Just Be And You Are

This well-constructed, crescendoed post by John Halamka really strikes a chord. Stress Acceleration is worth reading start to finish for the writing quality as well as the content. A few snippets below:

Does this acceleration of stress bother me? Over the years of medical training and leading large complex organizations I’ve learned to adapt to just about anything. For every issue there is a process to resolve it.

Is it sustainable for society? I don’t think so.

…Can we sit and enjoy a meal without thinking about work or checking email? Can we go to a movie or concert for an evening without needing to stay connected? Can we turn off our social networks for a week without suffering withdrawal?

The level of stress I see around me is leading humanity to increase consumption of pharmaceuticals (have a problem – take a pill), eat poorly, and reduce the baseline of human kindness (driven in Boston lately?).

As attention becomes more of a scarce resource, does it become a commodity for sale?

Marketing agencies must view attention in this way at times. The signals we’re bombarded with day-to-day are endless; tv, music, books, ads, and magazines are just a start. Everyone has an opinion too and they aren’t afraid to express it, the blogosphere being a great example.

Attention spans are only going to get thinner. Multi-tasking has a limit, so do you a) choose to scale back and unitask, b) limit the scope of what you pay attention to, c) don’t do anything and let yourself swim in the sea of messages?

It’s a tough choice, but no matter which path you choose, you are paying out something of yourself. Something much more valuable than the dollar in your pocket. If attention is the next scarce resource, buy-in is gold.

The quarter-life crisis and the mid-life crisis seem to result from two things; higher life expectancy and greater exposure to information on a global level.

We share more information faster

I’ll tackle the latter first. As in the case of psychological diagnoses, just by coining the term we’ve made a phenomenon out of it. What was meant to be a label defining a cohort’s struggle through hard times becomes a scapegoat for a variety of other problems. So no, I don’t think everyone really goes through it.

From what I’ve read, the DSM-IV vaguely defines the mid-life crisis as an adjustment disorder. Which makes me wonder about the standard by which adjustment is measured. What do we need adjusting to? Who defines that standard? And should we want to adjust? A word that better suits is “expectation”. Whether quarter or mid, we haven’t adjusted, or come to terms with what’s expected of us.

Misunderstandings, arguments, crises are usually 50/50. Never is one person completely at fault. There are two things at play here; a person’s ability to adjust and poor standards set for adjustment. If an increasing portion of the population is suffering from this crisis, maybe society needs to reexamine its expectations. But this doesn’t happen enough.

The person going through the crisis, initially outcasted and eventually adopted into the definition-driven community of struggling 20/40 somethings, is forced to sacrifice reconcile their expectations with those of society. This step is crucial – even character-defining – since the choice is buying in or not.

I know a lot of people who’ve gone through the quarter-life crisis, but I’m never clear about the outcome. I’m curious about people’s experience after the fact. I want to ask questions like “Did you settle and for what?”, “If you didn’t, what did you redefine in your life and how is different from society?”

We live longer so we know less younger

Life expectancy is the underlying theme. This is all new to us. Whereas society may be proliferating outdated standards, we as individuals may just not have a clue. We haven’t lived this long, ever. Everything changed post-industrial revolution and we’ve been making it up as we go along.

This is where I high-five the quarter-lifers and mid-lifers. Instead of being a diagnosis in the big book of mental disorders, this kind of a crisis builds new cultural memes, argues against status-quo through personal struggle, and acknowledges that change is necessary. It’s simply evolution taking it’s course. We used to be adults in our teens and now 30-year olds are going back home to live with their parents (who are alive and wealthy enough to support it).

Living through this crisis is all about uncertainty, which isn’t so bad on it’s own. What gets me riled up is the suffering that ensues from the uncertainty. That it’s a bad thing not to know even if we’re living longer and society hasn’t reevaluated it’s standards. That you drink through it, cheat through it, leave kids behind through it, spend excessively through it. That I’m not sure I understand. My guess is that transitions are harder to deal with than we expect, because we don’t talk about transitions enough.

It’s a set up

The keyword is “expectations”. That we need them at all. Outside of a cliched sense of “no expectation, moment-to-moment living”, there is a lot of truth in not setting yourself up for failure or letting someone else set you up in the first place. It’s unavoidable in the case of your parents, friends or the media. You need to know the definition in order to redefine it. Recognize though that it is not a bad experience, not a crisis. It just is.

We’ve become immune to watching commercials and maybe that’s why advertisers are working so hard to keep our attention. Probably because I don’t watch much TV (ok, hulu selectively), whenever I watch a commercial my mind is thrown in ten different directions. It’s an experience and only when I see myself watching it can I step out, and recollect my brain.

The plethora of audio-visual stimuli in a commercial is meant to do only one thing; keep your eyes on the screen. We all know it’s to sell us stuff and I don’t think most of us buy into it. What we buy into instead is a well-staged glamorization of reality. Reality. You know, slow-moving birds, waving trees, smell of the air, feel of the pavement, all that jazz. Just isn’t as exotic and glitzy as TV. After a few hours a day (which is below the national average), we’re overstimulated to the point where regular old life seems, well, regular and we have go back for more. It’s like opening a Doritos bag.

The best way to realize the inanity of what you’re experiencing is to step out of yourself for a second and think about you sitting there watching this commercial and absorbing what it has to offer. Your transfixiation becomes immediately clear and you might find yourself shaking your head and getting some water. Or just getting up. Have you ever watched people playing video games (especially the Wii)? They’re so caught up in the screen that they don’t realize they’re pressing a few buttons really fast or waving a joystick around madly. It’s really funny to watch and makes me think about what they’re really doing; entertaining themselves. View yourself the same way watching a commercial and you’re realize what you’re really doing too.

Mainly, I want to jump out of the jaded reality of marketing and focus on what I really wanted in the first place – to watch a show and be entertained. Commercials have been a bother since day one, and thanks to TiVo and web streaming, they’re becoming less of a nuisance. If you watch TV the traditional way, try doing something else when the commercial comes on. Being sedentary is one of the major culprits in the obesity epidemic racing through America and no one wants to be part of that statistic. Getting up alone would do just to stretch the legs but my personal favorite is squeezing in a few pushups or situps. TV just became interactive.

I like to call this the strip experiment, and it is extremely revealing. For a few weeks, strip away anything you don’t absolutely need to function, live, survive. I specifically mean all media; TV, movies, video games, books, magazines, newspapers, even the internet (unless, of course, you need it for work). Why would you do this? Because there are so many things influencing you right now that you may not even know what you really want.

Think about a group of friends deciding where to eat. When the question, “where should we go?”, comes up, the majority of the group is bound to say, “It doesn’t matter”, while a few people will make their preferences known. The indifferent folks actually do know what they want but there’s just too much decision-making noise for them to even realize it. This isn’t about groupthink or being introverted or extroverted, it’s about filtering a boatload of information at once. Myriad restaurant options, what the group can afford, location, service, mood, etc. Note that when the choices are narrowed down, everyone has an opinion. » Read the rest of this entry «