Wisdom is one of the most powerful by-products of emotional health, and it gives us the capacity and fortitude to see the situation objectively and then respond calmly and logically, rather than allowing anger to corrupt our observation, assessment, judgment, and conduct.
6
A Fight to the Death
Even the healthiest among us are not immune to being swayed by our emotions. We often require little convincing to do what we feel like doing, and we frequently act against flawless logic when we find it convenient or comfortable. It’s not about reason and rationale, it’s about emotion and desire. With cigarette warnings of severe consequences in plain view, tens of millions of people still smoke. An avalanche of literature on the hazards of obesity and the importance of exercise is ignored by 67 percent of the population, who remain overweight or obese. Hundreds of studies bring us to near-universal agreement that money doesn’t buy happiness, yet 55 percent of the adult population is in debt—trying to buy their way into happiness. What does logic have to do with it?
As self-esteem fades and the ego’s noose tightens, our entire decision-making system falls prey to corruption. We descend from thinking to feeling and too often respond by shooting first and asking questions later. We become stuck in a perpetual cycle of bad decisions, and then we feel further compelled to justify our previous actions, regardless of the consequences. We eat food that we don’t want because we ordered it. We read a book that we don’t want to read because we walked all the way to the library in the rain to borrow it. Ralph Waldo Emerson poetically condensed the folly of this mind-set: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”1
Growth is internalized when we tell ourselves, I was wrong, and now I will do what is right. We must be able to accept that we have been doing something that never made sense—or no longer does—instead of hiding behind a wall of explanations and rationalizations. Those whose egos reign lack self-esteem and can’t afford to question their own judgment, worth, or intelligence. Justification then binds them to the past and drags their mistakes into the future.2
TWO WRONGS DON’T MAKE A RIGHT
As hard as it may be to admit defeat and throw in the towel, investing additional resources in a pursuit or project that’s going nowhere is certainly not productive. We need to cut our losses and channel our energy into more constructive options, but the ego forces us forward—clinging tight to false or damaging beliefs and behaviors, even when they’re hurting us. Loss aversion refers to our ego’s tendency to lean toward avoiding loss, rather than acquiring gains. It’s not just that we can’t stand losing; we can’t stand even the possibility of losing, admitting defeat.
Why do rational people sometimes make irrational decisions? Why do we willingly throw good money after bad? As any master stock trader will advise, we start losing money the second we allow our emotions to influence our trading decisions. When investors put on blinders, ignore empirical evidence, and dedicate themselves to recovering as much of their loss as possible, we say they’re “chasing a loss.” It’s one thing to do this with a stock, but it’s quite another to do this with our lives.
Our commitment to stubborn persistence tends to become stronger once we have invested time, money, or energy into something—whether it’s a tumbling stock, a doomed relationship, or a dead-end job. If we make a hopeless investment, it’s easy to succumb to the sunk-cost fallacy: I can’t quit now because I’ll lose everything I’ve already invested! This is true, of course, but it’s irrelevant to whether we should continue to invest. Everything we have already invested is lost. We can’t do anything to change that. Misguided commitment is nothing more than a delay tactic, which is the toxic offspring of denial—a refusal to accept what is.
RIGHT TO THE END
Even after the facts become obvious, an intelligent but ego-oriented person might stay the course of a bad decision and persist in outright self-destructive behavior. Unable to emerge victorious, the ego shrewdly switches tactics and declares us to be a casualty of fate, circumstance, or others’ cruel conniving, to avoid taking responsibility for our actions and our lives. We become locked into these patterns and too often manipulate events to unfold in accordance with our expectations. It’s how we need the world to be. Being right becomes more of an emotional priority than doing what is right. We act against our own best interests because, unconsciously, we need to prove to ourselves and to others that we are victims. In this way, we perpetuate our own misery. We align the entirety of our lives to accommodate our story.
Renowned psychologist Dr. Nathaniel Branden wrote about a woman he once treated who grew up thinking she was “bad” and undeserving of kindness, respect, or happiness. Predictably, she married a man who “knew” he was unlovable and felt consumed by self-hatred. He protected himself by acting cruelly toward others before they could be cruel to him. She didn’t complain about his abuse because she “knew” that abuse was her destiny. He wasn’t surprised by her increasing withdrawal and remoteness from him, because he “knew” no one could ever love him. They endured twenty years of torture together, proving how right they were about themselves and about life.3
When we suffer from low self-esteem, we’re often afraid that something bad will happen to us after something good occurs in our lives. When fortune unexpectedly smiles on us, we feel anxious because of our sense of unworthiness. To alleviate our emotional tension, we might even sabotage our success so that we can fulfill our personal prophecy: The world is as we predicted. We feel secure because our beliefs—no matter how damaging and distorted—have been reaffirmed. We will be right, even if it kills us.
