Introduction
I recently read a compelling New
York Times opinion piece by David Brooks called “The Self-Destructive Effects of Progressive Sadness.” It discusses
the growing darkness of the national mood, which Brooks terms “maladaptive
sadness,” and which he attributes to three trends: a catastrophizing mentality;
extreme sensitivity to harm; and a culture of denunciation. The result, the
author contends, is a decrease in one’s sense of agency, which causes emotional
duress that can eventually lead to sadness and anxiety.
I was hoping the article would suggests ways we can work to
mitigate this problem, but it didn’t get into it—that’s a whole other article. This
post is me taking a swing at that other article.
Pay attention … or not
I believe the solution to this maladaptive sadness begins
with deciding where and how—and, crucially, if—to
focus our attention.
Let’s start with the catastrophizing mentality. Humans do
have a talent for focusing on the negative. The late Hans Rosling, a Swedish
physician and statistician, examined this in his excellent book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. This book explains why the vast majority of people—including scientists,
executives of multinational companies, journalists, medical researchers, attendees
of the Davos World Economic Forum, and others—have historically done really
poorly on a multiple-choice test about the state of the world. In fact, people do worse than if they guessed
at random; as Rosling explains, they’re “systematically
wrong.” Out of nearly 12,000 people tested in 14 countries in 2017, “every
group of people … thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more
hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.” Rosling identified ten key
reasons people err, and one of them is “the negativity instinct.” To some
degree, we’re hardwired for pessimism, which is exacerbated, Rosling explains,
by “selective reporting by journalists and activists”—which accentuates the
negative to create a sense of urgency. (Read this, quick! Donate now!)
Meanwhile, he points out, people may feel that it’s heartless to acknowledge
that the world is improving when there is still so much wrong with it. But then,
naysaying doesn’t help, particularly when it depresses us.
I’m not suggesting that the solution to a widespread
emotional health problem is simply to decide
to be more positive. I acknowledge that a lot of our vulnerability is more psychological
than logical. I can remember being a little kid and only just having learned to
swim, and how I would be afraid to venture toward the deep end of the pool. Of
course it’s no more dangerous over there; a person can drown in six inches of
water. It just seemed more dangerous.
As much as I reassured myself that the deep end was no big deal, the sight of that
chasm opening up below me freaked me out every time. I finally got over this fear
by simply closing my eyes when I got to the deep end. Without the visual
stimulus, I could swim all the way across. The point is, “eyes wide open”
doesn’t always reduce risk, and can introduce nonproductive anxiety.
Fast-forward a few years to when I’d moved on to bike racing.
The Junior field (ages 16-17) in those days was pretty big—50 to 60 riders,
typically—and fast. I remember the first road race of the season on a cold day
with a strong crosswind, which meant lots of jostling around in the pack. I was
feeling really intimidated, especially when I looked back at the large swarm of
riders behind me, all of whom it seemed were saving their energy (in my draft) and
could come flying past me at any moment. This was a major burden, psychologically,
until I decided only to look at the riders ahead of me, and never allow myself
to fall back very far. Each time I finished taking a turn at the front, I would
only drop back a bit, and then get back into the line at fifth or sixth
position. (To worm your way in, you look only forward, at the wheel you want to
take.) This way, I was able to pretend I was already in a small breakaway with no swarming peloton to worry about. I did this for about fifty miles until I realized it was always the same
riders ahead of me. Finally I sneaked a look back. The pack was gone—we’d
dropped them! It wasn’t the size of the pack that mattered, but the quality of
the riders near the front.
Far higher achievers than I have employed similar mind
tricks. In this great interview, the cycling champion Andy Hampsten talks about the psychological rigor of
beginning a pro career in Europe. So often, he was tempted to quit. He
describes one such occasion, racing on a terribly cold, snowy spring day in
Spain. He was shivering so badly he feared he might crash, and seriously
considered abandoning. But then he found a way to deal with his fear: “a silly
book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy that I thought of … where when the hero was in danger he had special
glasses that would turn pitch black so he couldn’t see how dangerous things
were. It’s best not to know … so I tried to apply that.” Instead of focusing on
how frigid and dangerous this downhill was, he tried to look forward to the
climb ahead, where he could warm up and the speed would be lower. His crisis of
confidence hadn’t been driven by a fully reasoned assessment of the conditions;
it was just negative self-talk. By choosing not to dwell on that negativity, Hampsten not only finished the
race, finished the season, and made the transition to a world class
professional, but grew his confidence and famously won the 1988 Giro d’Italia
stage race by dominating a legendary mountain stage in a snowstorm.
