In important respects, work is how we interface with the world. Even other people are work. You might have to bite your tongue at times; you might have to say helpful things even when you don’t feel them; you might have to focus to listen carefully when all you want to do is go crawl up in a corner.
“How to win friends and influence people” is in important respects a guide to the work of dealing with people, to getting along with them, and to helping convert them into allies in your happiness by becoming an ally in their happiness. We’re all connected, potentially, but it takes work to realize it in actuality, even when dealing with family and people with whom you share an instinctive and natural affinity.
The Trump economy has finally caught up with me personally The past couple weeks have been an extended series of logistical problems, requiring me to formulate plans and lists to deal with a host of situations relatively foreign to me. And it’s all very detailed: a 10/32 screw will work in some places, but in others it’s a 12/24 with square mounting nuts. Sometimes both have to be black. One person needs green wire, and another white velcro. Most of these items are special order, so I have to figure out what I might need a week ahead of time.
I’ve been dealing with all this by worrying continually. The worry has allowed me to spot some problems before they became problems. In other cases, I’ve run into problems I didn’t realize were possible, and had to react accordingly (more work is usually the correct answer).
And it hit me this morning that planning is really focused worry. If you do the focused worry correctly, once, then the rest of the worry–the sort of thing that drags you down–diminishes greatly.
And it hit me as well how stupid it is not to be well organized, not to be able to place your hands on the correct tool or gadget or whatever immediately. This adds stress to the whole process, unnecessarily.
And in reflecting on my own patterns, and where they come from, I realize that my home was always a chaotic mess in every possible respect. Physically, certainly, but both parents had a long standing habit of making plans then immediately abandoning them. We had vacations where we would change the plan 5-10 times. It was nerve wracking. I hated it.
But to a vastly lesser degree, I’ve replicated the problem. My own planning has been quite poor. I’m a master at just getting by, which is really no way for a man my age to live. And in truth, planning is hard in general for people with trauma, because the future is equal to the present, and we’re just trying to get through the present. A lot of drunks are poorly organized, not because they are drunks: they are drunks because they are poorly organized. The drinking and the unreliability are connected. They stem from the same source, which is the true “disease” if we are going to use that term. If I had been in the military, at least the habit of planning would have likely been drilled into me. I always wanted to be in the military, but it didn’t work out. Bad eyes (a problem back then) and scoliosis.
But I am realizing that a spiritual life, one which is peaceful and connected and happy, consists in large measure in dealing with anxiety, and dealing with anxiety, in turn, means having your shit together. It does not necessarily mean simplifying your life, but at least in removing the absolutely unnecessary frustrations of bad planning, disorganization, and always feeling like the world is acting on you, because you made no intelligent preparations.
Maturity, in other words, is spiritual. It is the starting point. Perhaps not even that, but at the minimum a sine qua non. This point should be obvious, but looking around me, I really don’t think it is.
I remember listening to a relaxation series many years ago by a guy named Emmett Miller. It was very good. That was when I realized deep relaxation was something I could not do, although I had no idea why. It seemed simple enough: do the exercises, and prosper. I’ve tried to teach myself Autogenic and Progressive relaxation multiple times. The shit starts coming up, and poof I’m out of it, and feeling a little worse for the wear.
But it is silly to think that ANY well integrated personality will not be physically organized. Take an Einstein, for instance, whose desk was notoriously cluttered. What I infer from that is that he was driven, emotionally, to do what he did. This is not intrinsically all bad–he was a genius after all–but it is also not intrinsically good. Many scientists, I feel, are like this: driven by unexplored emotional conflicts into the domain of pure and beautiful abstraction.
So too are most Leftists. One would think Central Planning–planning by the, in theory, cognitive 1%, the brilliant, the most capable–would work. But it never allows enough information, because it is dealing with people who are mutable, motivated in many ways, and prone to reacting in unpredictable ways to all aspects of the system, over and above the price problem so well described by Friedrich Hayek (in, among other places, “The Fatal Conceit”).
And this is the interesting question about the whole thing: given a record uninterrupted by ANY success anywhere on a large scale, why do people keep proposing these ideas?
Simple: because this is their “science”, their refuge from the real world, which is to say, in the end, their own unexpressed and painful emotional conflicts and scars. They NEED it to work
So the whole thing is expressed, not a practical, result oriented enterprise, but as an AESTHETIC project designed to appeal to the sensibilities of those who style themselves the cognitive 1%, the geniuses. I’ve said this before many times, but not, I don’t think, quite this way.
Happy people like doing effective work. They like seeing their ideas come to fruition, and when they fail, it bothers them. They ask questions. They wonder where things went wrong. Then they roll up their sleeves, and try again more intelligently.
This is the thing: the Socialist want to “try again”, but not differently. They want exactly the same things, free stuff for everyone, to be paid for by “the rich”. It’s a monochromatic mania, pushed by demented, morally and psychologically ill people, for whom words mean as little as results. Their actions mean what they say they do, just as their words do. Justice can be tortured into any form desired, in the underlevels of their intellectual Lubyanka.
As I say, I have this evil in me too. I am not innocent. But where I like to think I shine is that I remain, I think, capable of learning, capable of change, and certainly dedicated in my own mind to personal evolution.
So I bought a couple tool boxes at Home Depot, and am becoming a fanatic about lists.