My younger friends – and at my advanced age virtually everyone is younger – particularly Generation Xers (born 1965-79) and the millennials (born 1980-2000) – complain about being over-scheduled and over-committed. “Crazy busy” or “insanely busy” is the constant complaint.
If people are not busy at work, they are busy in left-over time with entertaining or being entertained or preparing to be even busier or keeping their children busy. Spare moments may be welcome in theory but in actual fact they make the younger generation strangely uneasy. Every passing hour must be filled with unrelenting activity. If ever there is any time for reflection – organising one’s thoughts for better results – as there may be, for example, waiting for an appointment, the latest mobile device comes to the rescue!
With all this in mind, take a look at an article published in the journal Science four years ago but more relevant than ever. It shows how far people will go to avoid introspection – thinking for thinking’s sake:
“In 11 experiments involving more than 700 people, the majority of
participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room
with their thoughts for just six minutes to 15 minutes.
Moreover, in one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women
began self-administering electric shocks when left alone to think. These same
people had previously said they would pay money to avoid receiving the
painful jolt.”
It might be that people when left alone dwell disproportionately on what is wrong or hard in their lives. What preys on the mind when they are not updating Facebook or going to a show or viewing Netflix or “social mediating” are the unsolved troubles, failures, health or money problems and interpersonal relations gone wrong – so keeping occupied all the time is the way to avoid the unpleasantness associated with confronting, yes, reality. It is a sort of fundamental procrastination which afflicts people when confronted with the rigours of life. It has always been this way – it is just that now the opportunities to procrastinate are so much more.
But the simple truth is that you can’t solve problems if you don’t think hard and long about them. Easy to make yourself believe that thinking and feeling will get in the way of “action” and therefore is a waste of time. Easy to make yourself believe this but it is the opposite of what is needed.
Research has also revealed that the “idle” mind promotes creativity. Professor Jonathan Smallwood, a neuroscientist at the University of York in England, puts it this way:
“Idle mental processing encourages creativity and solutions because imagining
your problem when you aren’t in it is not the same as reality. Using your
imagination means you are in fact rethinking the problem in a novel way.”
Maybe this is why Google is offering its employees courses called Search Inside Yourself and Neural Self-Hacking, which include instruction on meditation where the objective is to recognise and accept thoughts and feelings rather than to avoid, ignore or repress them. The intention is to “free up employees’ embattled brain space to intuit end users’ dreams and create products to satisfy them.” We should all attend Google courses.
Problems, some seemingly impossible to solve, are inevitable in life. So are feelings of frustration and apprehension. So are situations of impasse and setbacks. But all of these will only get worse and more intense if crowded out by dealing only with everyday tasks and enjoying everyday diversions. Brain space has to be devoted to considering major urgent realities. And, lo and behold, the end result is often enough much greater satisfaction than getting done the next thing you have made a habit of finding to do.
