Our Daily Cycles of Aversion From and Attachment To Work

Recently, I had an insight about how distraction, such as provided by content platforms like Medium and Youtube, plays a key role in reinforcing our reoccurring cycles of struggle in life and prevents us from changing our habits and breaking out of the cycle. And now I’m turning this insight into content by writing this article on Medium. Of course, I have this little hope that this text might be a source of inspiration and support to you to break out of your own cycles a little bit more. But it could as well have the opposite effect, i.e., providing yet another source of distraction good enough to prevent you from breaking out for today. What I only know so far is that the problem is complex and that my aspiration is to bring more light into it. So just this little reminder to be aware when reading this text, or as the Myna birds in Aldous Huxley’s “Island” aren’t getting tired of repeating: Attention! Here and now, boys!

The ship on this image is following its own trace like the thoughts in our brains are following paths created by other thoughts in the past. The cells in our brain wire together as they fire together and they fire together as they are wired together. If the ship on the image stops driving for a moment, the air bubbles and waves making up its trace would slowly vanish and the ship would be free to drive anywhere on the ocean. Are we able to stop our thoughts just for a moment? Image by Sanndy Anghar from pexels.

Anger

Before having this insight, my experience starts with anger. More precisely, it starts with a state of thoughts that turned out to evoke anger in me. We were reading a book in my reading group that criticises our society’s obsession for work, causing an attitude of optimisation and self-optimisation in other areas of life. The book was written in german by Patrick Spät. However, there are dozens of other books and articles out there (e.g., this one) following the same line of arguments, that would trigger the same feelings of anger in me. There are plenty of aspects about work that can make you angry, for example, the unjust distribution of power and salaries, competitive struggle, manipulation of all sorts, corruptive or lazy colleagues, hierarchical and one-sided dependencies, pointless tasks, pointless jobs, getting ignored or overlooked, feeling urged to put on a happy face or to be grateful, and many more.

Considering myself, what makes me regularly angry at my current job are the thoughts that I am working for someone else’s profit, that I earn less salary than I would deserve, and that my work is probably not of great use to the world (yet?!?). Reading the book mentioned before triggered all of these thoughts in me. I do not exactly disagree with the books arguments. On the contrary, the mere fact that they were triggering thoughts of anger in me is by itself a strong hint that the arguments are indeed relevant to me. However, as big the book’s capacity was in supporting my feelings of anger, as little it was providing me with any useful source of relief from this anger, which made me even more angry.

As Gabor Maté emphasises in his book “When the Body Says No”, anger is by itself a powerful source of energy to support us in transforming a currently unsatisfying situation to our favour. Yet, if we are not able (or more often if we didn’t learn how) to express anger in an effective and beneficial way, suppression (and on the other extreme uncontrollable outbursts) of anger are sources of stress to our bodies and in the longterm may lead to various health problems.

Transformation

Having this knowledge of the either transformative or else stress inducing and health threatening potential of anger and being aware of currently being angry, it seems quite obvious that one should rather try to head towards the first alternative: transformation. So I started to meditate about the questions: What is my anger trying to tell me? Which situation in my life is dissatisfying and calling for a change? What actions should I take?

Here, the complexity is starting to increase. Because in most cases, our anger is not only triggered by a current situation but also by our experience from the past. For example, I found that the feeling that I am working for someone else’s profit is strongly connected to the experience in my childhood that the wellbeing of my mother was more important than my own. My mother herself was not aware of that, it wasn’t her intention to make me feel that way. Rather, I think, she had a lot of pain from her own history inside her that she wasn’t (or wasn’t able to be) aware of. This resulted in her often trying to solve what appeared to be my problems and pain, where in fact it was her own pain inside her that she was recognising. She only projected it into somebody else’s pain, especially into her children’s. So when I, myself, wanted to solve what was supposed to be my own pain, I actually had to solve somehow her pain; however, there was no possibility for me in achieving that. So one forming experience of my childhood was being trapped in someone else’s pain and in having to solve someone else’s problems, the ones of my mother, the person I was most depending on. Considering this background, it seems quite natural that the feeling to work for someone else’s profit is still present all the time in my job today. On the other hand, pretty likely not by accident, I chose a job for me at a startup company where I get payed below average, where this feeling is actually justified.

