Sometimes I feel as though I am surrounded by urgency, anxiety, and hysteria. I’ve never seen such stress—students, colleagues, family members -- and I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
I’m not talking about people who have had bona fide disasters – deaths of loved ones, the loss of a home, divorce, severe illness, job loss – those are enough to make anyone lose their marbles. And we won’t even talk about stresses like “my home was bombed” or “all my children are ill because we have no clean drinking water.” No one I know (to my knowledge) has the slightest freaking idea what that feels like, including myself.
No, I am talking about the reactions I am seeing to the stresses that everyone encounters. Deadlines. Too much work. Arguments with friends or co-workers. Big papers due. Changed plans. Mishaps. Students hyperventilating because they waited until the last minute to write a huge paper.
What’s really going on? Our culture seems to have been inculcated with a pervasive feeling of dread. I don’t get it: if people can survive having no clean drinking water, why do we need Xanax in order to deal with our lives? I have come to the following conclusions:
1) Our entire culture catastrophizes. We have no perspective. Being hurt in a terrible car wreck, getting arrested, getting shot, having your house leveled in a tornado, having someone you love die, losing your job and having no prospects, being homeless, those are catastrophes. 9/11 was a catastrophe. Many other things -- including things that, granted, ARE very upsetting and stressful -- are NOT catastrophes. I blame this lack of perspective on all the things I list below, and on the fact that we are barraged with horror stories everyday from every quarter, and we completely lose our sense of perspective. There’s also no discrimination in the stuff that is trumpeted at us in headlines all day. Truly horrific topics like “Atrocities in Mogadishu” are situated right next to “Channel 9 Investigates: Can eating too many carrots kill you?” I don’t know – are you going to eat them in Mogadishu?
2) Our culture is completely screwed up about work. Too many people in this culture are suffering from the bone-headed idea that if you’re not doing something related to work/school, you’re wasting your time. As a result, most of us are exhausted and have done very little to recharge our batteries. They can’t watch TV without doing work at the same time, can’t go for a walk without talking business on their cell phones, can’t go to a coffee shop to relax without bringing the goddamn laptop. If our world has become a place where reading a good book, taking a walk, talking to a friend, listening to music, enjoying art, making love or taking a nap have become a “waste of time” or a reason to feel “guilty” about not spending the same amount of time reading 25 work-related blood-pressure-raising e-mails, then we need to make a different world.
3) Our culture is completely screwed up about consequences. We do incredibly destructive or stupid shit as if there were going to be no consequences as all, and then we obsess over the possibility of consequences that are actually not very bad. I see this all the time with students who procrastinate all semester writing a paper that’s worth half their grade, but will stay up all night cramming for a 15 point quiz. Huh?
4) Our culture is completely screwed up about responsibility. We spend endless amounts of angst and energy trying to fix crap we can’t control, but we refuse to take responsibility for all kinds of stuff, including our own problems, the way we think, the way we learn, the way we treat the earth, the way we drive, the way we talk to each other, and the effect we have on people around us when we exhaust ourselves trying to fix crap we can’t control.
4) Our society is suffering from malnutrition and lack of sleep. Sure, some of us lucked out and married cooks; but even then, you have to be home to do that. Many of us have “no time” and so we cram processed junk and lots of it. We are Fat partly because of that, and partly because we refuse to take time to nourish ourselves in any other way, including sleep -- so food, and lots of it, becomes one of our few emotional comforts. As for sleep, my experience has been that work that’s done when you’re exhausted often has to be done over again anyhow. Go to bed. Take a nap. Eat an apple.
6) We are all TOO DAMNED AVAILABLE. There’s not a moment of the day when we are not reachable. Cell phone, e-mail, land line, texting, Blackberries. We can even carry our computers around with us. As a result we have a whole generation that doesn’t understand the word “unavailable.” Their parents call their blasted cell phones when they’re in class; they spill their guts on Facebook; they e-mail you at 3 am and then, when they see you at 8 am, are appalled because “didn’t you get my e-mail?” Believe it or not, I’ve started locking my office door when I’m in there working to stop my students from just walking in without knocking. We can’t even enjoy a concert anymore without having some idiot (not always young, either) sitting there texting in the row in front of us, cell phone light flashing and keys beeping until you think there might be an imminent homicide in row 32. The worst part of it is that people get sucked into this trend, and even old farts like me start to feel as though we are obligated to take part in this constant-availability sickness. The only way we are ALL going to make this stop is to each take responsibility for not buying into this. It’s not rude to send a 15-second “Thanks for the message, I’ll get back to you later” e-mail (unless one of the above actual catastrophes has occurred.) The business colleague who called you on Sunday morning to discuss Wednesday’s meeting can wait a few hours, and the student who needs help with that paper can wait until you have time to give him/her an appointment (which will also take much less time than the three screens of e-mail s/he thinks s/he’s going to get at 4am.)
7) Last but not least: when did we all start being in such a terrible hurry, and what exactly are we hurrying to? This may be related to the feeling of dread; maybe we’re trying to get everything done before Gabriel Blows His Horn? When you realize you’re going to die, will you ask yourself how your life sped by so fast? Shit, you sure were in a hurry to get it over with.
Speaking of realizing you’re going to die, you may notice that I haven’t said anything about spiritual practice. Do I think it would help? In theory, yes, but it doesn’t seem to be helping many of us, so either it’s not working or, as the Internet jargon goes, UR doin’ it wrong. My money is on the second. I know a lot of people, myself included, who manage to make that one more thing to get anxious and stressed about (I’m not meditating enough, I’m not doing my spiritual practice right, I have no time to do it, blah blah blah.)
By now (if you made it this far) you’re probably wondering what Great Words of Wisdom I have now to set you free from all of the above. I don’t have any. It affects me as much as it affects you. But I do keep coming back to one thing: it’s my responsibility whether I buy into all the above garbage, or not. It’s my responsibility to get a grip, to get some perspective, to stop trying to fix things that are beyond my control, to close the laptop, to allow my spiritual practice to happen, to slow down, to ask myself what the hell is really important and why am I hyperventilating about something that’s not. In fact, it’s my responsibility to figure out what the hell IS my responsibility, and to figure out what is a catastrophe and what is just a pain in the neck.
Then, I have to take on that responsibility, and if you want things to change, you do too.
“Do not waste your life!”
(whack with bamboo stick)
End of rant.