7
Reality Isn’t Going Anywhere
All roads out of reality lead to the Land of Suffering. Avoidance is not coping. It’s crashing in slow motion. It’s easier, too, for us to ignore reality than it used to be. In days of old, we tended to make better choices because the consequences of our poor judgments were immediate and trickier to conceal. Today, we have a “buy now, pay later” mentality. Suffering indigestion because we ate more than our body can metabolize? Take an antacid. Lactose intolerant? Take Lactaid. If we ingest too much of the wrong thing, don’t worry. There are laxatives for constipation. Antidiarrheal for diarrhea. Aspirin for headaches. And calcium carbonate hangover prevention supplements to nip those hangovers in the bud.
Interest may be deferred, but that balloon payment will come due sooner or later. This mentality is nicely captured in an old joke: A man jumps from the top of a twenty-story building, and as he falls to the ground, a woman at the tenth floor sees him from her window and shouts, “How’s it going?” The man replies, “So far, so good.” Making things more problematic is that we have far more means of escapism at our disposal, allowing us to blithely ignore our reality. Technology—arguably, an addiction in itself—has become a popular enabler, the new Great Escape. Computers, televisions, smart phones … everywhere we turn, we find convenient vehicles for mindless distraction. Instant shrink-wrapped entertainment offers escape into other worlds, a never-ending labyrinth of video games, movies, TV shows, blogs, and forums where we can dissociate from the pain du jour. We need to be distracted, to be taken away from ourselves. The uncomfortable noise of self-reflection muted, and the volume of illusion turned way up.
The addictive nature of technology magnifies not just the emotional lure, but the physiological pull. The inevitable multitasking leads to overstimulation, and creates “a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.”1 These effects contribute to impaired emotional processing, lack of concentration, high stress and anxiety levels, and impaired decision making.2
MEANING = PLEASURE
As life becomes increasingly more comfortable, we’ve fallen out of the habit of exerting ourselves. We’ve come to believe that comfort is the path to happiness. Perhaps even more damaging is the notion that comfort is happiness. The idea of sacrificing our creatu
re comforts to pursue our goals and dreams has become foreign to our thinking. In our minds, life should be easy.
Lying on the couch and watching TV is undoubtedly comfortable, but hardly meaningful, and so, by definition, offers no genuine pleasure and certainly no fulfillment. To be more precise, the feeling is not really pleasure at all, but mere comfort, which is the avoidance of pain. If we seek to avoid the pain, though, of legitimate challenges, then we are, in essence, avoiding life, and rather than minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure, we will maximize suffering and live exceedingly unfulfilled lives.
How would you feel if someone pulled a few strings to get you a great job? You would probably feel pretty good. How might you feel if you found out, after thirty years on the job, that everything was fake; that you had pushed buttons not attached to any working machine, and your phone calls had been answered by actors who were merely playing along? In fact, you were wildly successful at your job, but none of it was real. Most people would be devastated—but why? The answer is simple: Your work was not real and had no meaning, therefore was not pleasurable. So goes meaning, so goes pleasure.
The more engaged we are in life and the pursuit of meaningful goals, the greater our pleasure and ultimate sense of satisfaction. Do we really want to live superficial, comfortable lives that lack meaning? No matter how much effort we expend, our satisfaction dissipates if the objective is not purposeful. Being comfortable and having fun are not enough. Our soul gnaws at us not just to do more, but to become something more. Make no mistake, the pursuit of ego-oriented objectives—those that bring money, power, and fame as a means unto themselves—takes us out of reality as completely and as quickly as the pursuit of amusement and recreation unto themselves. Viktor Frankl described this as “an unheard cry for meaning,” and Freud writes, “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement—that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”
CHASING COMFORT = PAIN
Our fruitless attempts to hide from life not only deny us pleasure, but also move us into the waiting arms of emotional disease, because in the attempt to bypass pain, we short-circuit our mental health. Research shows that the more modern a society, the higher its rate of depression.3 Technology leaves idle hands and frees up many hours each day. With this freedom, we can fill our lives with either time well spent or time misused, abused, or utterly wasted.4
Unsurprisingly, people without work are more likely to suffer psychological trouble and stress-related illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. They also have diminished life expectancy.5 In fact, even at work, a person can literally be bored to death. In a UK study, 7,500 London civil servants ages 35 to 55 filled out a simple questionnaire in which they were asked if they had felt bored at work during the previous month. The researchers followed up to determine how many of the participants had died after approximately ten years. Workers who reported they had been “very bored” were two and a half times more likely to have died of a heart-related ailment than were those who had said they were “not bored.”6
Depression is often described as a taste of death. When we die, our soul—the real us—separates from the body. A person who doesn’t grow and move forward in life will force a rift between the body and the soul—the very experience of death itself.7 We feel this lack of harmony as depression. Our soul aches to grow, and stagnation feels like death because it is—a spiritual death. The accompanying feeling of futility—that what we do doesn’t matter—leads to the inevitable, excruciating conclusion that we don’t matter.
