How Can We Worry Less?
Many of our problems are first-world problems. As much of a luxury they are to us, whether they’re real or imagined, I believe they’re important. Our problems may not be as pressing as we expect them to be, and there is a high chance that people’s problems are a lot more urgent and serious. As a comparison, their problems are probably much lower on the Maslovian pyramid like food and health, whereas I’m sure there are others as heartless and practical like me plotting out the best strategy and moves to capitalise on the falling market. However, problems, no matter how small or big, keeps us moving — literally. We’ll never be able to cross everything off on our checklist and crumple it up. When we do, if we do, especially for an extended period of time, we’ll crumble and fall.
Ask any idyllic retiree and they’ll tell you how stressful a stress-free life is.
We don’t want too much late-night worry or mind-killing stress. We want a fair amount of excruciating decision-making instances and multiple-front crises. We want to know and experience the moments when we’ve witnessed these waves and tided through the storms. When we have problems, it means that we have decisions to ponder about, choices to make and a future to look forward to. Sometimes we regret, and other times we rejoice. When we start to have lesser reasonable object of worry, we start to come up with a variant of it. We turn to different avenues like constantly annoying our partners to test their stress limit or turning to a childhood hobby we didn’t quite get to finish. But we don’t really want to know their stress limit, at the same time, we don’t really want to finish that childhood hobby.
We want to be challenged, but we don’t want the challenge to end.
Often, problems comes with a goal-oriented solution. The goal is to eliminate all causes of worry so that there is no need to worry anymore. But, that is the very fallacy of worry. Worries do not get rid of themselves. Technically, the goal of claw machine is to claw out your plush and all worries end on that note. When worries end, pleasure arises. Yet, we still feel a wave of disappointment, because the challenge has ended. The game has ended. So we look forward to the next challenge only to complain once again about how our enjoyment takes the form of endless frustration. We want to win, but we hardly want the game to be over.
We become our own version of a paradoxical puzzle.
The bothersome part about worries and problems isn’t that the solution is hard to find, but it often comes in a form of an unsolicited advice. People, be it your closest family and friends to that overly friendly cafe owner, will not hesitate to weigh in on our most primal and intimate life problems. People spontaneously volunteer their two cents’ worth as though their advice matter. The matter of the fact is, even the wisest advice tend to fall on deaf ears. It does little to nothing for the advisee and simply cause confusion between the comparative simplicity of the advice with the elaborate development of his own circumstances and path. If it is a worry or problem that we’ve been missing countless nights on, obviously the “obvious” course isn’t as obvious as all. Unless we’re talking about the issue hypothetically, unstrangled by any emotional investment.
Often, we’re not asking for advice. We tend to ask for commiseration, sympathy, reassurance or permission.
We want to waive our own agency. We want to talk about the problem behind a veil of ignorance. We want to outsource the blame for our mistakes. We don’t want to be told. We want to be heard. At times, we simply just want to hear how irrevocably useless our situation and decisions can be. Let’s admit it. We give the best form of advice, the bravest form of advice, that we’re unwilling to risk. It is much easier to risk with someone else’s life. Either that, or we give a safe patronizing advice that we obviously wouldn’t accept.
It seems like all we do is act in our self interest, isn’t it?
Whether as an advisor or an advisee, we do more of what we want and less of what we should. Maybe this is where intuition steps in. How many times have we divided a piece of paper into 2 columns of option only to choose the one with least amount of pros in it? Okay, maybe not on a piece of paper, but at least on our minds. It appears that sometimes we need that brief deliriums of false clarity and constant shift between contradictory certainties to come to terms that all decisions belong solely to us and are ours to make. Some decisions are self-evident, whereas others force us to take a leap of faith on the balancing scale of its own frustrations and satisfactions. Perhaps the reassurance that we all need to hear is that there is little reassurance in assuring ourselves. Our worries and problems are similar to the stock market. No matter how minor or major of a crash it may go through, it will always recover. It is not a matter of if, but a matter of when. Unless Thanos appears.
