If I have one pet-peeve, it’s meddlesome people.
If I have two pet peeves, it’s people with misplaced priorities.
If I have three pet peeves, it’s that too many people fit the above descriptions.
If humanity has one problem that goes opposite directions, it’s that people care too much about things that don’t matter, and they care too little about things that do matter.
Too many people care about how other people fill the dishwasher, what other people wear, what kind of movies other people haven’t seen, drag queen story time, whether their kids are gay, or Ben Shapiro’s opinions about movies.
Too few people care about climate change, race relations, poverty, vaccine misinformation, social collapse, cyber-attacks, solar flares, our shitty two-party political system, fungal pandemics, or human trafficking.
Why? Why do you care about such futile things? Why is your attention so fixated on the micro?
It’s the little things…
I think some people feel so powerless and out of control of the events of their lives, they’ll grasp for control anywhere they can get it. They feel like they can’t control the weather, and they’re sick of hearing about it, but they think they can complain about your driving enough that you’ll magically change your behavior and that makes them feel like they still have influence.
I think maybe people really do care about all of the above things, for a brief moment, before deciding it’s way too much for them to stress out about, and they rush to find some smaller, more manageable problem in their lives that they can complain about, obsess over, dominate, and ultimately control.
It makes them feel like maybe the world isn’t falling apart. “Maybe if I yell at this barista or nag my spouse or argue with this person on Facebook, I can be the master of my immediate surroundings. If my little world is under my rule, I don’t have to think about the outer world.”
The problem, of course, is that very few things in our lives are within the bounds of our control, at all. In fact, if you stepped back and made a list of everything within your control, it’s almost hilarious how lopsided that list would be. You control your words and your actions. That’s pretty much it. Even your thoughts and emotions aren’t really that much within your control. Those are things that happen to you that you then have to process and organize (processing and organizing both being actions as responses).
The rest of life is partially or completely out of your hands. You don’t control other people’s words or actions, natural disasters, the weather, gravity, solar winds, dark matter, black holes, asteroids, or time.
You might be freaking out, but I need you to stay calm. Once you take a deep breath, this information should ultimately make you feel at peace. Realizing how little you control should make you feel empowered. It makes you feel empowered to stop wasting energy on things over which you have no influence, and to focus your energy on the things over which you do have influence.
I’ve been into Stoic philosophy lately, so here’s a couple of quotes:
“You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.” - Epictetus, The Enchiridion
This is also the idea behind the Serenity Prayer (at least the parts relating to radical acceptance, this essay is not about the religious aspects). Christians (and recovering addicts, for whom this is a large pillar) know that prayer is:
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will; so that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with You forever in the next.”
When I do something, and you don’t understand it, you don’t have to say anything. You can ask me to stop, but if I don’t, what next? You need to learn to live with it or remove yourself from the situation. You could explain your reasoning to me, try to convince me of your point of view. But if I’m not hurting you, then you need to let it go or let me go. If my actions result in your having feelings that are difficult for you to ignore, you need to examine why you’re having those feelings.
Parents do this with their kids a lot. Parents have a lot of opinions about things their kids do that frankly is none of their business. Yes, you should parent your kids, but leave them alone if they want to wear a funny hat or talk in a British accent. Yes, expose your kids to a variety of activities and hobbies, but if they don’t want to play baseball, don’t force them to play baseball. Yes, your kids need to respect and obey you, but it’s your job to behave in a way that earns respect and to give them guidance that is in their best interests, not yours. If you have opinions about their opinions, you need to ask yourself why that is, because if you spend their lives trying to make them have your feelings, while ignoring theirs, they’re going to realize one day that you don’t care that much about what they think and they’ll resent you.
Holy crap, how do I stop this toxic behavior?
Otherwise Known As:
“The Wisdom to Know the Difference”
There’s a really great book called “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck” by Mark Manson. The book is a no-bullshit version of self-help, supported by sound psychology, about how best to identify the things in life that you should be concerned about and the things you should not be giving your attention to at all.
The philosophy behind the book isn’t “I’m not giving a fuck anymore, life is meaningless”, it’s “I’m not going to give a fuck that my neighbor cuts his grass with scissors and has clothes like a dickhead, that’s really none of my concern, but instead I’m going to volunteer more of my time at the homeless shelter and start getting involved in my community to solve the homelessness problem because I’m very passionate about this issue.” It’s about self-examination and deciding what actually matters to you.
