Tana y Jake: Lessons to Learn

No, of course I haven't gone all "drama blog" on you, but as you know, I do watch my share of drama channels on YouTube, because it's entertaining. We could sit down and talk whether drama channels are the new gladiator games of the world, where we gather to watch others destroy their own lives of the lives of other. Why do we, as humans, find so entertaining the disgrace and suffering of others? Oh well, that's a topic for another post.

Souce: Google Images and Flipboard.

In today's post I'd like to talk about a case I've seen on drama channels, which has gotten some hype. This is abour to YouTubers, Tana Mongeau and Jake Paul. Both of them have pretty much livestyle channels, and have been in quite a lot of drama on their own. Their style is irreverent, down right vulgar, from what I've seen, and have also been featured in Shane Dawson's docu-series.

I believe both of them have been banned from large YouTube conventions, such as VideoCon, and in Tana's case, she got some notoriety when she reacted to the banning by declaring she would do her own convention - TanaCon - which was an absolute disaster.

Jake Paul... well, I don't know much about him and haven't heard of him until Shane's docu-series, where Shane wanted to stablish whether he of his brother Logan, or both were sociopaths.

Both Tana and Jake like to party, are wrapped in constant drama and lead what looks like irresponsible lives. It seems like they just burn through the days, and up until Shane's series on each of them, it seemed like life was catching up with them, which was sad, since they are both quite young. They are both YouTube celebrities and it seems they own their fortune to the platform. From what I gather, Tana also got a reality TV series on MTV for her 21st birthday.

After Shane's series on each of them, it seems they've got together (this was this year), and appeared to begin dating. It was never quite clear that they were dating, as they seemed to be dating other people, specially Jake. Much of what happened with them was quite under the radar for anyone that wasn't following their antics, until suddenly they decided to get engaged and then married quite fast. As the news exploded, specially around their odd wedding, the news of them hit the drama channels I follow, and a bunch of recipes and videos were unloaded. They were news for a couple of days and then the novelty died out.

So, what's the deal? First of all, their whole relationship looks fake, and particularly Tana often mentions that the whole thing is "for clout". She has 4,9 million subscribers and he has 19 million. As a marketing move to get her growing, wouldn't be so bad for her. For him... well, maybe he could reach another segment of the market with her. However, their behavior is peculiar, and this is where we can learn a few things.

Both of them are clearly young and immature, but of the both of them, Jake is one to have a manipulative, abusive tendency. It has been put to evidence plenty of times, that he doesn't treat well his girlfriends, and likes to humilate them, taunt them and play rather heavy "jokes" on them. There are people on record talking about physical abuse as well. Tana is notoriously irresponsible, prone to leave everything to others and trust herself on others. She abuses of her staff and people she considers under her, but cowers in the presence of those she perceives as above her.

The things I saw that draw my attention were the dynamics and how Jake seemed to be imposing on Tana and leading her on. For instance, Tana has an MTV reality show that goes around her 21st birthday. On a birthday party planned and paid handsomely, Jake pulled some stunts that pretty much ruined the whole effort. He knew someone he doesn't like was on the guest list. He demanded Tana to uninvite the person. Tana tasked someone else to do it, but it's not clear whether it happened or not.

Either way, Jake drove to the party, made Tana leave her party to talk to him, and then, even though the person Jake wanted removed was gone, he decided he wanted to go home and took Tana with him. Note this: he made Tana, who needs public attention for the growth of her channel, and who needs the attention to feel good about herself, to leave a celebration that's all about her.

Around that time, Tana managed to be accepted again at VideoCon. She did her stunts, like disregarding time, being appalingly late and then, when told she was late, she denied it and threw a temper tantrum. She was surrounded by her adoring fans, who are all kids who take Tana's chronic tardiness as her personal mark. She makes them wait and they wait on her, not realizing the disrespect she shows with her tardiness.

Jake has been banned from VideoCon for a while. Through Tana, he managed to make her and her staff ask for him to be accepted again, allegedly, because he was her boyfriend and wanted to surprise her. He was barred, like, from the premises and all, from what I gather. He got her to get his prohibition lifted, and so he "surprised" her by walking on the stage when she was being interviewed, in front of her loving fans, in an activity all about Tana, and said he had a poem. This poem was supposed to be about their relationship, and it was really bad, but the worse part was the begining of it, where he stated in no uncertain terms, and much vulgarity, that Tana was pretty much a whore who gave him oral sex the first time they met. This in front of her fans, in an activity dedicated to her.

They were engaged to marry, and it was going to be a quick marriage, which Jake postponed three times. All the chatting and postponing was communicated through staff. Jake never told Tana in her face that he wanted to postpone, or why. At one point they were talking, and Tana wanted certainty, that the marriage was going to be legal. Jake looked at loss.

Tana was a lot on camera, trying to justify Jake fooling around with other women, as them having an open relationship. It has transpired that they haven't spent the night together either, or had sex. This even though Jake's poem claims she's easy and he can get a blow job out of her upon meeting her.

