the inside joke that was his clinging to a career that no longer existed. When he left, bakery employees and customers alike weren’t laughing with him.

Now, a couple of decades later, I am self-aware enough to consider if I am clinging to something AI will (or already has) taken from me. I am a writer and researcher in a time when AI scrapes the internet for information, and regurgitates it in complete sentences. Regurgitating relevant shit is certainly part of what I do. But lucky for me, I have lots of new thoughts not otherwise available on the internet or in the dusty annals of academic research. I like to think of my ideas as novel, while acknowledging that some think them loony. Either way, creative or crazy, artificial intelligence can’t touch my opinionated ramblings.

One such unique perspective is the degree to which a lack of self-esteem is a mental health crisis in an ever-expanding, ever-cloaked-in-harmlessness, addiction economy. With easily accessible dopamine hits available around every corner, and a persistent cultural intertwinement of self-esteem and career status (especially for males), things are perilous, indeed. This paragraph’s diagnosis of the problem is not what is unique about my ideas. My proposed solution is the thing no one else is talking about. We have to redefine what it means to be masculine (hint: masculinity needs to be disengaged from power, control, fame and wealth).

In a week following two more tragic shootings, big surprise, both shooters were white males. Males are responsible for 98% of mass shootings in this country, with the majority perpetrated by white men. So while the political parties argue fruitlessly about gun control and scouring the internet for unhinged manifestos, we ignore the cultural tumor as it continues to metastasize.

Let me be clear–I am not taking a political stance here for three reasons. First, I am hopeful that you will all keep reading, so I’m following the Michael Jordan doctrine for political commentary. Second, there is no longer a relevant political party that represents even a third of my beliefs. Like many, I am a man without a team. But third, I am not taking a political stance because while I think there are a lot of valid ideas that should be considered, none of them address the underlying issue that perpetuates this crisis (no one appreciates underlying issues like a former alcoholic). Background checks and waiting periods make sense to me, just like they make sense to the vast majority of Americans. As a K-12 parent and educator, I have seen first-hand the value of smiling, friendly, armed school resource officers. But I want those things like I want yellow mustard to dip my fries into when I’m eating a burger. Everyone is talking about the condiments. What about the damn burger? If we grill a burger made with rancid meat, no amount of mustard-dipped fries can save the cookout.

We do have a mental-health crisis that leads to mass shootings, but it isn’t because there are a few unhinged people walking among us. It is because we condition our young men, especially middle-class white young men, to connect their self-worth to power and control. Let’s look at youth sports, for example. Middle-class, predominantly white families will drive from Topeka to Omaha for a twelve-year-old’s soccer tournament. Do you see how much pressure that puts on the kid? Or how about the kid whose parents think it is inappropriate to make that investment in time and money? Unless the parents combine rationality with age-appropriate communication, that second kid thinks he’s not good enough. “We aren’t wasting money on that,” is not sufficient age-appropriate communication. How about education? It has only been a couple of generations now where college is the clearly defined expectation. I have a white, middle-class son who has shown a passion and aptitude for working with his hands. He is a freshman in college right now because the pressure the culture put on him was greater than the encouragement of his parents to explore the trades or take an extra year making the decision. I saw him last weekend, and he seems to be having a blast and enjoying some of what he’s learning, so it might work out fine. But it was an eye-opening lesson for me about the pressure dynamic of a culture that has replaced well-intentioned motivation with a fixation on the symbols of achievement.

I work with a lot of kids. I see the pressure they are under. Pressure for grades. Pressure to choose what they will do for the rest of their lives at age eighteen. Pressure to hold it all together with various forms of dysfunction at home. Pressure to excel at volleyball or the oboe or whatever. And for boys, they have the added pressure of trying to feel good about themselves when all of their interactions, with adults and other kids, are centered around teasing, hierarchy, achievement, sitting still like girls, and meeting standards set by others. It is not hard to see how this conditioning morphs into a need for power and control. When your adolescence is about teasing someone else so as to distract from your own weaknesses, the message is received loud and clear. Never reveal weakness. Fit in and conform. And if you don’t find a home on a baseball team and with an academic trajectory that will get you into college (where you can conform and hide weaknesses for four more years while experimenting with the world’s most highly addictive substances), maybe look on the internet for a team you can join. They won’t want to hear about your weaknesses, either. Power. Success. Achievement. Control. Save the country from the bad guys. Make them pay for teasing you. Claim your power. Take control. Fulfill your destiny.

Viral social media posts and national media “cited” (without actually citing) a study this past spring and summer claiming that friends who tease each other are more loyal and develop stronger relationships. What utter bullshit. The truth is that friends that gently tease each other do so because we males are conditioned to tease our friends as a twisted form of acceptance and admiration. The teasing doesn’t lead to closeness. The closeness normalizes the dysfunctional interactions.

Seventy-two percent of the U.S. population supports background checks. A majority of surveyed students support school resource officers. But 98% of mass shooters are males. Why aren’t we laser-focused on the attribute that applies 98% of the time. If we want to solve the problem, why don’t we address the underlying differences in conditioning between men and women. Let’s keep the meat from turning rancid.

Nothing drove my addiction like a lack of self-worth associated with career identity. No matter how hard I worked, I could not achieve power and control. It was only once I relinquished my fixation with power and control that I got healthy and relatively happy. Let me be clear: I never wanted to rule the world. I only wanted to have the power to control my economic and industry-specific competitive landscape. I just wanted to rule my little corner of a very specific sliver of the world. And when that didn’t work out, I drank until it didn’t hurt.

Even today, even as much as I’ve learned and evolved, my conditioning still plagues me. I find myself worried about readership far more than I worry about my message. I worry about reaching new audiences far more than I think about gratitude and respect for those who stick by me, week after week. I ruminate and fixate about where I’ll get my next squirt of mustard for my fries instead of nurturing my burger meat. I realize that last sentence could be misinterpreted, but it made me chuckle, so it stays in. No need to massage my meat.

Look, boys used to have to go out and fight and defend the tribe and kill the water buffalos to prevent us all from starvation, but now we have brick houses and theoretical law and order and refrigerators. Our society is quite a bit more civilized.

It’s too bad our culture is not.

Focus on the 98%. Not with government policy, with your interactions. In your home and in your culture. Help our boys know that they are enough. Teach them to be human beings, not human doings. Disconnect trophies on the wall from self-worth. Give boys permission to tell you how they feel, not show you the pelt they hunted. Don’t ask them how they did. Ask them how they are. And when they cry, have some fucking empathy and cry along with them to shoulder some of their pain.

If we don’t want them to be killers, we have to make it safe for them to be themselves.

If you want to consider ways to fix a toxic culture that led to your addiction to alcohol, please consider joining us in SHOUT Sobriety.

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