Going Nowhere
Am I languishing?
This question came up in conversation this week as I was reminded about Adam Grant’s article and Ted Talk on this (which I wrote about back in April 2021). ‘Languishing’ was defined by Professor Corey Keyes as “a sense of emptiness, stagnation and ennui”. Grant suggested this is what we were feeling as a result of the pandemic, lockdowns and other restrictions and he said it’s a psychological state between surviving and thriving.
Another way of putting it is that we’re doing OK, we’re not in depression, but we can’t be arsed to do anything or take an interest in anything.
Or as Grant puts it, it disrupts our focus and motivation. I guess that’s why he’s got the PhD and the media profile.
Anyway, I reckon it’s still hanging around, and specifically hanging around me. Grant says it’s really hard to talk about because of all the toxic positivity that’s about. We’re supposed to be ‘up’ all time, look on the bright side, count out blessing and all that. Personally, all that bollocks makes my skin crawl. But even so, if you ask me how I am, my reflex answer is “Fine” and I might even stretch to “Good” if, I don’t know, England have won the Euros or something like that. Even when I feel a bit shit.
We’re not supposed to be ‘Languishing’ are we? We have all these advantages and opportunities, we’re supposed to be seizing the day and ripping up trees, not loafing about and feeling ‘meh’ about everything.
Grant points out that the antidote is not optimism but flow, the experience of being deeply immersed in something and losing all track of time and space. Peak flow requires active involvement in a real life activity.
So how do we get into flow? We need three things:
Mastery - we don’t need to be totally proficient but we need to see progress. So small wins can count here. My ukulele playing is no great shakes but I know I can play chords I struggled with a while ago, and I can play songs fluently that I stumbled through a few months previously.
Mindfulness - this is just having uninterrupted periods of time that allow you to focus. It means stopping the stream of interruptions that we normally allow to break our day into ‘time confetti’.
Mattering - we need to feel what we do matters to others.
I’m pretty good at the first two. Writing this Not-Newsletter every week is something I really settle into and enjoy, for example. Once I get started on a bit of writing, I can carry on for ages - often until I can feel my bum going numb!
But mattering is what I’m struggling with. What’s the point? Who cares? Who’s listening? Am I just yelling into the void? Is all this just an utter waste of time that won’t change anything? These are not helpful thoughts.
I put this partly down to the lack of face-to-face contact over the past two years. I used to frequently meet up with my ‘tribe’ to talk about reinventing organisations and humanising work and found that energising and re-affirming. It’s not the same online and the frequency of meetings has dropped away a lot. There’s something about seeing the enthusiasm in people’s eyes and feeling the energy in the conversations that really makes a difference.
But I also had a word with myself because this matters to me, and it’s also down to me to get it out to people who it matters too as well. That’s something I am going to be much more focused on going forward.
Of course, I’d love to hear why this matters to you. Well, yes, tell me why my ramblings matter but more importantly why decrapifying work matters to you. I’d love to hear your stories about what it is that makes you want see positive change.
Also, let me know if you are ‘Languishing’, I’d love to help you get yourself out of it if I can.
My deets are at the bottom. You know what to do.
Nothing Compares 2 U
Grief is a big part of my motivation for wanting to decrapify work.
We don’t really talk much about grief in regard to work but it is part of any transition, and we all went through a massive transition (possibly several) due to COVID.
I realised that it was a big factor in my transition out of corporate, and not acknowledging and accepting it was what had held me back. It wasn’t just that I was grieving for the things I had lost - the status, the identity, the salary, the routine, the (false) feeling of security. I hadn’t properly addressed those more obvious things and so I had to attend to that.
However, what I realised (thanks to Brene Brown) was that I was also grieving for my lost future. In any situation, we naturally project forward, imagining how the futures might unfold, in several ways. When you transition out of that situation, all those possible futures are lost as well.
