Stress is about cheating
The feeling of stress comes from an inability to choose between obligations
Part 1 of a planned series on warriors and workers
Summer is approaching. And here, summer means a lot of manual work. Which makes me think of that common psychological response to having too much to do: Stress.
I do a lot of stupid work (not stupid as in unnecessary but stupid in the sense that I do not need my brain to do it). Which gives me a lot of time to think about work and the mental states related to it. Like the feeling of stress. Why do we get it? What is it good for? How can it be avoided? Should it be avoided?
After a number of years, I think I have cracked the code: Stress is the feeling one gets when there is so much to do that it can't be done without cheating. For most people, cheating is unpleasant. In order to get the courage to cheat, we need another unpleasant feeling to whip us into it. And that feeling is called stress.
Stress is what we experience when we have too many deadlines to meet too soon. We know that something must go. But we don't know what. So the feeling of stress becomes a perpetual spur to cheat with small things. Maybe work can't be sacrificed. But cooking can. So stressed people eat sandwiches and drink Coke although they know they will feel bad from it in the long term. They avoid double-checking details they know they should be double-checking and hope to get away with it. They know they should be friendly to people around them, but they cheat with that too, because they know they will get away with it, for a while at least.
Stressed people are constantly asking themselves a certain question: Am I doing the right thing right now? Am I doing something that I should actually be cheating with? That way, whatever stressed people are doing, they always question whether they should be doing something else instead.
How to abolish stress
After having realized that stress is essentially about cheating, I had the key to stop feeling stressed in everyday life: Only set ridiculously realistic and flexible goals for myself. Decide exactly what I want to do with the time and energy I have and do that and nothing else.
Humans in general want to do more than they are able to do. That is only natural. The opposite, wanting to do less than one is technically capable of doing is called depression. That is not a nice feeling. So the first step towards not being stressed is accepting that if ambitions are higher than ability, that is just a sign of mental health.
Step 2 is to choose consciously among those ambitions. This is hard, because it requires giving up on parts of one's identity. I want to be a person who works hard, keeps physically in shape, spends time with my children, reads books, writes about what I read, maintains a home with a certain standard of maintenance and cleanliness, has many children, wears clothes that are not visibly worn out… I want all that. And I can't achieve all that. I have to choose.
The choice can be made two ways:
Consciously and calmly making priorities: What is important and what is less important? What needs to be done right now and what can be saved for later? What should I simply skip?
Unconsciously and chaotically. Try to do everything that would be nice to do, and cheat constantly in the process.
The cost of avoiding stress is to admit to oneself: Actually, I'm no better than that. I can't achieve more. The benefit, except the obvious emotional benefits, is the opportunity to do things as thoroughly as one prefers.
When to apply stress
What is the good thing with stress then? It is to get the power to cheat when it is unavoidable.
Sometimes, hopefully most times, it is possible to admit to oneself that one thing or another isn't doable and needs to be down-prioritized, come what may. Sometimes, one or another thing just can't be consciously down-prioritized: An imminent threat to life and property. A person in danger for physical or psychological reasons. Higher powers that threaten to ruin one's life and require immediate action.
When really fast decisions are required, spontaneous cheating is the only appropriate mechanism. When calm, conscious cheating isn't possible, panicked, spontaneous cheating is a necessity. It has saved innumerable lives.
In a state of battle, stress is the appropriate attitude. In a state of everyday work, it is not. Or at least shouldn't be.
Life is a battle
Making a priority list is easy. People should have figured that out a long time ago. Why do so many people, maybe a majority of people in certain age brackets, still feel significantly stressed? And why do so many employers prefer to keep their workforces under constant, low-intensity stress?
Some jobs are a bit like war. People need to keep vigilant in order to survive. Some jobs are plain impossible and workers need to cheat in order to uphold a semblance of doing them. But people who are doing entirely normal, technical things at work are often stressed too. Employers are establishing routines and then load so much work on people that those routines can't be upheld. Then they leave it to the employee to decide how to cheat with those routines.
Is that wise? If everybody involved is actually very bad at making priorities, it could be. There might be many people who are just incapable of prioritizing consciously, but who are capable of prioritizing subconsciously. That is, people who only work effectively when put under stress.
But I suspect the foremost reason why people feel stressed is that life really is a battle. In a battle, it is very unwise not to feel stressed, because you never know what the battle will throw at you and you better be ready for everything, everywhere all at once. Many people also live their civilian lives that way. They are constantly sparring against other people. And other people are unpredictable.
When working with genuinely technical stuff, it is possible to make a list of priorities. In the social realm, it is not. There the big sport is to keep up appearances. Which appearance to keep up depends on who is looking. People who are acting on the social arena will always need to be alert in order to parry the strikes of other people. They can't afford the meditative state of technical work.
In conclusion, the most important thing that can be done to decrease stress is to apply a technical mindset whenever a technical mindset is applicable. There are enough real wars as there are.
I think stress comes from the feeling of being overwhelmed by having too much to do; but crucially, at least part of that depends on one's perspective. For example, if you have ten things to do in one's day if one looks at the whole day it's very easy to become overwhelmed, even though it is possible to accomplish those tasks in the day. For me, my stress levels went down significantly even though I didn't outwardly change anything when I changed my perspective to only focus on what was in front of me -- to do what I could at the task at hand and then when finished move on to the next, without focusing on the big picture. Of course if you have so many obligations that you cannot do it all even with that perspective shift then something manifestly needs to change, but often times developing tunnel vision helps a lot.
Another pertinent dimension is "things I must do" vs "things I want to do". One can fill up one's life with the former (highly structured) and never have time for the latter.