My wife's holidays start on Wednesday, but we are going to do a mini-trip away tonight, just the two of us. Because last year (before getting fired), I bought tickets to a concert, thinking it would be a nice way to start the summer. It should be, though it is under quite different conditions than I had predicted when I bought the tickets. We won't be doing too much else this summer, except another mini-trip with Smallsteps to Helsinki later, so getting away from the routines for any period of time is welcome.
Especially for my wife.
It has been a stressful year so far for her.
She worries a lot about many things that she can't do much to change. I think many people do similar, and waste a lot of mental and emotional energy that would be better spent on areas of life that can be affected. And even when there is little that can be done, that same energy can be applied to improving experience through our relationships with people and other aspects of our lives.
I think that one of the reasons some people are so much more effective than others, is because they use their personal resources well. It is similar to no matter how much money some people earn, they still live hand to mouth, because they can't manage their spending. The less emotional control we have, the less capable we are of handling our emotional and mental spending on the irrelevant. We become consumers of our own resources, without thinking about the return on our investment.
And over the last few decades, emotional control has been replaced by emotional expression, where every change in our feeling has to be announced to the world in some way, in the hope for feedback from a faceless crowd through thumbs, stars and shares. Whether we feel good or bad, our emotional state is the driver of our actions, even when doing so will go against what we actually want to build and experience in our lives.
Everyone says they don't like drama - yet create drama.
Maybe this is partly because we have developed a world that is pretty isolated, where we often work alone, and even consume alone from behind screens. We have broken the social norms that have evolved us for hundreds of thousands of years, but we still have the urge to share. But without the real social networks we used to leverage, we use digital substitutes which put "volume" of communication before quality of communication.
More the better, right?
I don't think so. Quality of communication and our relationships, is far more important than quantity of them. Yet, the metrics of society today have a different KPI. It is all about maximising the "spend" by individuals, whether they are spending, time, money, or attention. It is about leveraging the mechanisms in people that drive them to accumulate more, but what is being accumulated is meaningless.
Stress.
It is a natural part of life. However, perhaps what isn't natural is the triggers for stress. Maybe we have been taught to have a stress response to factors that are unimportant, that do not further our personal goals or causes, and are in service to another's bottom line, rather than anything significant to humanity. We get stressed over things outside of our control, but also by things that we needn't even think about much at all, or at least, we don't have to connect our meaning and identity to them.
Like a job.
But work can be meaningful, if it is for something larger than the "means to an end". If only working for money though, it is hard to be inspired by it, yet because of all the things relying on it, it also creates stress. So we end up stressed over something we don't care about, because we believe it is the only way to get what we do care about.
Is that actually the case though?
It depends on what you care about.
Taraz
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