He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.
His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.
You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.
For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.
Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.
Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not? I think most people could actually "choose family" (or not, if it's better for you as individual). Why stick with people if they're mostly negative and have a negative impact on you? Just because you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human on the planet?
Not to take away from the rest of what you say, it's a highly personal experience, and I thank you for sharing that heartfelt message to give people more perspectives, something usually missing when "divisive" (maybe not the right word) people end up in the news. Thank you for being honest, and thank you for sharing it here.
> Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not?
I'm sorry you had that experience.
There are very good reasons to leave / avoid family. I have an extended family and I've seen it all: One cousin recently had to kick her husband out for being an alcoholic; a different cousin was kicked out for being an alcoholic and met his 2nd wife in AA. Fortunately, my ultra-conservative aunt and uncle tolerate their transgender grandchild, but it creates a lot of friction between them and my cousin (transgender child's parent).
For most of us, our families are a positive experience. As we get older, we also learn that families are an exercise in learning to accept people as they are, and not as we wish they would be. We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.
As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.
My brother has a substance abuse problem. When he gets out of prison, he’s clean. Them a cousin or uncle that hasn’t seen him in a while will stop by with a party favor (an 8 ball of coke or something) and then before you know it my brother is in jail again. They all are alcoholics and drama often escalates to fist fight type drama. Or the women will start throwing stuff around someone’s house and trash the place. It’s just like normal to them. Sometimes they make up and help clean up and sometimes they don’t. But the few times I’ve been around them on the decades since I made a decision to cut them out, it’s always just the same ole shit. They’re in a cycle of “dependence on family” while also “destroying family” from my perspective. It’s so volatile I can put up with it at all. My kid has only met these people a couple times and it’s always for brief time because once the booze get flowing or the other substances get passed around anything can happen. When I was a kid my mom was arguing with her then boyfriend and he ran her over and she was in a full body cast for like 6 months. My dad was always normal ish, from a more stable family, then in my mid 20s he was caught in a pedophile sting situation. And that’s just the beginning.
Like, who tf are these people. I have no time for this shit, Is my take on it.