Two circles
So, am I just suggesting we put our heads in the sand?
That’s the whole trick, just ignore apparent threats? No, of course it’s more
complicated than that. In his editorial, Brooks goes on to say, “People who
provide therapy to depressive people try to break the cycle of catastrophic
thinking so they can more calmly locate and deal with the problems they actually have control over” (italics
mine). Societal catastrophes like climate change, systemic racism, and the
vanishing middle class are all real problems, of course, but they have something
in common: they are beyond the ability of most individuals to combat. They’re
bigger than us, which is why we feel so powerless.
This brings me to a useful concept (which I’ve mentioned in
these pages before, so bear with me if this is review): the distinction, as
described in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, between the “circle of influence” and
the “circle of concern.” Below is the author’s schematic. The idea is that we
should spend most of our mental energy on what we can influence; for example, learning
to manage our own stress. We should avoid spending too much energy on the
circle of concern, such as the future of democracy, because that’s where most
of us are largely helpless.
Did Hampsten’s team management emphasize to him how
dangerous the race over the snow-covered Gavia Pass would be? Did they remind
him that that no American had ever even finished on the podium of the Giro,
which he now stood to do but
only if
he didn’t crash out in this dangerous stage? Did they show him a
highlights reel of riders crashing on descents in bad weather? No, that would
be pointless, and worse—and that would all be in the circle of concern.
Instead, the team focused on what aspects of the race they could influence.
They went around to all the sporting goods stores in the area and bought up all
the cold weather gear they could find to equip their riders. They prepared Hampsten
for success, and—since literally no other team had thought of this—in doing so they
gave him an edge over his competition. (That stage of the Giro has become
legendary; the
tifosi (Italian fans)
call it “
the day the big men cried.”)
Why now?
Okay, so it’s best to separate what information is
actionable, and what isn’t. But the Seven
Habits book was published in 1989; if the matter is this simple, why is everyone’s
emotional duress seeming to increase so much, and so fast, now? As reported by the National Institute of Mental Health, “more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (57.8 million
in 2021).” If a growing sense of powerlessness can be linked to people spending
more mental energy in the circle-of-concern space, what is causing that
increase?
The Internet and social media are obviously implicated and
I’m clearly not the first person to assert that. Even if we set people’s habits
aside for the moment, the pace of bad news has accelerated, and it can feel
like our reaction time has to be faster. Consider the meltdown of the Silicon
Valley Bank: as described in this Charles Schwab article, “With the effects of rapid news flows, especially via social media, and
banking that can be done quickly and via mobile devices, the bank’s collapse
happened with lightning speed.” Much of the ripple effect across the economy has
been due to sudden and unwarranted loss of confidence in the banking industry
as a whole; as Schwab put it, “The main channel of contagion so far is more
psychological than systemic.”
But where the mental health crisis is concerned, it’s not
just the speed of the Internet at work; it’s how we choose to use it. Brooks cites
a culture of denunciation. Sure, you can denounce others without the Internet
but it’s a lot harder. I mean, unless you’re a professional whose work can get
printed on paper, what are you going to do—pass out leaflets? Stand on a street
corner braying? Collar your colleagues at the water cooler? No, when people are
feeling fed up about vaccines, politics, or any other battle in the culture
wars, they go post vitriolic comments beneath articles, or send tweets, or
otherwise leverage the computer network that connects five billion people.
