I've started to be able to evaluate my stress levels by how many drafts are in my email inbox. Right now, I have seven drafts, so I have seven works in progress: An article I've been pitching around, half an essay for a scholarship application, an email to my supervisor at my internship, a reply to an unpunctuated and misspelled message from my grandfather, an article on social entrepreneurship for some start-up...I don't even know what I should be working on anymore.
Everything is in limbo—some of this stuff has been lingering for months—and absolutely nothing is making progress. A reasonable person with good work habits would chip away at one task at a time until everything was finished, but, I am not a reasonable person with good work habits so instead I spend most of my time flitting around the Internet and invariably Googling images of potato bugs at 3am on a work night. It feels like paralysis. Every time I start working on one thing, I get anxious because I'm neglecting something else or because I can't get this one thing to be perfect, and I freeze up.
Obviously, I'm currently in the panic stage of my stress cycle. That's how stress works for me: I'm either intensely productive or too stressed to even function. The more I have everything under control, the more things stay under control and the better I am at doing everything. While I'm getting tons of reports in at work (so fucking tight, I know), I guess it must get my brain firing on all cylinders (I treat my brain like a machine LOL that's fucked up) because that's when I come up with most of my article ideas. I'm in a productive mood, so I write these articles with the quickness. This makes me feel better about myself, which in turn helps me perform better. And so on and so on—a virtuous cycle of high output is born.
And then, insidiously, something I've forgotten about will resurface and the tables start to turn on me. Things pile up. Like, I'll need to write an article or something and then an application for scholarship rears its ugly, but potentially life-changing head or my supervisor needs me to translate some news articles from Italian (I don't speak Italian FYI), and, meanwhile, I need to start reading for the eighty page thesis I am required to write during my senior year of college. When this happens, I leave things unattended for too long. And the more everything sits there, the less able I am to address anything at all that I need to do. Welcome to the panic phase. Please have a seat. Complete and utter dread will be with your shortly.
I never seem to able to break this stress cycle by just doing less because doing a shit ton of things at once gives me a feverish sense of accomplishment that leads me to—SPOILER ALERT—continue to take on too many things.
It's like telling people that the only food worth making is an omelet and then saying what a shame and a disgrace it is that all these eggs ended up broken.
I guess I'm the kind of over-committed organization kid that middle-aged men write condescending, pitying, moralizing articles about. Kids These Days™ are too busy and, according to our wise elders, it's turning us into conformist zombies that have no concept of life's higher meaning. That article pissed me the fuck off maybe because it was my generation and my school specifically that he caricatured, but also because the author really pats himself on the back for having better thought out priorities. After all, whose values are these drones conforming to? Whose fault is it that higher education is so stressful that it turns us into zombies that don't have the time to think about shit like why we're all here on planet earth? As society gets more and more competitive, it rewards and validates people who jump through an exponentially growing numbers of hoops. And who created said hoops for my generation to jump through but the very generation that brought us up and now worries that we're living our lives wrong. Well, would ya look at that.
Convinced we have to Do It All™, we value children with varied and extensive accomplishments who become teenagers bound for elite universities and then turn into adults who work hard, play hard, dress well, have gym memberships and come home to an apartment with a nice couch and a fridge full of organic produce. That’s what we think of when we think of success. But acquiring those very same markers of success is just as competitive and stressful as achieving success itself and too much stress is undesirable, like a loathsome disease that it's your own fucking fault for catching. It's like telling people that the only food worth making is an omelet and then saying what a shame and a disgrace it is that all these eggs ended up broken. I feel like I am societally expected to manage my stress not by doing less, but by stressing less about all that I'm doing. Doing a lot at once means you're a go-getter, but stress means you're a pussy who can't hack it. And it's not fucking okay to not be able to hack it.
This is, of course, not entirely a generational conflict. People have always tormented themselves in the name of self-control and self-improvement, but nowadays it seems to be more intense, more modern. Modern capitalism requires consistent, never-ending growth. So does technology: The computing power of a dense integrated circuit (the building block of a computer) has grown exponentially for fifty years. The more we have the means to optimize everything, the higher expectations are, and with the fucked up way we think of ourselves as machines to be regulated and adjusted to produce the best results, of course we expect infinite improvement of ourselves too. Of course that's stressful, especially because optimizing everything about your life doesn't really make your life optimal. In case you hadn't realized, perfectionism makes you crazy, and, besides, even exponential improvement can never truly reach perfection.
No matter how productive you make your time, or how much money you make in order to buy yourself free time, your time will never be infinite. Maybe it'll turn out that I'm stressed because my life is constantly slipping away, never to be as good as it could be. Though I was taught that hard work would bring me anything and everything I ever wished for, no amount of hard work can bring back a single hour I spent lying on the grass in the backyard in the summer when I was sixteen. We can never change the basic realities of our lives, no matter how efficient technology allows us to be. The closest we can get is being busy enough that productivity begins to make us happy. If I'm doing enough things at once, I can forget that nothing I do matters.
Emily Lever is a French-American writer who wishes she led a life of adventure. You can follow her on Twitter here.
