Thought That Came Unbidden

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Viet Nam War lately. Probably because for my birthday I bought myself a boxed set on DVD of China Beach, possibly one of the finest pieces of network television ever made.

If you missed the show in its brief run between 1988 and 1991, it follows a cast of characters around China Beach, a real location near Da Nang for troops to catch some rest and relaxation to which the show’s creators added the 510th Evacuation Hospital and Graves Registration Unit.

One of the structures the show rests on as you get to know the characters – a numbed out, shut down nurse from Kansas, a burned out Marine acting as life guard and chief entertainment provider, an arrogant doctor, and a female entrepreneur willing to engage in the world’s oldest transaction if she must – is the idea that there is Viet Nam (in-country) and there is the world, which was often stricly defined as “the United States.” Turns out it was a little more complicated than that.

This concept plays out in every non-fiction book I’ve read about the war, and I’d read more than I have fingers of which I have the usual number, and I took the time a while back to ask my uncle M. about his experiences as a Marine in-country from 1967 to 1968 in a mechanized platoon.

The basic idea is what happens in-country is separate from the world so what happens in-country doesn’t matter. Some people used it as an excuse to be horrible human beings but for most, I suspect, it was a way of dissociating, of pretending the experience was happening to and around someone else. Thinking it through, this may be why 30% of Viet Nam veterans have PTSD diagnoses compared to lower numbers from other military engagements post-World War II according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

And dissociating is what most of us have been doing lately, and will probably continue to do for the next couple of years or until this fucking pandemic finally gets under control, only we’ve been doing it with binge watching Netflix and refusing to put on pants that don’t have a stretchy waistband instead of getting hooked on heroin. The problem is, dissociating isn’t really going to work for us the way it “worked” for troops in Viet Nam.

They had the advantage of a hard dividing line: in-country, with the atrocities of combat, the constant fear of death, the physical discomfort, and the ordinary struggles of being forced to be in close proximity to people you didn’t choose, or the world where everything was clean and shiny and death, both physical and of the soul, didn’t lurk around every corner. According to my uncle, even R&R in Thailand away from the combat theater wasn’t “the world” because it was still Asia, exotic and far from home.

It’s not going to work for us because the horror – climate change, fractious politics, the pandemic, school shootings, racism, rape culture and rampant misogyny to name a few things – has been going on so long we’ve lost our ability to flatten and divide it into small enough pieces to cope with.

And is it any wonder? Nadia Boltz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor, author, and bit of a badass, wrote beautifully recently about why we are unable to cope over time: we just aren’t made for it, in a literal, biological way.

It also doesn’t help that corporate America is gaslighting us, turning real psychological problems from all of the things we face in the modern era into the equivalent of “she was asking for it because she wore a short skirt.”

Even worse, they’re marketing the solution to the burnout created by late-stage corporate oligarchy pretending to be capitalism back to us as the self-care industrial complex (available mostly to white women at every outlet near you).

Dissociating isn’t going to help us. Unlike the GIs in Viet Nam, the world is the same as being in the shit.

I started 2021 with six habit tracker programs installed on my phone. Not from any obsessiveness, because I discovered something interesting about myself last year: I’m one of those people who is motivated by continuity.

Like a stereotypical urbanite creative, I started meditating recently. To my credit, I actually started before “these trying times” way back in August 2019. And while I was inconsistent in my practice, I did it enough to get a taste. What I didn’t realize is that for me, someone prone to anxiety, it actually does what all those patchouli doused hippies claim meditation does.

It calms me down.

On days when I don’t get my morning routine – which consists of morning pages (thank you, Julia Cameron) and 10 minutes of meditation – I’m like an over wound toy. Jangling nerves and snappish replies, followed by the inevitable guilt and shame which just winds me up even more. In a year when nothing worked right, this actually did.

And the app I’m using, the orange dot one, taps brilliantly into two aspects of human psychology: streak theory (or the theory of sunk costs) and nudge theory.

Streak theory powers every frequent buyer reward program in existence. For continued action – such as buying a certain number of sandwiches – someone gets a small reward. In sophisticated programs, or in certain educational settings, longer streaks earn rarer rewards. Keeping a streak going taps into our desire to make our sunk costs, the money or effort we’ve already put into something, be worthwhile.

Nudge theory, for which Richard Thaler won a Nobel prize in economics in 2017, is a concept that says that subtle shifts in policy are more effective at getting people to make decisions that are broadly beneficial for their lives. Digital apps leverage nudge theory by pinging you several times a day with light touch, often humorous reminders to buy that sandwich or do that meditation session.

In the digital realm, apps use these pings, or nudges, to leverage your working memory. Miller’s Law tells us that the human working memory can hold 7 plus or minus 2 things on average, unless something comes along to push it out of your mind, you’re probably going to do that session, or get that sandwich from that place when it comes time for lunch.

Streak theory and using nudge theory in this way both have a dark side, though. Keeping a streak going can be a form of addiction. It can also lead to paying for things you don’t really need.

There is also a school of thought that says streaks alone, which are neutral, aren’t effective at forming habits. To form habits, we need behaviors to become ingrained. They need to be things we do without thinking about them.

This is where the habit trackers come in. It isn’t simply a matter of getting that badge or seeing that graph add one more point for my completed activity. I also need the reminders. I need to use the addictive, distracting nature of cell phones to my advantage.

If I’m going to look at the thing, it needs to serve me in developing better habits.

The other thing I’m doing is off-loading responsibility to the application for making the decision to spend time on something.

If I’ve got the app nudging me to do morning pages, do my meditation, drink enough water, and take my vitamins then hey, I’m just responding to this thing. It’s not really me making the decision to spend the time on those tasks instead of having back-to-back meetings and working an average of 4 extra hours a week.

There is too much noise in the world. Too many news stories, sales, random email lists we can’t remember subscribing to, and apps demand our attention constantly. And I’m just talking about grabs that come from engaging with your computer, be it desktop or laptop.

As recently as 6 years ago, people were doing research to discover just how your cell phone can distract you. The answer is: just by being in the room (2014, 2017, 2018). The mere presence of the device, even if it is out of sight, draws part of your mental attention creating Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).

I’m betting you can feel that itch along your palm as you unconsciously reach for your own phone right now, if you aren’t already holding it as you read this.

Attention is something I have very little to spare right now, and I haven’t quite figured out why. I’m fairly certain it’s due to some fucked up internal coping mechanism that tells me as long as I’m busy I’m controlling my environment, and if I’m controlling my environment I can’t get hurt. My anxiety is a tad transparent these days.

But because I’m working hours ridiculous enough that I’m rolling into the last two weeks I will work this year with almost four full days of uncompensated overtime, dealing with personal administrative crap when I’m not working hasn’t been a high priority.

The shift to e-bills at the beginning of the pandemic fed my anxiety something fierce. My blue collar roots take pride in always being able to pay something and to do it on time. The prospect of missing a bill led me to activate the Updates tab in Gmail.

Huge mistake. Massive.

It went okay for the first couple of weeks as Gmail learned based on what ever algorithym the bro who programmed it determined. And then shit went off the rails.

Bill notifications started going to promotions. Stuff from my mother started going to updates. Nothing was where I expected it to be. I told myself for months it was manageable. It manifestly wasn’t.

About a month ago I killed the Updates tab by moving everything into my inbox. Now everything that’s 90% relevant is in one place.

Every.thing.

Today I’m declaring digital bankruptcy. I’ve done a cursory pass through the 1,500+ emails in my inbox to try to find things I might actually need. And now that I have, everything is going into archives on the theory that if I handle things as they come in I can reduce the amount of noise.

Let’s hope this works.