Customer facing employment and therapy

There are two things I swear by.

First, under the current economic and social systems in place, every person in this country should work in a service industry or customer facing retail job for at least six months, with a year minimum being preferable. And the second is therapy should be entirely covered by insurance as preventative / maintenance care, with no preset maximum session limits.

The first item, face-to-face customer based employment in our current “the customer is always right” society, in my incredibly bias opinion from over a decade in restaurants, teaches problem solving, multitasking, de-escalation techniques, communication skills, money handling and credit processing acumen helpful to traverse our current economic hellscape, etc. The complexities of providing an enjoyable experience that is directly attached to a price tag is nuanced, and being able to understand and navigate multiple of these interactions, repeatedly, with an ever changing cast of customers, builds a resilience that is transferable into every area of life.

The second item – therapy! – but not conversion therapy because that is torture, don’t fight me on this, I will win. But therapy, when done without harm by an educated professional with myriad experiences who is patient centered, again in my absolutely bias opinion, promotes introspection that wards off the social expectation to dehumanize each other at the alter of capitalism, racism, patriarchy, religious zealotry, classism, the list is exhausting. For example, speaking specifically in the United States, the very real racial divides legislated into our lives that shape our understanding of the world before we are even old enough to process what we are experiencing. In fact, I would venture to guess, all five people who ever read this post were born into a racial environment wherein there was a good school and a bad school, or a rich school and a poor school, or a public and a private school, or some variation of a this or that school, and each of those direct comparisons evoke racially disparate mental images – you as an individual had no power in the decisions that created that environment – but you as an individual have every power to interpret life beyond the box you were born into. I’m of the belief if therapy was normalized and treated as medically routine without stigma, it would have a cascading effect wherein even if everyone didn’t partake in therapy, enough people would, that it would naturally start changing and shifting real world behaviors.

Unless we want to collectively burn it all down and create a new society that puts humans first and supports the good of everyone versus the exorbitance of a few, but I digress.