With all this bold negativity on display, it’s no wonder, as
Brooks points out, so many people have developed extreme sensitivity to harm. In
the parlance of the schoolyard bullying culture I grew up in, “they can dish it
out but they can’t take it.” Well, maybe that’s not totally fair, but I think
there’s something complicated going on around being a bully in one moment, and
wanting to appear sensitive the next. The thickness of people’s skin, so to
speak, is selective. For example, progressives criticize Jane Eyre because one of its protagonists participates (albeit “off
screen”) in colonialism without the author denouncing him for it, so anybody
who has experienced systematic oppression might find this triggering somehow. They
say it’s best, therefore, to write the book off as “problematic” and not use it
in schools. But then they go off and watch “Breaking Bad,” a show about a guy
who cooks meth, or “Real Detective,” which repeatedly shows graphic footage of
a young woman’s naked corpse. If challenged on whether this could possibly be
healthy to take in, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s just, you know, edgy.”
I have a scheme to help you navigate these waters and fight
the tide of these increasingly anxious times. But before I begin: what follows
isn’t for everybody. If you feel a strong need to grow your knowledge of the
precise cause and extent of the world’s problems, and feel that proper virtue
signaling can’t be achieved without sharing what you’ve learned, and that your personal
identity depends on upholding a culture of personal punditry, you should just
stop now. Go read something else.
What? You are still
with me? You want to continue? Great! Let’s get started.
Opt out of the culture
war
The first thing I’d like to establish is that in the culture
war that’s raging, we should all be conscientious objectors. Why? Because this
is a war that can’t be won. Our strong opinions are being weaponized, but we
aren’t actual soldiers and we’re not being deployed with any battlefield tactic
that can actually prevail over a known enemy. Political extremists and
Internet algorithms are drawing out our built-in impulse to find someone to
blame for the world’s problems, just to foment our opposition and thereby
increase our loyalty. (The “blame instinct” is another of the ten reasons
Rosling cites for people misunderstanding the world.) Unless we’re politicians
or policymakers, we aren’t changing the world when we rail against it; we’re
just collateral damage in a war that will never end.
I’m not saying we have no
role in the world’s problems. Of course if we’re concerned about climate change
we should try to walk, bike, take mass transit, etc., and vote for programs
that address the problem. And those of us who are parents have a duty to educate
our children and help them become responsible adults. But when somebody who isn’t
a parent and hasn’t been a student in forty years wants to collar me and go on
a tirade about the “crap” that “they”
are teaching in “our” schools, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to run for the
hills.
Take ownership of your
attention
If a chain smoker complained to you that he was chronically
short of breath, or a fast food junkie groused about how hard it is to lose
weight, you’d probably be biting your tongue. Where our physical health is
concerned, it’s easy to tie the willing consumption of a dangerous substance to
the natural consequences it produces. Some of us are outspoken about this; consider
the age-old cliché, “My body is a temple.” Fair enough, but what about our
minds? We’re less likely to question the growing tendency we have to be glued
to our screens, scrolling through our feeds. I do hear people confessing that
they probably waste too much time on social media, but this is given with the
half-serious, hangdog air of somebody acknowledging something fairly harmless,
like a caffeine addiction. Nobody treats overconsumption of polemic Internet
content as a big problem. But I believe this content is a pollutant, and
possibly as dangerous to our mental health as tobacco or junk food are to our
physical health.
I think it’d be easier to get people to agree with this
concept if I took the partisan angle and said either that Fox News is toxic to
the brain, or that NPR is, depending on my audience. But it isn’t so much the
position itself that’s the issue; as Brooks, and the Seven Habits book, point out, the despair comes from railing
against what we can’t solve (and guess what: blaming one party or another
doesn’t actually help). So when we use platforms that track our interests, and that
have learned how to push our buttons, we’re signing up for a steady diet of emotional
unease. What’s needed is the wisdom to understand the threat here, and the
discipline to shelter our minds from constant provocation. It’s realizing we
can choose whether or not to peer into the chasm at the deep end of the pool.
Firewall for the Mind
In the realm of computer networks, a firewall is a device
(or software function) that enforces rules about what communication, or
“traffic,” is permitted. It filters out threats based on where content is
coming from, what type it is, and so forth. Early firewalls had an access
control list with simple rules like “allow [or deny] any traffic from [source]
to [destination].” Modern ones are very sophisticated; for example, the one
governing my home WiFi blocks all gaming, social media, and pornography, as
well as any traffic from China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, or Syria.
