Newspapers and magazines are very keen on the headline “How I lost 10 kilos – and kept it off”. They are less keen on the headline “I keep getting fatter and fatter – and there’s nothing I can do about it”. Yet that’s the reality for me, and I imagine for a lot of others. Why not be honest about it?
Some say the media should try to be more positive. I’m not so sure. I’d like to see a bit more negativity, just to make me feel better.
What about a headline: “I haven’t had eight hours sleep since I was 18”.
Or: “Every time I cook dinner, I burn the chops”.
Or: “I’ve suddenly lost the ability to reverse-park and can’t work out why.”
I’d read all those articles, with a grunt of satisfaction. “Ah good, at least I’m not the only one.” Aspirational stories are all very well, but they do make you feel like you are the only one going backwards.
Of course, social media has made it worse. No one wants to advertise their own failure, only their successes. People brag when they lose weight, but go silent when they put it back on. Someone might tell you of their success gambling on the horses, or on the stock market, but never when they lose money. And people only post a photo of the souffle when it rises. Never when it slumps.
No wonder there’s been a rise in anxiety and depression. Other people can reverse-park, cook a chop and sleep through the night, so what’s wrong with me?
Making matters worse, is the rise in what is called “wellness journalism”, or to give it a more accurate name: the “here’s something else to worry about” school of reporting.
There are, for instance, constant articles about how you need to get eight hours’ sleep, and if you don’t get eight hours’ sleep, you’ll face all sorts of horrors, including dementia, depression and early death. This is not necessarily helpful, not when you wake up at 2am to have a wee and find you can’t get back to sleep because you are so worried about not getting back to sleep, due to the imminent risk of dementia, depression and early death.
I don’t mean to imply that the newspapers run this story every day. Some days, of course, they skip the article about sleep, to make room for the one about how drinking any form of alcohol, in any quantity whatsoever, also leads to dementia, depression and death. Or the one about how just walking past the supermarket cabinet featuring packets of bacon is sufficient to put you in hospital.
There are, for instance, constant articles about how you need to get eight hours’ sleep, and if you don’t get eight hours’ sleep, you’ll face all sorts of horrors
Perhaps we need a rewrite of that wartime song about positive thinking. In my version, Johnny Mercer would be singing “You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the negative, E-lim-i-nate the positive … Don’t mess with mister inbetween”.
Certainly, I’d like to see books that are less upbeat in the “motivational” section of the bookshop. What about some books that admit the ubiquity of failure? I’d like to see The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People, The Magic of Thinking Small and How to Lose Friends and Minimise Your Influence.
Silver, in my mind, is the new gold. It’s fine to come second. Sometimes near enough is good enough.
The most common problem people face these days is anxiety about how they are doing. Half the country is living with a gnawing sense of failure. Wouldn’t it be better if we convinced ourselves that we are doing OK? Yes, I’ve put on five kilos in the last year, but it could be worse. It could have been 10. I’m a hero when you think about it. And who “sleeps like a baby” anyway? Not even babies sleep like a baby. We all toss and turn, and then wake up, and then worry that we can’t get back to sleep. I do. Don’t you?
Have these “aspirational thinkers” never read Seneca? It took three attempts on the day the Roman philosopher was forced to kill himself – he sliced open his veins, which didn’t work, then swallowed some hemlock, which didn’t work, then collapsed bleeding into a steaming bath, which finally did the trick. Seneca, though, took it all in his stride. He’d spent a lifetime training his mind to think negatively. Leaping from bed in the morning, he’d consider all the things that could go wrong and then – as the day went on – be pleasantly surprised by how well things turned out. And if they didn’t turn out well, at least he had the satisfaction of having predicted the unfortunate outcome.
Certainly, on that day of his death, he must have been really happy: “I just knew today would turn out to be a stinker.”
Is our central problem that we ask too little of ourselves or that we demand too much? To me, the answer is obvious. So I’d like to propose a toast – a toast to failure, or at least to an acceptance of our various imperfections. It might even involve a glass of shiraz, whatever the experts say, and I wonder if you’d also join me in a cheese board?
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