You’re supposed to care about some things. But the Internet, social media, 24-hour breaking news, retweets, toxic politics, cancel culture, moral panic, and plain-old human pettiness have convinced us that we should care about EVERYTHING. Our dumb caveman brains are not built for that large of a sphere of influence or care. We cannot possibly sustain a life of paying attention to every injustice in every country, community, social class, and level of injury without going bonkers in the head, as evidenced by our society being largely bonkers in the head right now. We need to reset and take stock of the things that we can actually influence.
Begin with yourself, at home, and then extend that circle outwards to your family and community. After you’ve got your house in order, then see what you can do for your larger circle and their issues. It’s a more manageable load to focus on causes that you really care about and take the practical steps to contribute.
When it comes to other people’s actions, when do those actions affect you and when don’t they? When do you need to take action by speaking up and voicing your concerns for the right reasons? When would you be better off ignoring it and thinking about something else, knowing your response is not a solution?
The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a healthy perspective on unwanted mental clutter. She wrote in a New York Times article about some advice she once was given in regards to marriage, a quote that I’ve found to be very interesting:
"Another often-asked question when I speak in public: ‘Do you have some good advice you might share with us?’ Yes, I do. It comes from my savvy mother-in-law, advice she gave me on my wedding day. ‘In every good marriage,’ she counseled, ‘it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.’
I have followed that advice assiduously, and not only at home through 56 years of a marital partnership nonpareil. I have employed it as well in every workplace, including the Supreme Court.
When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one's ability to persuade."
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for the New York Times
It means sometimes you just have to pretend someone wasn’t just super fucking rude right to your face. That person might be trying to provoke you, drag you into the mud with them, because their only way of solving conflict is to sully you and make you appear less righteous in the process. This is a great skill to put to use in marital conflicts or in casual disagreements with peers or strangers. Annihilating someone at the first sign of discord isn’t usually the best course of action, or a responsible use of your intelligence, if you want to keep that person around. If you don’t, it might be best to let your true feelings come out. Then again, sometimes full disclosure is needed in order to set proper boundaries and expectations with those who are sticking around, if the relationship is to be a healthy one.
It’s the big things, though, too…
There’s also a time and a place to care, to take action, because something does indeed affect you and even if it doesn’t, it may affect people who don’t have the power to change it, but perhaps you do. That’s where the “why” becomes important.
I spoke earlier about individuals grasping for control. That’s something large corporations do, too. Corporations are afraid of pissing off shareholders and sponsors, and therefore are very focused on risk-averse business practices in order to have the best chance at making the most profit possible, right now, before a new thing comes along that forces them to pivot and do it again.
Now, that’s something I’m surprised more people don’t care about.
“Why should I care about this big thing that’s happening to someone else, Conner? Didn’t you just say I should recalibrate my circle of influence? I can’t do anything about wars or labor strikes.”
Right now, there’s still a writer’s strike and an actor’s strike going on (as well as IATSE and Teamsters in solidarity) and I’m appalled that more people don’t care about that. In fact, at the time this piece is published, it will be Day 137 of the WGA Strike and Day 68 of the SAG-AFTRA Strike against the AMPTP. Yeah, maybe you don’t work in the industry, so you think it doesn’t affect you. Yeah, maybe you think movies are trash now, so you think the creatives are getting what they deserve. Maybe you’re an insane person who thinks everyone in “Hollywood” is a pedophile and they all deserve to suffer.
The fact is that the vast majority of WGA and SAG-AFTRA members (writers and actors) are working-class or lower. Many of them don’t make the minimum $41,000 annual pay that makes them eligible for health insurance, so they have to seek it out of pocket and supplement their pay as low-wage workers in other gig work, like delivering groceries or waiting tables.
(SAG members must make $26,470 annually to qualify for health insurance. How many of SAG’s 160,000 members make that much? 12.7%, or a little over 20,000 people, in an entire industry. That means 140,000 performers, 87.3% of actors, are not remotely wealthy, or even middle-class.)
The “Hollywood” you’re picturing is a microscopic percentage of working creative talent in the industry, and those rich folks who are also striking are not complaining about their own lifestyles or their pay, they’re picketing on behalf of their low-wage brethren who are unknown to the public and therefore unknown to media outlets. Those same media outlets, however, know who Bryan Cranston is, and Bob Odenkirk, and Sarah Silverman, and Kevin Bacon, and Amy Adams, and Kerry Washington, and John Goodman. Those outlets will give airtime and coverage to those people. Those people have a platform to lobby for rights and change for the industry of which they are a part.
