Tag: emotional blackmail

I’m staying put while I wait for the headstone to be finished and fitted, and consequently got to see an Arican weekend.

There’s not a lot for me to do in many ways, so yesterday I spent some time going through all of my father’s papers and notebooks. I found evidence of one email address he’d used from five years ago, but it no longer existed. So I returned from the computer and continued… until I found painstakingly detailed notes on how to use Yahoo mail. Including a password.

Bingo!

I felt that if he had e-mail perhaps he’d been in touch with people and I could work out more of his life. I ran down to the computers they have here in the hotel, logged in and… he’d only ever emailed one place – the Department of Work and Pensions. It was all about his pension, along with a couple of emails explaining that they had his address wrong (and which they never seemed to correct!) and that was it. Nothing else, nothing in the sent folder to anyone else. It was a dead end.

Ah well. So I went back to the notes and worked out a fair few things. I’ll note what I’ve learned in full at the bottom of this post, as the whole day taught me things.

The Letters

One of my disappointments was to find no detail of any personal life, anywhere. But I did bring with me all the letters he sent me from 1988 to 1991. These covered his crisis period. I decided to get them in order, photograph each one, for posterity, and then read them one after another.

Ouch. This caused another period of getting down, because I realised some things. I remembered how, in the letters, were statements which were essentially threats to commit suicide. The incredible emotional blackmail. His feeling of injustice over what he thought was some kind of inheritence. In part that my memory hadn’t formed a perfect impression of the order of events (although I wasn’t too far out) and that his crisis had clearly been real enough, but largely because towards the end of the letters he stopped being so demanding and so hard on me. In fact, the very last letter was more about caring for me than himself. He was almost upbeat and looking to the future.

That was the moment. He’d realised what he’d done and he was trying to repair it. Problem is, he was too late. I was still upset at him, and I’d now rejected him completely. At the time I couldn’t forgive him for what he’d done. The letter is in quite a sorry state as I’d crumpled it up ready for the bin, but interestingly it looks like I changed my mind, flattened it out and put it with the rest.

And so I found myself wondering. Should I have forgiven him sooner? I’d certainly have stood far more of a chance of finding him, and maybe he’d learned. But at the same time I do believe I was still scared of him. I never told him I’d moved, and I never checked again with the neighbour who’d been taking my post in.

I think, to me (and maybe to others) that this is a valuable lesson in the dangers of losing the trust of those closest to you. If you want to get it back a letter isn’t enough. You have to earn it. Really work at it. He could have forged the connections once more, the stupid bugger, but he couldn’t stop me walking away. My own instability at the time meant he had no chance of finding out where I lived…certainly not from South America.

It’s also taught me that communication is everything. Sometimes those around you know little about what you do and what you think. For example, he didn’t really understand the repossession of my grandmother’s house or the intense solitude I felt at the time.

Maybe if I’d simply told him? But I needed to protect myself as well.

I did originally plan to place the letters online in their entirety, but that will have to wait. I saw some things there that could cause real issues for some people and which need to be cleared first. Maybe in the future. But it’s a thin maybe.

More Friends

arica-trip-and-more 162 (Medium) — Rafael, Joaquin, slightly mental chewing gum seller.

At 9pm, after the terror pizza, I headed to the pool hall to meet more of my father’s friends and acquaintances. There was Oliver (or Oscar, my notes aren’t clear on this and I need to check tomorrow) who met him over ten years ago on the La Paz-Arica train. Or Pablo, who’d known him since 1991… from the time of that last letter.

Obviously I had questions. I asked if he’d mentioned family and they only had one mention… a daughter, in Quito, Ecuador, who died in a road traffic accident at the age of about 13. But I couldn’t find any more detail than that. No names, no known addresses, and there’d been nothing in the notes. Back home we suspect he may have been using this as a way of blocking conversation about family, but who can be sure? He gave the story consistently, everyone reported it as the same, but something occurs to me… it’s an old story. If he was reporting this 19 years or so ago, then the age wouldn’t be possible as I’m not aware of him having been to South America prior to around 1983.

So, after all this, and without the help of an interpreter, I only had vague echos of the man. Nothing so firm other than that he was, it seems, generous with friends, selective about his company, and a creature of habit. I sat where he sat, chatted with his friends, enjoyed a beer, and learned to spell ‘jote’, the red wine and Coke mix, correctly.

This all cheered me up. Apart from the odd mentalist (my father did hang around with a diverse group) I found that these friends he had were pleasant, intelligent people with things to share. We drank to my father, I tried to explain the story in as sensitive way as possible, and we laughed and joked.

Four minute workweek would be too much for some... (picture of Vicky Pollard from Little Britain courtesy of the BBC)

If this is actually just a small-minded rant, feel free to tell me in the comments. I need to know if I’m just an idiot who hates somebody doing well and raising money for charity….

