: Uptick
Am noticing an uptick in unhinged and self-centered behavior/main character syndrome. But also noticing an uptick in Great Recession-style random acts of kindness, “was just thinking of you” messages, etc. This instills a bit of hope for humanity, if not the country.
: A little air
Just coming off of about two brutally busy months of work and starting to breathe a little easier, or to state it more accurately, focusing on long-term existential anxieties instead of “Why the fuck won’t my colleagues agree with me?”
I am normally fairly good? I think? somewhat effective? at compartmentalizing my emotions and not taking them out on others, but the past few months showed me that I am more vulnerable to stereotypical forms of emotional spillover than I thought. I shot down a few good ideas and acted unnecessarily smug when proven right. I made the right decision for the wrong reason and took credit anyway. Etc.
With a little more daylight in my schedule, I chatted with a new friend today who is about to embark on a cool life project that will put him in a fast-paced new environment with a bunch of strangers. We talked about the idea of how everyone has a different stress response and how it’s important to know what yours is so that you can differentiate the symptoms from the disease and warn others when you aren’t feeling like yourself.
My stress response is critical analysis and being a hater.
If you master your own stress response, then you can treat stressful situations as a little game where the challenge is to try to do anything other than your stress response. You win by resisting the impulse to flip the fuck out and instead projecting optimism and grace. The strategy is to figure out what kind of behavior is the precise opposite of your stress response and then do that.
My anti–stress response is to be an absolute class act and regard everyone with gratitude.
This is a very difficult response to deploy on people who seem to be investing their utmost effort in performing their ineptitude, but you have to try.
Not even gonna proofread this.
: The phone as creativity sink
I have been on a bunch of long flights lately, and each time went in with the resolution that I would get some good thinking and writing done in the air. My claim to fame among corporate travelers (the lamest brag) is that I have never used inflight Wi-Fi, even though I think I can technically expense it. But with every flight the impulse to cave and just scroll lobste.rs or whatever grows stronger.
Here’s the thing: I used to get on a long flight and the ideas would just start flowing. I would bang out an outline of an essay or a music composition or a blog post, sometimes on paper, sometimes on my phone.
This doesn’t seem to happen as readily anymore. Have I become less disciplined? Nowadays, I sit on the flight and try to come up with ideas but keep drawing blanks. Oddly, when I feel the impulse to scroll a feed, I just open my phone and swipe back and forth between home screens and it somehow fulfills the same purpose. That’s kind of fucked up, right? I get more from the “fake” dopamine hit of dicking around on the phone to no end than from the thing that I ostensibly really want to do, i.e. write.
This brings me to a phenomenon I see in various hobby circles: People expressing guilt over having spent not enough time working on the hobby and too much time watching YouTube and scrolling feeds. This is ironic because, supposedly, a hobby is supposed to be enjoyable, so why do you have to force yourself to do it? Why not just declare YouTube your hobby instead so you can feel less guilty?
Part of the explanation must recognize that we have a tacit moral hierarchy about which hobbies are more or less virtuous. There is some level of social pressure to have at least one “healthy” hobby like exercise or crafts to balance “unhealthy” ones like, IDK, sports gambling.
If you were a dictator it would make sense to promote some hobbies over others for the sake of societal advancement or whatever but what reason, really, do we have for voluntarily self-flagellating ourselves over an Instagram habit? The fact that everyone feels like they should be doing more home cooking with fresh ingredients has not brought about that reality; instead we are still eating fast food and Postmates, but just feeling anxious and ashamed about it to boot.
: How to disagree without people hating you
Any ideas here? I always struggle with this at work, where I have a professional disagreement with someone (I think we should do it X way instead, I have a good reason for thinking so, it’s something I’m knowledgeable at) but I experience immediate regret as soon as I express the disagreement—I feel like I am jeopardizing our good working relationship or spending out of a fixed pool of goodwill points, something like that.
I guess I struggle with it most in situations where others have already let me have my way on a bunch of arguably unimportant issues, and then suddenly something that actually matters comes along and I am asking for one more dose of tolerance.
When I can tell that others are “just tolerating” me or allowing me to win the argument just so they can move on with their day, it makes me feel very insecure, like I am some kind of narcissist or bully who refuses to hear criticism. But it’s not true! I am more than happy to be disagreed with, and I try my best to express to others that I am open to being wrong—but if others want to be passive and flatter my nonexistent ego then I have no opportunity to demonstrate that I do not take it personally.
My therapist would remind me that a narcissist would already have gotten over it.
How can you be both right and open-minded at the same time? I don’t think it’s as obvious a question as it seems.
: Spillover stress
Had a bad meeting at work the other day—I was stressed out about the state of the world and doomscrolled some awful article right before I went in. Ended up being basically unpleasant during the whole meeting, shooting down others’ ideas and saying “That will never work,” etc. Sent a little apology in the group messages afterwards but still feeling a bit guilty about it. I guess my therapist would remind me, in this sort of situation, that the fact that my conscience is still torturing me over the incident is evidence that I am not the sort of bad person that I am worried I might be.
I don’t know if this is me getting older, wiser, and more self-aware about it, or if my personality has actually changed, but I seem to be more susceptible to this sort of “spillover stress” now than I was when I was younger. I have to be very careful about my media diet and what sorts of articles I click on, especially if I know I’m about to go into a contentious meeting or already sleep deprived or whatever.
If I’m doing it right, I have to dedicate what seems like a solid hour a day (not all at once, of course) to this sort of metacognitive maintenance: checking in on my stress and fatigue levels, talking myself out of clicking on a bad headline, keeping tabs on the feelings of colleagues who are dealing with similar issues.
I always thought the hard part of my job would be the technical skills—you know, the ones I spend so much time, money, and effort honing—but what I see now is that the real challenge is managing relationships, and being able to show up with a little more grace and tolerance when everyone’s in the pressure cooker. (Of course, this requires that I be so good at the tech stuff that that is never the problem.)