The wedding itself was not only cheap, but quite evidently fake, and much like a reality TV gypsy wedding, but with no money spent on gaudy, flashy, blinging, excessive stuff. Even a fake fight broke out. Everything about it was tacky, and they charged people $50 to watch it streaming on a streaming service that didn't work. Another TanaCor fraud case?

Once the wedding and the reception was over, Tana went home alone and Jake went to keep partying with some girls. Some suggestive pictures were posted by Jake, of him with his pants open, with two beautiful, thin girls. Tana has some overweight.

The case, for me, it's clear: Jake uses Tana for his own purposes, such as getting into places from which he has been banned, gets access to other viewers, gets higher exposition and gets his hands on a new girlfriend-victim, whom he can torment to his hearts content. For me it's also clear that he doesn't deal well with the fact that Tana is raising, getting forgiven and accepted again, or that she could be celebrated and loved by herself. He needs to impose and flex his muscle to make patent that he can destroy anything good in her life.

Tana, on the other hand, is very immature and has no grasp of what respect or responsability is, two important components of adult life. She actively ditches responsability and thus allows others to make decisions for her, plan for her, but also has no qualms to trample plans, because she doesn't acknowledge consequences. Even when she is the cause, by her ditching responsability, she mentally assigns the blame on someone else, because she makes others responsible for her life.

This avoidance of responsability is what makes her a perfect victim for people like Jake, who can take the power or authority, pretend to be responsible, and then ensnarl her in their game to pile negative consequences on her, offering her a narrow path of solution, which force her to bend to his will, do his bidding and take silently as much humiliation as he wishes to pile on her.

Jake weaponizes responsability by equating it to guilt. You see, responsability is paired with authority: when you are responsible of something, you have the authority to do something about it, and the means to do it. Jake takes the authority, pushes her into a corner, and use responsability/blame to force her when she doesn't comply, or when he wishes to punish her with some "training discipline", to get her used to his particular games.

This dynamics strip her of any respect. Jake molds her into a little less than a doormat, a typical joke-woman, the kind that embodies to his will the stereotipical stupid blond of any misogynistic joke. She's the stupid, the willless, the dirty whore that can be kicked, mocked and will eagerly come back for more. She lets him push her, debase her and ruin everything in her life. In turn, she exercises her disrespect on those that depend on her, like her staff and her fans. She disregards their time, money, effort, advise and everything else.

Now, this sort of behavior isn't just something that happens to YouTubers, but it happens to many people, of many walks of life. Many think that "adulting" is hard and prefer to keep to their childish or teeny behavior for as long as they think they can get away with it. This can be due to a faulty, sheltered upbringing where parents or guardians have failed to teach their kids from young age about responsability, and all the components of it.

The lack of respect can also be result of the upbringing and the environment in which the person developed. Either they themselves were often disrespected, or they grew up seeing people disrespect others, this is something they learned. It might happen that they were never really taught to respect others, or just in words, but that never reflected in actions.

Whether you are being a victim in a situation like Tana's, or a bystander getting affected, it's important first to recognize the situation and understand what's happening. People like Jake can make you think you need them, that the whole world will collapse if you leave them. There reside their power: they need you to stay and be willing. Thing is, the world won't collapse.

The best course of action is always to leave the situation and learn from it. If someone is like Jake, they are not going to get better, they are not going to improve nor will they correct their ways. They may change their path, but only to find a new way to torment you. Once they latched onto a prey, they will use it and abuse it until it dies or escapes. So don't fall for the promises or the hope of change.

Tana and Jake are rushing, but have no direction, no clarity. This is a mistake you shouldn't make. Even if you have no idea what you want to do with your life, there are things you might, like whether you want to travel around the world or have a house and a dog. Take those wishes for your life and make a plan about how to better get them. Learn responsability, don't avoid it. You are not going to be young and strong forever, and you will probably die old and weak. Plan ahead.

Really, That's not How it Works

The worldview of some people is really interesting. Some seem to believe that things will change the way they want them to change without them putting anything into it, or even if their actions feed into the contrary effect. This is the case of... Carly.

Carly has a child whom she has spoiled since the crib. We all know because she has been our coworker since before she was pregnant. Whatever the kid has wanted, she has always provided, to extreme lengths. She has rushed to the hospital with the kid for reasons most people would just keep them at home or give it a thicker coat and send them to school. The kid also goes only to private hospitals, which is not your only choice here. Curiously, the kid has been pumped full of pills for all sorts of allergies and things to the point where they take daily more medication than most elder people, with ever changing needs and issues.

Before you say something, yes, it is possible the kid indeed suffers for a long series of illnesses and allergies, and that their parents to everything they can to help them live a normal life, but then wouldn't all those affections also show? However, the point here is that Carly is going far and beyond. Kid has allergies and all sorts of diagnosed illnesses, and needs to be checked monthly by the pediatrician (for the last twelve years) - and the kid belongs to four different sport clubs at school, and all of them are extremely physical and outdoorsy - and so Carly also does the kid's homework, gets them all the videogames and videogame consoles, sneaks out of work daily because she has to pick her kid up from school, and school ends three hours before the end of her work day...