Now, thinking about this, my todays feeling that “my work is probably not of great use to the world (yet?!?)” is likely related to this very same childhood experience too: How could I ever solve the world’s (a.k.a. my mother’s) problems? And, pretty likely not by accident, I chose a job for me at a startup company with a mission of boosting the energy transition towards a sustainable energy system, where the feeling of pursuing a mission impossible seems quite justified.

Long story short, we are conditioned. Transformation means to free ourselves from conditioning. But conditioning is complex. Should I rather try to work on my traumas from the past or act to change my dissatisfying job situation today? And who am I if I don’t work for a startup company with a mission of saving the world?

Distraction

It was somewhere at this point when I switched over to Youtube and started to watch a video about entropy. After about four to five videos I jumped to Medium and read an article about entropy and machine learning. Next, I read a paper about entropy and biology and if the emergence of life is in contradiction or in line with the second law of thermodynamics. Then I watched a video on Youtube about the same topic, only to switch back to Medium to search for interesting applications of machine learning in biology. Then, I started to think about writing an article on Medium about entropy and machine learning myself. And so on…

This doesn’t sound like a seductive distraction to you? Well, to me it does. I could spend hours or a hole day by jumping around these topics and platforms, and at the same time forget about any other needs of my body like food or sleep or looking into the trees.

Loneliness

However, sooner or later resistance was growing inside me against this state of complete immersion, barely noticeable in the beginning but slowly getting louder and louder. It was a feeling of dissatisfaction and guilt. It was a feeling of being completely separated from the world. Guilt was probably caused by my anticipation of the reactions from the outer world on my feeling of separation, that one is not supposed to separate oneself from the community and not care about other people. Dissatisfaction was probably caused as a reaction of my inner world on the feeling of separation, a fear of spending the rest of my life in separation, the confirmation of my deep conviction that it is impossible for me to connect to other people. I felt lonely. Lost. What was I supposed to do?

So in addition to the desire of absolute understanding of entropy and life, an urging to connect to other people and the outer world has joined my carrousel of repeating thoughts. At this point, another thought was emerging in my mind as a glimmer of hope: work. I haven’t mention so far that my position in the startup company with a mission to save the world is that of a data scientist. As a data scientist I am actually supposed to think about entropy from time to time, I can also create things that might be useful to other people and to the world out of this thinking. And by creating useful things there is maybe even a possibility for me to establish a connection to these people. So it seemed to be a reasonable conclusion that the one and only place where I can solve my dilemma, where I can stay in my mind thinking complex thoughts and connect to people at the same time, is actually work. After all I could give it a try again.

Survival Strategy

Attention! Here and now, boys! My mind has drifted far into the future. And suddenly I ended up in the hopeless state where I started from: work, the cause of my anger is also the solution to it. What has happened?

Probably the answer to this apparent paradox lies again in our past, where it was useful to end up in the same position that was also the cause of our struggles. As a child we were expected to act in a certain way, firstly by your parents, later also by society. Being aware of these expectations, and starting to question them, would have separated us as children from our environments, which was dangerous back then. In fact, it was a life-threatening danger, as our lives as children depended completely on our environments. Hence, our only chance was to find some survival strategy to adapt to the expectations of our environments, even if we had to give up a part of ourselves in this bargain. An offer we could not refuse.

Different kinds of survival strategies that help us to grow up in difficult emotional environments are described, e.g., in the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) by Laurence Heller. They all make us identify with a role that seems to evoke positive feedback from our environments. Often this role is not solely defined by the requirements given by our environments but also by our capabilities to react on them, or what we often like to call our talents. We adapt our interests towards things that we are good at and at the same time seem to be beneficial to our survival.