I’m not suggesting you focus on creating a technical
impediment to this or that Internet content. A firewall for the mind isn’t
something you’d configure on any device, but rather a more general rule base
you create and adhere to around how you’re going to use your brain and what
you’re willing to focus it on. It’s about what information, news,
entertainment, etc. you’re going to allow in, what you’re going to ration, and what
you’re going to reject, whether it’s online, printed, broadcast, or spoken. I
propose that instead of passively receiving what’s pushed toward us, we should
each start with a general rule—“deny all”—and then make specific exceptions
based on what will educate, entertain, or enlighten us without any side effects
like frustration, existential angst, anxiety, or a feeling of doom and gloom. This
should be highly personalized—never mind what everyone around you is focusing on. After all, that’s not working out so well lately.
As an adult I’ve never had cable TV; I was a late adopter of
cell phones and smartphones; I eschew all social media. I also refuse to talk about politics with just about anybody. Those are aspects of my personal firewall, and my rule base has adapted according
to what’s going on in my life. For example, when my wife was pregnant, I
blacklisted the book What to Expect When
You’re Expecting, which is a terrorist tract designed to terrify new
parents. As I headed in to my third decade in corporate America I stopped
looking at “Dilbert” because it was just too cynical. In the years following the
2016 and 2020 presidential elections, with political polarization at a fever
pitch, I stopped reading the political articles in The New Yorker precisely because they took me deep into circle-of-concern
territory where, like all kinds of people across the political spectrum, I felt
aggrieved but helpless.
Of course your own rule base can be whatever you decide, but
you might start with a few general questions:
- Is this content making me happy?
- Is it making me money?
- Is it making me laugh?
- Is it edifying or entertaining?
- Is it satisfying my curiosity?
- If it concerns a problem or an issue, is there some
specific action I can take that will actually help?
- Does this content dwell on bad news that occupies only my
circle of concern?
Existing mental
firewalls
It would be naïve for me to pretend this concept is entirely
new, and in fact people have been building their own mental firewalls since the
dawn of human existence. The problem is, the rules are often set up not around
protecting our brains from sadness and anxiety, but around tuning out what
doesn’t match up with our tastes and/or belief systems. Choosing between Fox
News and NPR is part of a rule base, after all. Where things are going
particularly awry is that cable TV programming, much modern print journalism,
and in particular the myriad content providers on the Internet are tailoring
their product to us. This seems like a favor except that the end goal is always
to maximize our outrage and hang on to our attention for as long as possible. The
circle of concern is their happy
stomping ground—not yours. Good mental firewalls thwart these mechanisms.
In general, I go after content that primarily exists to
entertain or enlighten me, not persuade me. Most fiction, for example, is free
of any specific agenda (and when a work’s social conscience seems too
prominent, to the point it’s just depressing, I reserve the right to withdraw).
Where nonfiction is concerned I particularly enjoy topics that aren’t in the news, and which nobody is bickering about, such as (to cite a convenient example) this article on caterpillars in which I encountered all kinds of delightful, non-pressing information.
For example, the “caterpillar of the silver-spotted skipper … uses an air-gun-like appendage in
its anus to send its [feces] pellets soaring. This practice, known as ‘fecal
firing,’ discombobulates parasitic wasps.” Stuff like this argues for a more
nuanced model of attention involving a Circle of Delight.
This isn’t to say the caterpillar article was all rosy; it
did explain how scientists are now seeing significant declines in insect diversity
and population that could become an ecological crisis, based on how many plants
depend on insects for pollination. So did I start combing the Internet for more
information on this problem? Did I try to make it part of my feed? No. I don’t
have a feed, I’m not a scientist, and this simply isn’t my problem to solve. That’s
the kind of line that I have to draw … which I think you should draw, too.
[Speaking of drawing, the art at the top of this post is by my younger daughter.]
—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here.
For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.