I appreciate, right away, that by writing about Tim Ferriss I’m going to give him the oxygen of publicity. That in discussing him we all encourage him to continue to use attention seeking devices to increase his influence and marketability.

And boy, does he know how to market.

Here’s a guy who’s written a book with an interesting concept. It’s titled The 4-Hour Workweek. Very interesting it may be. But I haven’t read it. Nor will I.

Because to read it would mean giving money to someone I find incredibly irritating. I mean, the guy gets everywhere. But he’s a fascinating study in popularity. Just like the most popular kids at your school probably weren’t the most capable or interesting, neither is he. Let’s go through some things:

1. Use of emotional blackmail to increase influence

Basically, the more people who follow your tweets on twitter, and the more people who follow your blog, the more influence you carry. Tell 100,000 people what you think about something, and you’ll influence them. Some will blindly take on-board your opinions, while others will be a little more cautious. But 100,000 people who treat you almost like a God? That’s power, that is.

Anyway, his latest way to build followers is to use a not-so-subtle form of emotional blackmail. He will raise for charity $3 for everyone who follows him on Twitter with a limit of 50,000. Now, you’d have to be pretty mean-spirited not to click that Follow button. That’s all you have to do to raise $3 dollars to help educate some US children. I mean, if you hear about this initiative and don’t click then you must be a truly horrible person. For five seconds work you can raise $3 dollars. That’s, like making $2160 an hour for charity! Wow!

I believe this guy is using the tricks religions use to gain followers. The upside of following their instructions may not be massive, but the downside could be huge. And he uses this approach All The Time. It’s horrible to see. See, in religion you can say things like “follow the guidelines in this book in order to receive eternal salvation” and “if you don’t follow us you could be cast into eternal damnation.” It’s like Pascal’s wager – if the religion is correct, then a small amount of investment of time and effort leads to a massive pay off (ie. eternity in heaven) but if you’re wrong and death is just death… well, you haven’t lost much, have you? Ratio of cost to potential gain is ridiculous.

2. Four hour workweeks don’t appeal to me

I mean, I enjoy my work. Simple as that.

3. But perhaps one of the things that turns me off is the overbearing air of smugness

Look at the guy’s header pictures. You can tell he isn’t English. You couldn’t go into an English pub and face your mates if you had a picture of yourself striking a sort of zen-style karate pose on your website’s header (carefully revealing your muscles, of course) unless perhaps all your friends were just like you.

4. In the end though, it’s the emotional trickery

The promises are high. The headlines beguiling. And you know, to someone working a dreary job or with difficult people what he discusses sound attractive. But a lot of it reminds me of me when I’d discovered I could make lots of money as a PeopleSoft developer. I really had it all – I could work moderately hard for short periods, taking plenty of breaks between contracts, travelling, fast cars, and sleeping with beautiful models. Ok, forget the bit about models, but really, life looked good.

And boy was I happy to let people know this. But when I thought about it, I got into corporate systems because at 18 I wanted to get a job coding and the only suitable job I could find around here was at a corporate. I trained up and, one day, took my skills out onto the open market. But the truth is, I was just lucky. How was I to know, in 1987, that ERP developers would be highly sought after in highly paid roles that the universities were failing to train for? I’d much rather have been a games developer – but truth be told, I wasn’t that good… Good for my wallet and lifestyle, because game coders typically earn less than ERP coders, but this was all pure chance.

In summary, Tim Ferriss is probably little further ahead of the curve than a lottery winner releasing a book called “How To Choose Lottery Numbers and Become Super-Rich Like Me.” That would be patent nonsense, but no more or less manipulative than his own lifestyle guruness.

So when this rich young man tries to pressure me into trying to find more people who can learn about him and adore him by tweeting about his new scheme, I find myself feeling ever so slightly sick. The idea sounds, initially, excellent. But why doesn’t he just give the money directly to charity? Why does he make it into conditional love? Why does he make it feel like a psycho girlfriend or boyfriend who says “if you loved me you’d do it.”

Maybe I’m Wrong

In a way I’d like to be. But I always want to look at the motives behind people. Maybe I’m just an idealist. But if I’m right, it might just dissuade people from posting some of the self-promoting junk that clutters up Twitter, forums and blogs. Not just his junk, but other people’s. There’s a growing tide of the stuff. It’s annoying.

Anyway, just a final call to action – you can follow me on twitter too if you like. I just won’t pay anybody anything. I also promise to try not to sell you anything, or retweet marketing gumph, competition announcements and so on. I may however, complain vehemently about whatever random irritation that cropped into my head that day.

Edited to add a link above to the Tim Ferriss’s blog post on the matter. And tags.