* * *
Our soul is rigged to revolt against negligence and indifference, and the system will faithfully keep dishing out new symptoms—both emotional and physical—to remind us that we exist in this world for a reason. Every soul has a distinct mission, infused with its own spiritual DNA. It longs to rise from the masses and to light up creation by unleashing its unique spark of the Infinite. For this reason, we feel more distraught to learn of the injury or the death of a young person than we do of an elderly person. Loss of life is unequivocally sad, but we find the loss of potential particularly heartbreaking. The wider the gap between potential and actualization, the sadder it seems. Likewise, the extent to which we fall short of our own potential, the greater the waste and the more frustration and shame we experience.
NO ESCAPE FROM REALITY
Living in reality is more than just choosing between “right” and “wrong.” In a larger sense, it is a choice between life and death. Choosing responsibly means engaging life, rather than neglecting life and dying, ever so slowly.
HAMLET: ACT 3, SCENE 1
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks …
Hamlet speaks of the pain and distress that permeate human existence. He contemplates his choices: Either I endure the trials of life, or I end it with suicide. And by suicide, we don’t mean one tormented act to end it all but, rather, the discrete death of escapism. That is the challenge we confront each day. Will we rise to meet life head-on or turn away and sink into the deceptive comfort of a counterfeit existence?
Emotional health demands allegiance to reality. Any time we move away from the swift current of life, we become less stable because we disconnect from truth. Should we move too far into our own world, even an insignificant event shifts our fertile imagination into overdrive, consuming us with mushrooming fear and anxiety. Our lives overfill with tragedies that never happen.
Paradoxically, the more neurotic a person is, the more he believes in his ability to see, know, and predict the world around him. In actuality, he is less able to recognize cause-and-effect relationships. To compensate for his impairment, to feel some sense of control, he creates his own associations between action and consequence. Naturally, this compounds his neurosis, because when the inevitable breach occurs, he retreats deeper into his assumptions.8 Superstition is nothing but a diluted form of paranoia—the desire to make connections where none exist. All of reality is an undifferentiated facet of the whole, so patterns and connections are everywhere, but when a person can’t see beyond himself, the soul’s desire to make connections is supplanted by the ego’s own self-oriented correlations. Because the individual can’t find meaning, he invents it.
Further compounding our emotional strain is mistaking affliction for accomplishment. Sometimes we seek distress, rather than success, and tell ourselves that pain equals progress. So we might unconsciously create obstacles to give ourselves the illusion of forward movement. Here’s an example of a common tactic: The file that we absolutely can’t afford to lose, our cellular phone, our vehicle registration—just about everything and anything that we can misplace, we will misplace. Essentially, we manufacture a challenge in a controlled environment that, once overcome, gives us a sense of excitement and accomplishment. It is a feeble attempt to feel the rush of life without making the effort of living. In some instances, we devise these challenges because, unconsciously, we want to inconvenience ourselves. Feelings of guilt and self-recrimination cause us to inflict harm on ourselves—the very epitome of self-destruction.
THE ADRENALINE JUNKIE CONNECTION
Sometimes people engage in high-risk behavior to feel alive. Even though they may be tremendously successful by societal standards, there is a lacking on the inside, a disconnect from the soul that makes them feel half-dead. They risk death for the jolt—the adrenaline rush—so that they can, at least in the moment, feel alive. Adrenaline, as noted earlier, is a stimulating hormone naturally released by the brain in response to extreme stress or anxiety. Its pur
pose is to send a surge of awareness and strength during a dangerous situation or crisis and creates a temporary natural high, elevated senses, and a feeling of power and control. (Neurotransmitters, such as endorphins and dopamine are also released, and they add to the experience.) What makes this fact most relevant is that intense anger triggers the fight-or-flight response and produces a similar sense of euphoria. Hence, the more one lives in accord with the soul, the less he needs the drug of anger to make him feel alive.
Imagine a thimble and bucket each filled with a liquid. The thimble feels as full as the bucket. Can we say that the bucket is fuller than the thimble? In relative terms, the bucket has more liquid; in absolute terms, they are each full. The same can be said for human beings. Some people are miserable, even though by all accounts they make good choices. This is because we each stand on a never-ending ladder of attainment, whose starting point is irrelevant. We might be capable of climbing easily, but we choose to be complacent and climb only a few rungs at our leisure. We can measure our genuine progress—and therefore our self-esteem and emotional health—only by looking at our effort in relation to our ability. Maslow succinctly summarizes this point: “If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy and angry all of the days of your life.”9
8
The Meaning of Pleasure, the Pleasure of Meaning
Living a life with meaning not only brings pleasure and bolsters our emotional, spiritual, and physical health, but it also results in less suffering. That’s not to say that difficulties don’t come or that people who endure misfortune or trauma in any way bring it upon themselves. Such painful circumstances are too often beyond our finite understanding, and are not necessarily the result of our actions. Yet pain is not the same as suffering. Suffering is the emotional consequence of our choices.
Never Get Angry Again Page 4