Doing the hard yards
It's mid-winter in NZ, with long, dark nights & lousy weather. In other places, they are dealing with record-breaking heatwaves. Here's some guidance, inspiration and distraction to help get through.
This week, I’ve been thinking a bit about The Great Resignation again, and how it’s not really that at all. It’s actually a Great Reassessment, or perhaps even a Great Recalibration, if only we were brave enough. But to be brave enough we really need to change our thinking about who this Great Resignation / Reassessment / Calibration is for.
An individualist view might be that we can get more money, a better role, more seniority, a great promotion if we change role now. Perhaps we are bored and are looking for a new challenge. All this is valid, and is focused on the ‘me’.
What if we want to spend more time with our families rather than being at work all the time? What if we look at our lives and want to change our work so that we can be measured against different benchmarks. Not so much busywork, and more time to do what we want to do. Maybe we downshift our lives to fit our new, reduced earning power. This is certainly more ‘we’ than ‘me’, but it’s still pretty limited in scope and ability to make meaningful change.
What about if we changed how we set up work expectations from first principles? What if we measured ourselves not only by what improvements we can make for our lives and our families, but through shifting our attention on how this could be achieved more sustainably in relation to each other and our footprint on the planet too. Not just for our generation, but for those who come after us. And not just those who will inherit our personal property and wealth, but for all. This kind of ‘we’ transcends familial connection and time. It is an intergenerational, inter-connected ‘we’.
The bubbles that kept us safe during the early stages of the pandemic pre-existed Covid - we just didn’t see them. They enclosed in our individualised goals and prosperity echo chambers.
These bubbles are popping, whether you look at how we are dealing with rising inequality, or how we continue to take our ecosphere for granted. Just look at the way the media report the record breaking temperatures in Europe over the past days.
This isn’t a warning. It is a heralding.
We can either take control of this, or feel the wrath of the earth as she pops our bubbles for us and forces us to take an intergenerational and inter-connected perspective.
It’s not yet too late. But action is beyond urgent.
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‘A bigger paycheck? I’d rather watch the sunset!’: is this the end of ambition?
This is more of a ‘me’ point of view. It’s more about relationship to job roles, and maybe a little to job teams too. But the wider focus on what really ails us is missing.
“No one can just go back as before, because we are all in some way profoundly changed,” she says. “What people want less of now is pointless presenteeism, stress, toxic workplaces and the commute … People want autonomy and flexibility as much as they want promotion and professional careers, or more.” - Julia Hobsbawm, consultant and author
It’s time to stop buying into our own destruction
In contrast, here’s a ‘we’ view. Maybe changing how we step up our society’s economic structure is well overdue. Has capitalism got out of hand? It’s long been thought so, but here’s a particularly juicy take this week in The Guardian by George Monbiot. It is well worth taking the time to read.
There are some species of caddisfly whose survival depends on breaking the surface film of the water in a river. The female pushes through it – no mean feat for such a small and delicate creature – then swims down the water column to lay her eggs on the riverbed. If she cannot puncture the surface, she cannot close the circle of life, and her progeny die with her.
This is also the human story. If we cannot pierce the glassy surface of distraction, and engage with what lies beneath, we will not secure the survival of our children or, perhaps, our species. But we seem unable or unwilling to break the surface film. I think of this strange state as our “surface tension”. It’s the tension between what we know about the crisis we face, and the frivolity with which we distance ourselves from it.
Instead of focusing on ‘micro consumerist bollocks’ like ditching our plastic coffee cups, we must challenge the pursuit of wealth and level down, not up - George Monbiot
Do we regret our pandemic life changes?
‘Let’s leave the city! Let’s get a dog! Let’s get a divorce!’ Maybe you made some life choices as the pandemic began. Whether those choices were big or small, how do you feel about them now?
Fuschia Sirois, a psychology professor at Durham University, says: “There’s a natural human reaction to mistakes, or decisions that we might regret initially. They create a cognitive dissonance, a disparity between our thoughts and our behaviour. Leaving that gap open creates aversive feelings and we try to close it.” If we can close the gap with our behaviour – reverse the decision – then we will do that. But if it is irreversible, it is much easier to change the thoughts.
The power of talking to yourself
“External self-talk,” as it’s clinically known, tends to be viewed negatively. But it can be great for pushing through all sorts of obstacles.
Psychologists call what I do “external self-talk” to differentiate it from regular self-talk, otherwise known as one’s internal monologue or dialogue. Plenty of people do it — just watch a tennis match if you don’t believe me. It’s viewed as normal within certain bounds, even beneficial, though speaker discretion is advised. Like many normal behaviors, it’s also weird if the wrong person observes it, especially when you’re young.
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Unwanted thoughts pestering you all the time? Here’s what you can do
For most of us, policing unwanted thoughts isn't easy - it’s also not a great way to think about what goes on in our minds. Controlling tends to lead to an ironic rebound effect which makes the thought we are trying to control recur even more frequently. But a new study outlines an approach that any of us could use in order to limit the number of thoughts that drop into our minds without an invitation.
The study looks at the differences between reactive and proactive control. Reactive control is when we take an unwanted thought and try and reject or suppress it; proactive control is when we try and stop the unwanted thought from arriving in the first place.
Think of it along the lines of the classic 'white bear problem'. If someone tells you not to think of a polar bear, well, you're going to end up thinking about the polar bear.
Reactive control means you'll try and distract yourself from thinking about the polar bear whenever it pops into your mind. It has been suggested, however, that our brains can potentially stop a thought from reaching our conscious mind before we need to distract ourselves from it, or proactive control.
Lucy in the sky with diamonds isn’t about LSD after all
Reading, listening, watching
Reading Private Eye again this week as a new copy has arrived. Always feels a little out of date with (a) shipping time, (b) UK politics being on fast-forward speed again over the past few weeks. Mind you, that feels totally like the normal rhythm now.
Watching: Finally into Season 3 of For All Mankind - it’s great, but suffers a little with jumps in the timeline. But I guess that’s going to happen when a Mars mission takes two years. We’ve also started watching Sherwood after a recommended from a friend. It’s a police procedure set in Nottinghamshire in England, but within the content of the lasting social consequences of the Miners’ Strike in 1984. It’s powerful stuff, and I still wince when I hear ‘scab’.
Listening: Portishead’s Dummy album has been on rotation on my playlists this week. Lucky enough to have seen them a few times, including with a full orchestra.
Cracking edition Sarb. Plenty of juicy links. An oasis amid the shittiest Wellington weather I can remember in ages.
Yours is such an important message Sarb, thank you. The question is how we can encourage the inwards looking folk to start taking some action before it is too late. Many, especially in the mid plus age groups seem to have given up, maybe through fear from misinformation and media representation. They certainly think that it is up to those ˋout there´ to take action. These folk don’t seem to even want to look at options. Young people seem to be much more able to see the urgency to take action but need strong support to make themselves heard.