Least Resistance

As a school social worker, my wife likes to order different shirts or items of clothing that have an inspirational message on them. It's a fun and indirect way that she can deliver affirmations to the students and staff. I remember a short time ago she got a shirt that said "I can do hard things". Of course me being a guy with the mind of a middle schooler found the double meaning in the shirt pretty funny. She did not.

It's interesting though because despite the message that we try to deliver to children and adults in the world, they never seem to take it to heart. Especially these days when the path of least resistance seems to be the prefered route. Trust me, I'm not one to talk, I have ADHD and if you know anything about that disorder, you know that doing difficult tasks is no small order. People with minds like me often find themselves procrastinating or putting off tasks that they perceive to be difficult, whether the task really is or not.

In fact, there are many times I find myself putting something off, only to finally do it and realize just how easy it was. Despite that, things we don't enjoy or things we assume to be difficult, or things we think we won't enjoy tend to fall by the wayside.

I've been having some struggles as of late at my job. It's not tasks or things at my job, instead it's people at my job, because I think we all know when you add people to the equation, things get quite messy. You probably wouldn't be surprised to find out that working in a school district I work with quite a few people who have advanced degrees. At least in the US, a bachelors degree is the absolute minimum to work in education (as a professional) while most have their masters and a few others go on to earn their doctorates. The latter isn't that common, but you do see if from time to time.

Despite all of that, it never fails to amaze me just how dumb a lot of the people are. It's like you get to a point where you are so focused on one thing that you become dumb in everything else. I think we are seeing this more and more in the world today. People are becoming so self absorbed that they have virtually no comprehension of the world around them.

If you can imagine some ditzy valley girl from an old 80's movie, it's kind of like that.

It happens pretty regularly that a teacher will ask for something tech related. Either they come to me directly or they take it to the building principal who then brings it to me. The key issue is, like I said above, they have no concept of how things work. Now, to be fair, I get that isn't their job, but you have to at least have a basic knowledge of what your request is going to entail, at least on some level I would hope.

However, more often than not what they consider an easy request has a lot of moving parts and technicalities that they didn't consider. I end up having to tell them no, when in their mind it's just a simple thing, "why does he have to be so difficult".

It occured to me the other day just how much easier it must be to be stupid.

I know that's a harsh thing to say, but if you look at the world, it seems to hold true. Look at all the mindless people eating up whatever facts some politician or the news is serving to them. It's easy to put your head in the sand and just keep going about your life oblivious to just how hard things really are.

Likewise, it's easy to be the person who always says yes, when you don't have to do the work to make something happen.

Instead that's left to people like me, who get to come along and be the bad guy. It's probably the single biggest part of the job that I will not miss when I finally decided to retire. I could go on and on with examples of how this dynamic plays out where I work. I have a feeling it happens in pretty much every workplace around the globe, but I also think it is an indication of a larger problem.

As I said before, think about all of the political division that is happening across the world, but especially in the US right now. Critical thinking takes work, it's not an easy thing to do. It often presents you with facts and realities that you might not be ready to accept. It also has the ability to change your point of view. Something that could be considered quite dangerous these days.

I can do hard things, but it's probably going to require some hard work, and that's okay.