And so it happens that in the last years the kid has taken the habit of telling her of the homework that needed to be submitted twenty minutes before class. The kid doesn't study, doesn't move a finger, because they are used to Carly leaving work, risking her job and making homework materialize out of thin air. Recently Carly spent a weekend preparing the kid's science project, only to have them misplace it and lose it. So now, an hour before Science Class, Carly had to sneak out of her job, start scrapping the project back on, find her files and print them, and then hire a messenger to send it to her kid's school.

Of course she gets mad and calls her kid and berates them, but you can hear the ennui in the kid's voice, like they boringly put up with the mother's rant, because they don't care.

For years Carly has been doing everything for her kid and instead of them. That child has no sense of responsability or cause-consequence, because Carly has been dealing with all of it and keeping them from facing real life situations. She keeps insisting to the rest of the office that she is going to stop, she will make the kid responsible, but yet she runs and picks up their responsabilities because "what can I do at this point". Oh, but "they will hear me out when I get home".

Except next week is going to be the same.

In a way, she drops her own responsabilities to attend her kid's responsabilities, which puts her at risk, because at one point people will stop be linient with her slipping away from the office on a daily basis half through the time she should be here and working.

So, what am I trying to say here? Though you can turn a situation gone wrong and make it better, this is not always the case, which is why, when you start something - like you decide to have a child, or you enter a relationship, start a company, etc. - you have to have a clear view of where you want to go, and go constantly for it. You can't do everything for someone else constantly and expect them to start doing everything for you. People get used to the comfort you give them, and then they expect them. 

When you "ruin" a relationship by not enforcing limits and boundries, and then wish to enforce them, you will have a harder time than if you would have started with this from the begining. In a relationship you can try and fix it, but when it doesn't work, you have the chance to break up. Can you do that with your own child? And there are many other situations where walking away isn't an option. Think of a job relationship, where you have to set boundaries to keep bosses and colleagues or clients from taking advantage of you, demanding more work from you than what you have been hired for, or what's recognized in your paycheck. With the current economy, leaving might not be an option.

So, don't wait until things become unbearable, until you break under the weight of the burden you have been carrying for others. Start small and always start at the begining. Learn to know yourself, your capabilities and your limits. And respect them.

In the end, it's all about respect: respect for yourself and all the others: those you think you are helping, and those you are imposing on in your effort to haul the issues of others.

Autosabotage

Once again I'm pulled towards the keyboar thanks to the case of a friend, and that case got me thinking. She works at this place that has become unsatisfying for her. She's been at the company for a long time and though in the begining it was nice, with time she has been noticing things that make her uncomfortable and others that are plain wrong. The idea of leaving the company has been out there for a while, but the current labor market situation didn't make it easy for her to leave. Then it happens that she got a job offer for a position that's perfect for her in another company, and she froze.

As she related her story, it was plain she was deeply dissatisfied, but then she was so scared about grabbing the chance that was being offered. At one point she said she felt bad for wanting to leave because the company paid her visum for Canada. So, though she was very dissatisfied with the company, and now had a way out with a job offer, she was having second thoughts because the company paid her visum for Canada, which she needed for her job, because otherwise she had no intentions to go to Canada.

I would like you all to take a moment to reflect on this, and also see how this situation can be carbon copied into just about any situation and any relationship in life.

Often we see ourselves in a situation where we are unhappy, we feel unappreciated, wronged, uncomfortable, hurt, abused, exploited, disrespected... and we want it to stop, we want to get out of it, but the moment we get the chance to do so we chicken out and pull from the deepest recess of  our memory a few flashes of good things or things that can pass for good. For instance, in my last relationship, the last two years I was deeply dissatisfied. I had decided I was going to break up with my boyfriend because I could no longer trust him and our lives and life philosophy went in striking different directions. And it took me two years to gather up the nerve and do it.

Through those two years I strategized, I planned and I kept giving him chances to redeem himself, which he didn't take. When finally I decided that enough is enough, I was stopped because I thought of my nephews, my parents  and my brother because they really,, really love him. Like... they just love him like crazy. How could I take him away from them? But it was time to move on, and it was done.

This behavior, this pushing obstacles in our own road, and play the devil's advocate against ourselves is autosabotage. Because one thing is to think things through - and I advocate for that - but another is to start pulling out little specks of goodness to make you stay in a bad situation. Truth is that these memories of the positive moments won't curb the experience. And abusive job won't turn better because you are reminded of the visum they gave you. A partner you can't stand won't magically become amazing again just because your family loves him. Your abusive parents won't get more bearable because they laughed at the picnic you had when you were five years old.

Remember that the memories - good or bad - will stay with you, but if you want a chance, you have to make it. It's your life and your decision. Nobody else's. Remember also that complaining has never solved anything.