Creative Rebellion Essays: Stress and the modern age

November 16, 2019 — fire in Topanga

I drive my daughter to school every morning. It’s convenient as her school is less than half a mile from work.  It’s one of the highlights of my day – spending time with her as we drive down winding mountain roads and go south on Pacific Coast Highway. During these times we either listen to music or we discuss what’s going on in school. The other day, as we drove home from school (Friday afternoons I pick her up), we didn’t listen to music but we discussed the Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita that happened on November 14th. My daughter is 16 years old and the victims, and the shooter, were all around that age. It struck close to home, to say the least. She told me, “Daddy you have no idea what it’s like to have to worry that some kid could just come in with a gun and start to shoot kids in the school. I shouldn’t have to worry about this.” I didn’t have a response. No, I don’t know what it’s like. Even though I grew up in Texas, where high schoolers often had gun racks mounted in their trucks, the idea of shooting up a school was completely foreign to us. And no one had guns with bump stocks or military-grade weapons. At that time, the most famous incident of a crazed shooter was Charles Whitman, the “Texas Tower Sniper” who, (decades before), on August 1, 1966 went up the tower at the University of Texas and proceeded to shoot at random people; the final death toll was 17. He was terminated by Austin police officers. And as crazy as that sounded at the time, mass shootings has literally become so commonplace that it’s hard to keep track of them. 

And this is the world that our children are growing up in. 

And anxiety is so pervasive that adults register it almost as background noise. The overwhelming message people are receiving via the news and social media is that the world is falling apart: political strife, climate change (we are personally adversely affected by the fires in California and we had to evacuate a couple of weeks ago), wars, economic uncertainty and the rise of AI. But all these signals are triggering our fight or flight syndromes, which are as real to the human brain as if a bear were on your trail. The adrenaline and cortisol rush was only meant to be activated in case a real bear was trying to maul you but we feel it every time we get into our cars and go to the office. At its foundation, it’s about survival – if I lose my status and my job, I’ll no longer be able to provide for my family and myself. All is lost. 

But it’s not true. It is, as they say, all in your head. Yes, there are urgent and potentially catastrophic issues and events happening out there in the world (or perhaps in your company) but freaking out about it does absolutely nothing to address the core issue of fixing the problem. What is also in your head is a brilliant, problem-solving electro-chemical miracle called a brain. And if you reframe the problem as a challenge rather than something that is an inevitable impossibility (which just leads to apathy or depression) then the creative lens on reality actually energizes you.  

When I first held a team offsite at my home in 2016, I brought in Lisa Kring, a mindfulness meditation teacher, to help facilitate. Here’s an excerpt from chapter 17 “Mindfulness” from my book, The Art of Creative Rebellion:

“At lunch I brought in a special speaker—Lisa Kring, a mindfulness meditation teacher at InsightLA and a good friend— to lead the team of young designers, researchers and program managers through an exercise. All phones and laptops had to be put down and closed. At first, I could sense some dubiousness in the team; but as soon as Lisa spoke in her charismatic and passionate way, they warmed up, and within minutes she had them in the palm of her hand as she led us all through breathing and visualization exercises. After a very fast forty-five minutes, the team opened their eyes and Lisa asked them how they felt. They all were centered and calm, as expected.

What surprised me was the realization that the most common issue that almost all the members of the young team (average age around twenty-seven) shared was pervasive anxiety. They were anxious all the time: about work, about life, about relationships, about commuting, about missing out (FOMO). Furthermore, the anxiety was increased by access to information, at all times, at their fingertips—push notifications about the latest government insanity, Instagram posts of friends doing fabulous things that they should be doing, LinkedIn telling them that their former coworkers are now at Facebook or Apple or Netflix with big titles, and just the constant dopamine release that happens when checking texts and emails. All of this led to a state of constant distraction, fragmented attention span (Ritalin is a common medication in this demographic) and, ultimately, anxiety.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

The world is not going to fall apart because you are off the electronic tether for a day. Or more.

Most urgent emails can wait for a bit; and if you are really in demand, someone will actually (gasp) make a phone call to get ahold of you.” 

