Stress and glitches

This is about how we go through life trying to alleviate stress. Sounds like a modern facebook post by a page that wants to provide life-hacks to the people browsing news feed. I guess stress is a common enemy these days. Everyone seems to be on the right track with many things: greener environment, more equality on several levels, healthier bodies and also about enjoying life more. When i say people i include myself as well as everything i write here is my own perspective and hence subjective. Why is stress such an issue? Watching Don Draper from Mad Men contemplating his life and his decisions in a skyscraper apartment, being drunk while drinking whisky and smoking a cigarette I can’t stop and think of why do some people suffer so much? Why do some real people get to put their lives in such a disorder while spending the rest of their lives trying to bring it back in order? Why don’t we get things right from the get-go? It seems like we are wild animals thrown in a new jungle and we are having a hard time to adjust and it seems we are out of place. Like we designed our life’s environment for ourselves but we can’t fit in there. How are people so bad in doing what is healthy for them, in every way? I think it’s because we missed going through some basics in the process of reaching our ‘ideal self’. We missed going through the basics that make us happy: relationships, needs and fulfilment. I guess it is true that people are naturally drawn to challenges and puzzles, we are restless either because we are wired that way or because we choose to be flooded daily with information that doesn’t help us to focus, to calm down and think in simpler terms. That’s why we have to prioritise, to be less thinkers and more doers, so much to think and so much to do but for some, including myself, so much easier to do the former just by reacting to various stimuli we expose ourselves to, every single day. Why all this confusion? Why does this post approach the problem of confusion-generated stress through even more confusing questions? I guess being a person within modern societies one is naturally confused in the path of finding ‘the truth’, ‘oneself’ or happiness. Calmness inducing activities that bring you closer to a simpler, less confused self such as meditating, travelling or being exposed to nature tend to reduce the confusion. As a software programmer tries to find what doesn’t work in his line of coding, or tries to find a simpler way to achieve B from A, thinking about the way people think allows me to use an analogy for a biological glitch, a confusion within our brains. Focussing too much on the problem sometimes turns to be inefficient and a waste of energy. The glitch doesn’t go away by doing more of that necessarily. It is more likely to go away through doing something differently and if you are lucky, with less resources i.e. with less thinking time. A popular saying is, insanity is doing the same thing every time and expecting a different result, and i think it can explain the above in some way or an other. Another pop-philosophical approach suggests that the objective or goal is not as important really as the journey and the experiences within that journey. Being a person who has found great joy from new experiences and literal journeys through travelling, I think journeys are increasingly responsible for facing glitches, either by correcting them or bypassing them. Is a problem you focus on of such great importance? Maybe you are focussing on the wrong problem. Maybe you have more options than you would like to think. Maybe multiple options create more obstacles than they would encourage moving ahead. Regardless of more and more confusing thoughts, I think it’s important we do things that makes us come closer to a simpler self either that is travelling or in general experiencing something new, in order to eliminate or to certainly be aware of our own glitches so that we feel in control and reduce the stress in our lives. I think it’s a solid solution to what we can do before we can gain the maturity and wisdom of old age when glitches and confusion will be things of the past, strange little puzzles that stand between us and our honest self, giving us a hard time and not allowing us to see what the problem really is. Until then, let’s be simple, let’s think in a more ‘tidy’ manner, one step at a time.