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I know how it feels to be getting old because I am.
It’s really not that bad, unless you mind pretty much everything you thought your life would look like not actually happening. Then, yeah, getting old can suck.
For me, though, my expectations were pretty fluid so I’m good. Plus I’m white and male, which, according to Louis C.K., means I can’t really complain.
Having been an adult for several decades, I’ve seen a lot of change. Some of it good, some of it not.
Like technology.
Technology has made life better in many ways, but has also changed our lives in ways that people like to say is not healthy, or ideal, or good. People staring at their phones all the time instead of engaging in the world around them, for example.
I did a search of “things that were different in the 70s,” and I found this great article. There are around 30 comments to the post and most of them talk about being largely unsupervised as kids, about how much fun it was, and about how much freedom they were given to roam and have play. In other words, parents weren’t as vigilant and protective as they are today.
That reminded me of the day I was working in my home office that has a window looking out into the street. We live at the bottom of a hill, and on that day, Sam was out riding his bike. He was probably 7 or 8. I looked out at one point to see him standing on the seat while he was coasting downhill.
I thought, “cool.”
He wasn’t wearing a helmet. Didn’t even occur to me that he should.
If that happened today, I’d be arrested for abuse.
Parents are more protective today because they are more fearful. Back then life was simpler, less complex, and less threatening. There was an innocence and naiveté that doesn’t really exist today. Or when and if it does, it’s usually called being delusional.
When I was growing up and in the early days of adulthood, life was viewed as mostly a one-size-fits-all proposition. And when change happened, it did so slowly and incrementally.
But that’s not how life is today. What could be counted on can no longer be counted on because ideas, technology, forms of employment, and relational constructs are evolving faster than our ability to keep up.
What we think we know to be true does not stay true for very long. There used to be this saying:
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” And it was true.
But now it’s more like, “the more things seem the same, the more they are actually changing…and you’ll be the last to know.”
It’s hard to know what and who to trust anymore, and it’s easy to understand why people are fearful.
A recent article by the McKinsey Global Institute talks about this changing world and describes four forces of disruption that are causing these changes. The forces are interesting (one of them is technology) and they make sense, but their point is the result–
“[These forces] are causing [historical] trends to break down, to break up, or simply to break… Our world is changing radically from the one in which many of us grew up, prospered, and formed the intuitions that are so vital to our decision making.”
“…our intuition has been formed by a set of experiences and ideas about how things worked during a time when changes were incremental and somewhat predictable… But that’s not how things are working now—and it’s not how they are likely to work in the future. If we look at the world through a rearview mirror and make decisions on the basis of the intuition built on our experience, we could well be wrong.”
This is the very thing I’ve contended with in my business. I feel like I used to be able plot the course of my company and anticipate changes in market cycles pretty effectively. However, over the past few years, nothing has trended the way I thought they would. At times I’ve thought I was losing my edge because I kept guessing wrong. Once I even suggested to my managers that I step aside and let someone else lead the company. They encouraged me to stay where I was because, it turns out, they are struggling with the same uncertainty and confusion.
But the truth is that nobody else really knows what’s going on either. That’s why so many “expert” economists couldn’t agree on the reasons the economy collapsed in late 2008. I remember listening to these experts for weeks and thinking, either they can’t agree, or there are 50 different reasons for the problem.
And that’s what progress now looks like. But instead of feeling progressive, it feels:
Chaotic.
Disordered.
Complicated.
Threatening.
One of my favorite scholars and theologians, Walter Brueggman, in an interview in late 2013, said people feel like “the world we have trusted in is vanishing before our eyes and the world that is coming at us feels like a threat to us and we can’t quite see the shape of it.”
I guess the good news is that since everyone seems to be experiencing this, we’re not really alone. The bad news is that it sounds like things aren’t “going back to normal” anytime soon. If being unsettled and uncertain is the new normal, then what do we do to manage the fear? Here’s my list of what I do. Sometimes it works.
1. Be grateful and thankful–I know those two words basically mean the same thing. That’s okay, because we need to hear it a lot. I know this is easier said than done, and I know that a lot of people say this. But it’s true.
By actively practicing being thankful, you remind yourself of the good things that are happening in your life. This will have an impact on your perspective and how you feel. So however you need to do this–making a list, setting a timer on your phone, whatever–just do it, and do it every day.
2. Don’t stop learning–We all know about fundamentalism. Mostly we associate it negatively to extreme religious groups (Christian, Islam), but it also gets applied to other groups like right-wing conservatives, or in the realm of economics, social sciences, etc. Google defines it as a “strict adherence to the basic principles of any subject or discipline.” Anyone know a food-fundamentalist? A parenting-fundamentalist? A home-schooling-fundamentalist? An environmental-fundamentalist? Ever notice they seem to always be afraid of, or angry about something that’s changed or changing?
In face of an increasingly complex world, it is only natural to want to make sense of the world and to simplify the rules. We all want to find truth and absolutes that will guide us in the face of failing historical precedents. That’s fine. Just don’t stop learning. Because what you believe to be absolutely true today is going to fail you in the future. Be open to learning new things, to change, to being wrong.
3. Don’t stop taking action–I have friends that have given up. Sure, they function, go to work, take care of business, but there is something inside them that has shut down. They are discouraged and confused by what’s happening in the world and in culture. They have disengaged and are no longer trying to grow, change, and/or influence the younger generations. They’re just holding on.
Do what you can to make progress, to make things better, to help someone. Ideally everyday.
Complexity and uncertainty make it difficult to know what to do, but only if you are obsessed with success. Recently I heard Carlton Cuse, the Executive Producer of the Lost series, say that the key to his success has been his resilience to the fear of failure and failure itself. Take chances, take risks, keep moving mentally, emotionally, physically. Otherwise, life picks you off.
You know this, but the people who succeed are the ones who don’t give up.
4. Surrender the outcome–Do the best you can and then surrender to the fact that you cannot control outcomes. Sometimes you will try to do the right thing, will have the best intentions, but there will be unforeseen and unintended consequences.
A friend of mine recently said to me, “freedom is not really the ability to choose to do whatever we want. That kind of freedom does not lead to peace. Rather, it is being okay with the realization that we have very little control over the outcome of our lives. That is true freedom.”
She’s right. Studies show that the more choices we have, the more anxiety, depression, and lack of satisfaction we feel. Sometimes things beyond our control happen that leave us with few or no options for changing or influencing the process and outcome. Sometimes we just have to ride it out.
And it may sound paradoxical, but this could be life’s way of giving us a gift to actually reduce our anxiety. I think you know that I mean. How many of us have gotten bad news that in an instant changed our lives and limited our options, only to find that the power of it diminished after a few days? It became manageable and a sense of peace and resolve came with it.
The world has changed and it is still changing. Kind of like a car rolling down a hill, it hasn’t yet come to rest. Problem is, just when you get used to it, it’ll stop.
And then that will feel like another change.
I hate that.
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