How much mourning is 'enough'?

A couple of things have been reminding me of death lately. And along with death, I've started to think about mourning.

As you know, dear readers, my mother died seven years ago last Friday. And my father passed away last October. Neither one of these were easy to go through, and I can't honestly say I'm over either one.

Can you 'Lose' a hobby?

Recently, I went through an experience that soured me to one of my hobbies. I'm at the very least taking a break from it, if not stopping it entirely. But there's a voice in my head, one that tells me that if I don't go back, then the people who soured it 'drove me away' and they 'won.' Which, by extension, means I lost.

Can you lose a hobby? I mean, you can lose one in the sense of it going away and being unable to find it. But can you lose otherwise?

I should clarify a bit. The hobby is a type of roleplaying. Not the sexy kind, but the nerdy kind. Like D&D. When I first started playing that, way back before my age was in double digits, the thing that appealed to me most about it was that you couldn't win. It was impossible. You couldn't really lose, either. You could only enjoy it.

That's what I've always liked about roleplaying. And when someone tries to force a final resolution, it makes me uncomfortable. I don't like having to compete against the people running the game. I don't like zero-sum-games. I hate that there has to be one winner and one loser. I'd rather it be something we can all have fun doing, and that way, we all win. Mutually Assured Delight, a far better MAD than that other one.

But what do you do with those people that need to win? What do you do with the ones that want it to be "I win, you lose"? One solution is what I'm doing: walking away. If they want to play that way, fine. But I don't, so I won't play with them anymore.

But that's not the best way. In fact, I'd say it might be the second worst. (The worst being going back and beating them at their own game, thus becoming the thing I hate most).

The best way is how we did it in college. I was thinking back to that game recently, and I noticed that there was a culture to that game unlike any other I've ever seen.

Characters died, yes. In that sense, people could 'lose.' But they were never killed randomly. They were given a resolution to their character's story. Maybe not the happiest resolution, but a resolution they could all be content with. And they would try, as hard as possible, not to kill anyone. IF there was no way around it, then fine. But there's almost always a way around it, and the players in that game managed to find it most of the time.

The one time I can remember someone actively pursuing another character's death, twisting things so as to be able to kill them (rather than twisting so they didn't have to), the entire game reacted with disgust. That player was ostracized (for a little bit) and told that what he did was 'not cool.' We moved on from there, but the fact that we did it at all is an important thing.

Maybe I'm remembering with rose tinted glasses. Maybe people are just assholes, moreso now than before.

Or maybe I just never noticed before.

the golden rule sucks.

They say that the golden rule is 'do unto others as you would have others do unto you.' But I don't think that works all that well.

For example, I want to worship the boots of damned near anyone I see wearing them. But I don't want that to happen to me.

But aside from the sexuality side, there are other times the 'golden rule' doesn't apply. The problem is that it asks people 'would you be okay if this happened to you?', and for a lot of situations, the answer can be yes even when what's happening isn't fair.

Take a CEO paying themselves ten million dollars a year. Would he want other CEOs to make that much money? Sure, why not? And saying that he is doing unto others when he pays his executives a fraction of that salary isn't entirely accurate. Those people are others, but the CEO isn't the same job. So a CEO paying an entry level employee forty grand a year is just saying that's how much he or she would EXPECT to be paid for an entry level job.

The problem is, it's not fair. If I'm in a position of power, I should (according to the golden rule) treat those I have power over the way I would want to be treated if our positions were reversed. But what if I think that our situations being reversed would mean that I SHOULD be treated badly?

Fair, on the other hand, is fair. It's fair for people who are more experienced, whose jobs require more education or skill, and those who bring the most to the company to get paid more than those who don't. But there's still a point where fair ends.

If I'm a CEO, I may, possibly, fairly deserve ten or even twenty times what my lowest level employee makes. But that comes to about half a million a year, not ten. Ten isn't fair.

If I make the rules for something, I should make the rules FAIR, not just the way I would want them to apply to me. That encourages me to make the rules lean in my favor, so even if I AM in that situation, I'd still have an advantage. I should be focusing on making sure that the equals are all treated equally.

Because THAT, dear readers, is the real golden rule. It's the rule we SHOULD follow, the first principle of ethical thinking: Equals should be treated equally.

Treated equally. Fairly.