Considering myself, as already mentioned, one formative experience of my childhood is that the wellbeing of my mother was more important than my own. What she interpreted as problems and threats in my childhood live were actually her own problems and threats. For me that was the experience that I, myself, don’t really exist in the outside world, a feeling of separation from the world, that there is an inside, where I do exist and an outside where I don’t. Yet, when I tried to live according to this truth of separation, it was perceived as a threat to my environment, above all, to my mother, which was mainly expressed in casual remarks of me being an introverted or inaccessible child. So again, I had to find a strategy to cope with this criticising feedback, an excuse for my odd behaviour. My discovery was that when I was immersed in playing Lego, loosing myself in constructing things, and thinking complex thoughts, the criticising feedback of my environment slowly turned into some sort of admiration for my incomprehensible and ingenious character.

Today, I see that my preference for complex thoughts and topics is deeply connected to this survival strategy. Of course, the grasping of complex topics also turned out to be a talent of mine that brings me some recognition and respect as an adult. But that doesn’t need to be a contradiction. It seems only natural that we all chose our survival-strategies in things that we are more or less talented in. I don’t want to argue that our talents are something bad that we should get rid of. Rather we should become aware that even (or probably especially) our talents are strongly entangled with some problematic experiences in our past. As a consequence, when we are pursuing our talents, which is often considered to be desirable in our job and other daily occupations, very likely there are also some tensions and negative emotions connected to this pursuit.

Relationship

We have seen that our survival strategies helped us to establish as much relationship as was possible for us as children growing up in difficult environments. It occurs to me that my attitude to work is determined by the very same mechanisms.

When I was coming back to the conclusion that work might be the best solution to the dilemmas caused by work, it was actually my survival-strategy speaking, saying that it is dangerous to express my anger and that I should rather try to establish the relationship again. In this sense, work is relationship. My job as a data scientist at a startup company with a mission to save the world actually mirrors my learned “reality” about relationships one to one. This is an important insight. It means that if we want to change our attitudes towards work, we actually have to change the way we act in relationships. This will have an impact on all relationships in our life.

The objective of the book we were reading in our reading group was to change our working system. How do we change a system of relationships? I believe that the only way to do so is when the people that make up the system grow up, and become aware of and start to change their own understanding of relationships. In order to break the big cycle, everybody has to break his own cycle.

This reminds me of the painfully beautiful bluegrass movie The Broken Circle Breakdown that sends me goose bumps down my spine and brings tears into my eyes only by thinking about it. Where the main characters, full of hope and pain, sing the gospel hymn Will the Circle be Unbroken. However, the circle wants to be broken. If you don’t want to break it, then your body will eventually say no — or the body of your children, as it happens to be in the movie.

Content Platforms and Transformation?

We have seen that choosing the transformative over the health threatening potential of anger means to break your own cycles, and is not as straightforward as expected in the beginning. Where can we start?

One possibility is probably to become aware when our mind is longing for distraction. As we have seen, this could be a sign that our survival strategies are kicking in. Instead we could ask ourselves why we feel this urgent need for distraction right now. What would we feel if we didn’t give away to this need? Is our body trying to tell us something and we are just trying to drown it right now?

To come back to the introduction of this text, I think that today there is a whole industry built especially in the internet around our desire for distraction, sometimes referred to as attention economy. The concept of attention economics has emerged as a strategy to deal with the problem of information overload that became significant with the advent of digital information systems. The goal in attention economy is to attract as much human attention as possible. A popular objective is, e.g., to maximise the time people spend on your website. If you want to catch someones attention for a long time, you need to keep him separated from his own awareness. And when are we most vulnerable in getting distracted for a long time? Probably, when we already are in a state of inner separation. Hence, if you want to maximise for peoples attention, you should pick them up when they are already separated and keep them there for as long as possible. This leads to digital platforms that provide any type of content to feed any possible survival-strategy out there. Maybe my own ways of distracting myself, i.e., watching Youtube videos about entropy, didn’t seem tempting to you. But I’m sure you find your own platforms and topics out there that feed your own desire for distraction like a charm.

Yet, the insight about this mechanism is probably already part of our transformation. Content platforms enable me to share this insight and to establish contact with you. Hence, they may also be a tool to enable breaking our cycles, and hence to transformation? It’s complex. Attention! Here and now, boys!