That is not complaining about one’s lot in life. That’s called effectively leveraged collective action, and labor unions of decades past would have done the same thing if there were world-famous humans among their ranks.
I think this is something worth caring about. Being cavalier and flippant about the livelihoods of tens of thousands of workers who are simply holding the line against corporate greed, that is not the way to respond just because you’re not interested in what they’re creating. You can still vote with your eyeballs and dollars. This isn’t about whether you think there should even be a film industry. This is about whether you think human beings deserve better.
And the thing is, this does affect you. It’s shortsighted to believe that this dynamic couldn’t eventually reach your workplace one day. Large corporations that make billions of dollars from the labor of independent contractors in a profit-obsessed economy WILL ABSOLUTELY exploit those workers to the fullest extent that they can in order to keep their overhead low and their profits high and the only thing stopping them is collective action from those workers and their unions. If you think that only the film industry would do that to its product creators, and not the retail industry, healthcare, hospitality, food service, etc, then I think you’re naive.
It’s not just the WGA or SAG-AFTRA, there’s been other labor strikes this year for similar reasons, including the threat of strike from The United Auto Workers union, as well as UPS’ worker’s union, Spirit AeroSystems, and many other private businesses nationwide. The fact that they feel they have to go on strike because their working conditions suck, that’s a big deal.
There’s a war in Ukraine right now. Is Ukraine far away from here? Yes. Does that mean the situation over there is not a big deal? Fuck no. It’s a huge deal. Those people are fighting and dying to defend their home from an evil prick who is trying to conquer them because he thinks he can. Politics and war conquest theory aside, do we think that’s ok? What if that were us? Wouldn’t we ask for help? At the very least, wouldn’t we hope other people gave a shit about what was happening to us? How would we feel if we knew that the rest of the industrialized world couldn’t care less, simply because it wasn’t happening anywhere near their homes?
The fact is, the war in Ukraine does affect the rest of the world. It affects the price of grain, it affects the price of oil, it affects global trade. But most importantly, it says something about us if we decide that proximity is the measurement of our empathy. In other words: “I only care if it’s making my life, today, worse.” If Russia is allowed to take Ukraine, then other large countries led by similarly questionable figureheads may get the impression that everything is up for grabs, that might makes right, and then it’s game on.
Again, the history of war conquests and moral relativism aside (the concept that “this is what has happened for all of human history”, “the idea that it’s wrong is a man-made construct”, and that “the assumption that modernity has made war conquest disappear is a false one”), I don’t want to live in a world where that is trivialized or allowed to happen out of pure moral laziness.
It’s a big deal that nearly every major candidate for President is a gigantic dipshit. It’s a big deal that our representatives in Congress are having medical episodes and profiting from coincidentally excellent stock trades at the same time that they’re supposed to be in touch with what the average American needs. (Thankfully, there’s finally support to ban this practice.) It’s a big deal that our country is run by a scary machine filled with people who are just looking to move up the ladder and secure their own futures instead of ours as a nation.
It’s a big deal that there’s people out there who think they can treat gay or trans people as sub-human, or who think the 2020 election was stolen, or who think it’s ok to ban books, or who think drag queen story time is a child grooming scheme, or who think that the United States should operate and legislate as a Christian nationalist theocracy, or that it’s ok to remove choice from the medical decisions of human beings.
It’s a big deal that we’re strengthening ties with Vietnam in a world where our relationship with China is getting a little bit dicey and we’re looking to be less economically dependent on them. It’s good for us and it’s good for the world.
These are all much more important than celebrity gossip, tech CEO jerk-off contests, or the goddamn Grimace shake (although, many of those videos were very well done).
There are things in the world that matter.
What can you do to help?
At the very least, you can stop acting like it’s not a big deal, because it is. At the most, call your congressman, become a more informed voter for your state and local elections, stop listening to idiots and sample a more diverse pool of opinions before finally coming to your own conclusions about an issue, be willing to be less dogmatic and listen to other people for once. Don’t open your mouth about a subject unless you know what you’re talking about or are about to ask a question.
This is all my way of saying that there are things that are worth your attention and there are things that are not. I think too many people are giving their energy to things that are none of their business, inconsequential, or completely out of their control. We could accomplish more by giving that bandwidth to better things.
Things that are happening right in front of us aren’t inherently important. Things that are happening far away from us are not inherently unimportant.
Proximity is not the measurement of empathy.