Hurry Slowly - Anxiety is clickbait 😳

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Artwork by Ashraful Arefin.

Hi Friend-

I recently did a scroll back in time to my very first newsletter. I launched it almost six years ago to the day, and shipped it out to my tiny baby list of 26 people. Now that list has increased a thousand fold. Who knew we’d all still be here?

That was 2015, and two years later I launched my podcast Hurry Slowly, which will crest 70 episodes with the addition of today’s new interview — a conversation with Kat Vellos about cultivating friendships.

If you’ve been enjoying these free offerings over the past many years, I would invite you to make a contribution.

You can support me by: making a donation to Hurry Slowly, or joining my RESET course, which is open for registration through tomorrow, October 15th.

Much love,
Jocelyn

Artwork by Ashraful Arefin.

LINK ABOUT IT

Navigating friendship in a pandemic world. On a new episode of Hurry Slowly, I sit down with designer and community builder Kat Vellos to talk about friendship. In a rich conversation, we dig into how to cultivate more intimacy, ask better questions, and focus our relationships around connection rather than extraction: “There's this idea around people removing anything from their life doesn't serve them. It's like, ‘Oh, that doesn't serve me, I'm removing that from my life.’ What's underlying this...is the idea that we should only keep things in our life that serve us, e.g. ‘Everyone in the world is here to serve me and everything in the world is here for my sole perpetual pleasure.’ The reason I think that's problematic is because if you're going to throw away a person or a relationship at the very first sign of challenge, or dissatisfaction, or conflict, then you're going to rob yourself of a lot of opportunities for growth, and for healing, and for forgiveness.”

This conversation will change how you think about trauma. Do not miss this interview with Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps Score. His thoughts on treating trauma and how we can get out of the "post-alcoholic paradigm" of treating ourselves with talk therapy and drugs has really stuck with me: "I discovered the world of the body and tantric traditions, the yoga traditions and breathing traditions, and musical traditions that show that we actually are capable of rearranging our own internal physiological systems. And I wish that in every classroom in America they would teach the four Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic and self regulation, from kindergarten through 12th grade, of what can we do to calm ourselves down, to stay focused? What sort of activities can we engage in to feel in control of ourselves? So that we get away from this culture of, if you don’t feel right you take a drug, instead of if you don’t feel right you go for a bicycle ride. If you don’t feel right you go to yoga class."

Consciousness is like a media algorithm that feeds you stories you’ve clicked on before. I recently read a wonderful book called Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, which I enjoyed so much I started Internet researching (stalking?) the author and found this Quora piece. This metaphor of the stories we tell ourselves as clickbait is *resonating*: "The mind imagines all kinds of stuff, like it does in a dream. In reality, nothing is there. What does nothing look like? Whatever you want it to. More accurately, the world appears in whatever way holds your attention. It’s like a media algorithm that feeds you stories you’ve clicked on before. It doesn’t exist externally. There’s no “out there” out there. There is no outside or escape. There is, however, an exit. There’s an internal door. I had to learn this. I‘d noticed the obvious, and now I had to live with the consequences."

The link between neoliberalism, perfectionism, and mental health disorders. Okay, so the title could be catchier, but this is a fascinating exploration of why socially prescribed perfectionism is on the rise: "We see the market in education for things like standardized testing and the incessant standardized testing of young children from very young ages because tests give us metrics that allow us to rank, sift, and sort, so we can get an idea of which kids are better performing, which kids are worse performing. But the problem with this is that we’re teaching children that they need to compete against each other in an open marketplace. So we are essentially instilling a sense of social anxiety. We’re suggesting that inequality is virtuous because those that have done well deserve the rewards. And so essentially what we have now is a culture where we are continually comparing."

The problem with resilience. A great piece on why talk of resilience can be so toxic: "Recently I asked people on Twitter what their first reaction would be if their employers wanted them to participate in resilience training to cope with work-related difficulties. 'Structural inequalities cannot be resolved with resilience. I shouldn’t have to be resilient to someone’s poor management of their organisation,' said one respondent. 'I’m tired of being resilient. You should have addressed abuse of authority. Pay for my therapist,' said another. 'That I am working in the wrong workplace,' said a third. How did we get here?"

What I've been reading lately:

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (coming soon to this podcast!)

The Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are by J. Matthews

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Artwork by Ashraful Arefin.

SHOUT-OUTS:

Link appreciation to: Ann Friedman and whoever pointed me to the Naked Capitalism article. 🙏

The artwork is from: Ashraful Arefin, who works out of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

You can support this newsletter by: Tweeting about i t or making a donation to Hurry Slowly.

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Hi, I'm Jocelyn, the human behind this newsletter. I created the online course RESET, a cosmic tune-up for your workday, and I host Hurry Slowly — a podcast about how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient by slowing down.

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Website: jkglei.com
Twitter: @jkglei

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Hurry Slowly - Anxiety is clickbait 😳

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