I told my daughter that, yes, terrible things happen in the world. She knows first-hand from the loss of her older brother seven years ago. Terrible things are a reality. And we can accept them as such, grieve, and then continue living by thinking in terms of gratitude and serving each other and the world. And we can only do this by thinking creatively and expansively – and creativity can only come about from contemplation and an absence of fear. 

I told my daughter that we are biologically geared towards the worst-case scenario, again, for survival. 99 times out of 100, as you tromp through the woods, there’s just a long tree branch on the pathway but the one time it’s actually a rattlesnake immediately teaches you to beware of all similarly shaped sticks. I believe that the way to deal with fear (which is a necessary teacher) is to learn the lesson and let the fear go. What causes anxiety is the deep association with the trauma and then a mental looping of the scene over and over. You feel fear but you are not the fear. You experience sadness but you are not the sadness. 

The last anecdote I shared with my daughter was from Carey Lohrenz, a female top gun pilot, who spoke at the 2104 Magento Imagine Conference. This recollection is a bit rough through the gauze of memory but she related the tale of another pilot who was trying to land his F-14 Tomcat on an aircraft carrier and kept missing his landing. She showed a video of the aircraft flying towards the ship with the voiceover of the pilot in his dialog with central command in the tower. The pilot would approach the aircraft and then at the last moment, pull up and away. After this happened, you could hear the man in the tower’s voice go into a calm, slightly deeper register and while the pilot’s voice, while measured, increased in speed. After the third attempt, it was clear that the pilot was in a mental loop of worst-case-scenario that was stopping him from landing his plane. Rather than using alarming language like “I’m running out of fuel,” the pilot used the codeword “bingo” to indicate that things were going from bad to worse. If he didn’t land it on the next go-round, he would have to ditch the 85 million dollar plane and eject. Finally, the man in the tower, said, almost like a mantra “focus, focus, focus.” And the pilot repeated it. And he landed the plane. 

“Focus destroys fear.”

This was the main point of the top gun pilot’s speech. When you are unfocused, the mind goes everywhere, and usually to the worst-case-scenario. When you focus your attention and actively do something, your mind immediately finds relief in its inability to actually multitask and fragment its worries across multiple catastrophic scenarios, most of which will never happen; something else will happen that you didn’t expect. 

So, control what you can control. Create and release. Do something now to address the thing that bothers you the most. It may simply be the act of writing it down. It may be getting involved with The Sierra Club or Singularity University. But again, focus destroys fear.

As I was writing this, smoke from a nearby fire exploded into view from our backyard (see image above) and my daughter, wife and our friends watched with bated breath as a coordinated aerial dance of helicopters and scooper planes swooped over the flames and dumped massive payloads of water and pink retardant to our cheers. We laughed to relieve the stress but underlying it all was the stress of the worst-case-scenario. Luckily there wasn’t much wind and the brave firefighters knocked it down in record time. 

I wish I could assure my daughter that everything is going to be okay. And I am sorry that she and all of us are living in an age of such anxiety. But my design training informs me that all things that are initially problematic are actually challenges that can be solved with the right framing and through the brighter lens.

And it’s how we see the world that ultimately allows us to engage with it constructively. Or not.

Our choice.

John

Resources:

The Contentment Foundation – led by Dr. Daniel Cordaro, this org offers child and adult-centered wellbeing curricula to schools internationally.

insightLA –  has been offering high-quality mindfulness and compassion practices throughout the Greater Los Angeles area for almost 20 years.

Headspace app by Andy Puddicombe. I use this app daily (well, I try to). Highly recommended it. 

Waking Up app by Sam Harris. Another meditation app that recently launched. Also a great experience.

The Sierra Club – helping the earth. 

The Ocean Cleanup – The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization, is developing advanced technologies to rid the world’s oceans of plastic.

Singularity University – Singularity University is a global learning and innovation community using exponential technologies to tackle the world’s biggest challenges and build a better future for all. 

What I’m listening to:

everything i wanted by Billie Eilish.

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