For a while now, the heart and head have been in disagreement. The head points to tasks that must be done. The heart pleads that it is overwhelmingly sad. So many are ill and are dying. There are times when anger takes over. What did I do to deserve a ruling dispensation this impotent? Complete exasperation is by now a familiar feeling. And why do I feel so hopelessly incompetent? Because social media feeds are bursting with pleas for help and I don’t know where to begin.
The head points out, patiently, that we have felt low before. And yet this feeling is unusual. I’ve stared down a life-threatening illness and got back on my feet when most people thought I’d never stand again. I know the despair that comes with losing a job, but have emerged unscathed. I have cared for a dying parent over a prolonged period, agonised over what more I could have done, but finally made peace with the universe.
There’s something different about this time, the heart points out. The head can’t quite put a finger on what.
The first clue comes from an essay published in The New York Times by Adam Grant, an organisational psychologist at Wharton. He describes what so many are feeling as languishing. “Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021,” he says in the essay.
The fact that this feeling is near-universal, that’s what is different now. In the past, when one felt low, there was an ecosystem one could rely upon to offer points of joy. There is no one to turn to for succour now. Every friend sounds distressed. The news is overwhelmingly macabre.
To languish in grief is inevitable then. But to continue languishing is unacceptable. Because, as Grant explains, it “dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work”.
As a meticulously organised creature, though I could see this happening to everyone around at work, I was embarrassed to admit it was happening to me. Last week I finally mustered the courage to articulate what I was feeling, on one of our daily team calls. What followed was an outpouring. Everybody felt the same way and some were at work on how to deal with it.
Three pointers stayed with me. The first is to look at social media feeds in limited chunks and at designated hours. The second, to simply listen to the voices of those that matter. And finally, to practice being kind to yourself. Each time I have attempted these exercises, I’ve emerged feeling better.
I had been scrolling mindlessly late into the night on social media platforms. Once I had set a hard limit on the time I spent there, the mood changed. I could be more present to those around me. I could hear, for instance, the voices of my two children at home.
Both have been housebound for over a year. I’m guilty of yelling at them on occasion for how much time they spend on their devices. There’s so much else they could be doing, I’ve said.
The irony is that I wasn’t following my own advice, and in my agitation I was being too hard on them. What else are they to do? Their school has moved online, as they have tried to tell me. Their friends are online. The games they play are necessarily online because they can’t leave the house.
The truth is, I have to reimagine how they engage with the world, and how I do too. This begins by accepting that the old norms don’t hold. There will be more screen time, and more sadness, more tragedy and, sadly, needless chaos.
As we do all we can to help ourselves and others, it’s okay to also look around and feel helpless, incompetent and angry. Because this is my generation’s World War. And we, the masses under attack, are only just learning to cope.
