Chases & Overcorrections
There is a phenomenon at work right in front of us but one that we barely pay any attention to. Let’s call it the ‘Urgent Optimism & Blind Turns’ phenomena.
How many times have you struck a conversation with someone about work and they have responded with a variation of an answer that could be translated to “i am dissatisfied/just here till i get something better/trying to pivot to something else”. Essentially, being engaged in a work while feeling a disconnect and looking to find a place to bridge that disconnect. There is a hope that the next move we make will somehow turn out to be a move that will eliminate the friction that exists between us as our ‘selves’ and the large space of the life that is dominated by the work we do.
That is the urgent optimism aspect of the phenomenon - hope that the next throw of the dice will yield the result we are looking for. The second part of the phenomena is what we do as a result of this urgent optimism - it is the ‘blind turns’ we take.
The connection between the two lies in the fact that we blame the external factors for the friction between us and the work in the first place - the manager, the work environment, the salary, the non challenging work and so on. And so if the reason for the consistent feeling of heaviness or dissatisfaction that we feel carrying around with respect to our work it is but natural to feel that changing the variable we blame for the friction will fix the feeling.
Think of it as you being trapped on an island where you feel unsafe and a wave of tsunami closing in. Your first instinct will be to hope that you can land on another island where the wave of tsunami is not coming in - although even in the absence of the tsunami you could have perished on the island and there is an equal chance that the new island is as unsafe as the one you rescued from.
We take the blind turns when we encounter a ‘tsunami’ or a ‘curveball’ because our brain forces us to correct our trajectory to avoid the threat it feels. At that moment - instead of logically analyzing our situation, and formulating the best road to take, we cede control to our subconscious. In the urgency of avoiding the painful threat looming over our heads, our subconscious plays the stories we have told ourselves, our strengths, our aspirations, our talent and so on over the years and rushes us to find a solution a.k.a turn to take.
And the loop goes on - sometimes forever. But there is hope and it is not too difficult to break the pattern.
The fallacy of this trap lies in two aspects - a) the false sense of threat and the resulting cede to subconscious and b) the externalization of the disconnect between ourselves and the work.
The next time we find ourselves taking a ‘blind turn’ in our work journey, what if we stopped and asked a questioned if there was a ‘real threat’ to our survival if we were to avoid the rush of making the decision and buying some time. More often than not - it is either a monetary or societal threat we feel, and while the societal threat is more an illusion the monetary threat is manageable most times if we re-frame our relationship with money from that of accumulation to that of remuneration for our value provided to society. Removing the sense of immediate threat allows us to calm the god-damn amygdala and buy some time without feeling ‘anxiety’ of having to fix something that gone awry.
The second step is what you do with the time you bought - that is where you turn the lens inwards. Let’s play a little game here to visualize this - if you are playing the lego game and a piece does not seem to fit where you think it should, what would you do? Our first instinct would be to examine the piece in the hand and try to find ‘why’ is it not fitting where we think it should. That would be followed by trying to find ‘another’ place in the set where the conditions for its fit are more ideal. Perhaps in the same way, we need to first break down what we ‘expected’ our work to be like and what ‘part’ of our identity did not like what we rather got. Did the environment not align with a value we dearly hold, or was it that the experience did not align with story we carry about ourselves, or was there a mismatch of our vision and the reality of day to day activities.
The hardest aspect of this whole journey is defining the ‘parts’ of our identity against which to evaluate the external markers. That is a reflexive definition in itself and true only at any given point of time - continuously evolving.