Friday Notes, January 26, 2024
Dear Friends —
So far this year, energy I might have put into weekly notes has been pulled into recovering from a cold (or the flu?), getting 2024 underway at work, and paying more than the usual amount of attention to multiple generations in my family. My guess is you haven’t missed the missives, but I’m determined to get back to regular writing. Knowing that you’re out there somewhere is motivating.
Like many in my cohort, I have newish grandchildren who are just getting on their feet, grown children who are finding (or making) their path in life, and parents who have a lot of years behind them. I’m somewhere betwixt and between: not young, for sure, but not feeling at all old. Neither starting nor done. At this point, I see quite clearly the life stages that are behind — and I’m able to glimpse those that may be ahead. I’m feeling a sense of urgency, given good health and few responsibilities at home, to make the absolute most of these middle-ish years. Time to do more to help fix this broken world.
One step toward working more effectively, if not harder, is to confront what psychologists call thought-action fusion. This is the belief, perfected by people with anxiety disorders, that thinking equals action — that simply by thinking something you can influence what happens in the world. For example, by wishing for or worrying about occurrences over which you actually have no control you make them more or less likely to happen.
We all know that thoughts alone don’t affect the likelihood of natural disasters, tragic or delightful events we read about in the newspaper, or election outcomes. But many of us behave as if we do believe that. We put time and energy into worrying about every existential threat we can envision as if that is a way to forestall bad outcomes. And many of us also behave as if the impact of our worrying depends on knowing more facts, hearing more commentary, and having more discussions with like-minded friends to vent our outrage and agree on the list of horribles that might befall us all. I see you, political junkies and news-aholics.
The thought-action fusion fallacy is hard to combat because we have an entire, highly profitable attention ecosystem built on it. We watch our favorite flavor of cable TV, listen to podcasts in which the Chatterati tell us what to worry about, read articles with scary headlines, fall down social media rabbit holes, and spend a truly silly amount of time letting our adrenal glands be stimulated to produce more cortisol. We even reward with views and clicks the people who are so committed to worry-mongering that they embody thought-action fusion.
This is a trap. The time and attention that you and I might put into learning about polar ice sheets melting or the latest polls from South Carolina could be better spent in other ways. But both because the content itself is dispiriting and because we’re such energetic worriers, we lose our inclination to do anything that could, even in a small way, make a difference outside of our own heads.
Being worriers stops us from being warriors.
In 2024, very aware of the emptiness of the thought-action fusion, I’m doing two things instead of worry and wish (with thanks to Amanda Ripley for inspiring this way of approaching the year):
First, I’m minimizing the time I spend watching and listening to content that drains energy. Instead, I’m shifting to the stuff that gives me insight, ideas, hope, inspiration.
Second, I’m forcing myself to do more things that improve even tiny little parts of the world outside my house. It’s better to donate to a political campaign than to hear one more person on TV talk about Donald Trump. It’s better to take clothes and blankets to a shelter for victims of domestic violence than to rant about the patriarchy. It’s better to go to a town meeting about keeping the library open than to worry about book bans. No, none of these little, relatively low effort actions will stave off all the things that inhabit our waking nightmares, but each of them has infinitely more positive impact than worrying.
And here’s the best thing I heard this week — a must-listen for parents of toddlers: the Dream Police (9 minutes and worth every second).
Have a good weekend,
-Ruth