That is, literally, the death of your hopes and dreams. That’s going to hurt, particularly if it’s a big transition and one you didn’t intend to happen.
That’s where we all are with COVID. All those futures that never happened and now can’t happen. That’s on top of the very real grief of losing loved ones to the pandemic. We’re all in grief, to some extent.
In regards to Decrapify Work, I feel that I never got the opportunity to make the contribution that I was capable of, I never got to realise my potential, because of the toxic workplaces and dysfunctional organisations (and, let’s be clear, complete and utter bastards) I encountered in my career. I’m grieving for the person that I could have become.
I’m also grieving for the colleagues who were also damaged by the corporate environment, who’s lives were diminished by the working environment. And all the people I’ve met since I started to share my story, who have similar tales of woe and distress to tell - and there are a lot more of them than I ever imagined.
The Kugler-Ross model of grief has five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. A bit like the Bridge’s Transition Model that I’ve written about before, it looks linear but it’s not. You can be at several stages at the same time, and return to stages. I’ve been through the lot with my grief but I’m still in anger. None of it was necessary, it didn’t serve any purpose and I’m not going to stand by and watch it be done to people time and time again.
That’s why it matter to me.
Think about what lost futures you could be grieving about, ones that you are stuck in the denial stage about, perhaps. Not only can you remove that grief as a blockage, you can turn it into fuel to propel you in a new future.
Emotion
The ‘let’s go back to the office’ crowd are still being quite noisy and often encountered in unexpected places. My posts about the future of work are routinely interpreted as ‘anti-office’ pieces, even when I specifically state I’m not against people going to offices, I just don’t think it should be the default.
It’s almost like they are not reading the words, they are just reacting…
It’s an emotional response to change. They are typically the more extrovert ones who liked working in the office. Well, they would, offices are set up to favour extroverts and encourage extrovert behaviour. They were in a privileged position and now they’ve lost it. They are grieving but they are still in the denial stage because they don’t recognise the privilege that they had. It was just ‘normal’, right?
So the responses are mostly about denial, occasionally spilling over into anger. I guess ‘Hybrid’ is part of the bargaining stage.
The ones most in denial are the bosses, who really don’t get the level of privilege they had. I think we can expect a lot more howls of pain. They think the coming recession is going to give them a chance to wind the clock back and force everyone back into the office. This is not going to end well for them …
Sunny Afternoon
This is coming out on a Monday because I have actually gone on holiday and I didn’t finish it before leaving. It will come as no surprise to you, then, that there won’t be a Not-Newsletter this week (I know that this one is coming out this week but it’s actually last weeks. Keep up!). I’m back next week and then away for another week. Hey, it’s August, you’re probably too busy having fun to read this rubbish anyway.
Meanwhile, I’m just sitting here, sipping on my ice cold beer…
Rolling In The Deep
Funny how the general public is subtly and constantly indoctrinated to always approach all adversity under the premise of “it could always be worse” or “well at least” optimism and by all means never ever ever let cynical skepticism appear lest you be a “Debby Downer” pariah. Allowing an appropriate allocation of both optimism and pessimism occur where applicable cannot happen according to those pushing the Pollyanna mentality. The litmus test that illustrates the one way relativity of the purported fabled benefit of eternal optimism is observed only when it’s you that needs to apply it-- turned around it doesn’t; for example try not showing up to work for 2-3 days in a row (without notice) and then return to work as if nothing happened a see if you are greeted with the optimistic enthusiasm you are expected to always exude-- Will the boss say “well at least you came back” or maybe “it could always be worse and you could have been out for 2 weeks” or will he say “you’re fired and GFY”? It’s only for Schlubs to apply to life. With “well at least” and “it could always be worse” what subjugation or exploitation can’t you endure? One has to know that one is in a world that ONLY functions to profit off the backs of the exploited no matter the cost and there exists no bridge, ethic, moral, vulnerability that can stop the “profit over safety and/or efficacy” commodification steam roller of vulture capitalism.