I get confused. Fine. Things happen that are weird, surprising, stressful and bewildering.
But then I become attached to the possibility of working it all out. And that desire, that attachment, gets me stuck. It is the desire to find that explanation (to learn! understand! comprehend! control!), rather than the event itself, that keeps me confused.
But I go through periods when I check my phone a lot, and I really really want to know why.
*
There was such a period recently, when my phone-checking occurred more regularly and with more anxiety than normal. I would wake up, roll over and check my phone. I had a break in the work I was doing... so I'd check my phone. At lunch… I checked my phone. Before dinner. After dinner. Before bed. I slid my finger across the touch-screen and focused on the little spinning graphic, the number above my Inbox, or the red tabs at the top of my Facebook page. Brain running: has anyone sent me an email, or a message? Has someone posted something interesting on Facebook? Started a job, joined a cause, started or ended a relationship, run a marathon, lost a job, found a different job, been on holiday, got drunk, seen a cat do something funny or taken a photo? In the middle of the night, when I check to see what time it is, I think, “It’s probably a reasonable hour in Germany, or the UK, or the US…” so I do it again. I check for messages and end up reading about how good the weather is in Oregon, thinking about donating to help find a cure for Alzheimer's, or scanning through photos of awesome tree houses.
This has happened before. Both the feeling of anxiety - a kind of existential unease that makes my stomach tense and my head race - and the strange hold my phone currently has over me are vaguely familiar. I would hesitate to say I’m addicted, but it would have to be close.
But the answer to why I check my phone so often is simple: because the answer is in there!
I may not know the question, but I am convinced that the answer will come to me via my phone. I have to be anxiously alert at all times in case it scrolls past. What happens if I miss it?!
The other day someone said: “This generation is different: the first thing they touch in the morning is their phones!” I think this was from an ad for Modern Family, and the insinuation was that the first thing previous generations touched in the morning was themselves, specifically: their penises.
But the point is that maybe it is widespread, this belief that the phone will tell me/us something I/we need to know. But what? What is this question that my phone is going to answer? And how?
*
A long time ago I attended a very brief theatre workshop. In it, the facilitator told a funny story about an actor, in a serious play, performing a serious show. The thing was, the theatre they were performing in was very run down. The floorboards on the stage creaked. The seats were shabby. The carpet was worn. The lights were hanging on by threads of rat-eaten cable. But the show, as of course it must, went on. At some point in the show one of the actors took a normal step across the stage and the floorboard beneath him gave way. One leg disappeared down the hole; the other slid out behind him until he was left with one leg scratched bloody and his groin crushed against the splintered wooden floor.
The rest of the cast and the audience gasped, then there was a long moment of frozen silence.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just a stage I’m going through.”
*
Erik Erikson was a student of Sigmund Freud’s. He proposed that, as people grow, we go through eight stages of development. During each stage we are challenged to resolve a particular question about ourselves and the world.
Erikson arranged his eight stages chronologically. The ages are not fixed. They are just rough guides to which questions we are most concerned (worried, anxious, confused) about at that time.
Can I Trust The World? (0-2 years)| Virtues | Psycho Social Crisis | Significant Relationship | Examples |
| Hope | Basic Trust vs. Mistrust | Mother | Feeding, abandonment |
| Virtues | Psycho Social Crisis | Significant Relationship | Examples |
| Will | Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt | Parents | Toilet training, clothing themselves |
| Virtues | Psycho Social Crisis | Significant Relationship | Examples |
| Purpose | Initiative vs. Guilt | Family | Exploring, using tools or making art |
| Virtues | Psycho Social Crisis | Significant Relationship | Examples |
| Competence | Industry vs. Inferiority | Neighbours, school | School, sports |
| Virtues | Psycho Social Crisis | Significant Relationship | Examples |
| Fidelity | Identity vs. Role Confusion | Peers, role models | Social relationships |
| Virtues | Psycho Social Crisis | Significant Relationship | Examples |
| Love | Intimacy vs. Isolation | Friends, partners | Romantic relationships |
| Virtues | Psycho Social Crisis | Significant Relationship | Examples |
| Care | Generativity vs. Stagnation | Household, workmates | Work, parenthood |
| Virtues | Psycho Social Crisis | Significant Relationship | Examples |
| Wisdom | Ego Integrity vs. Despair | Mankind, my kind | Reflection on life |
*
Occasionally, it becomes obvious I’m embarrassed about checking my phone. When I’m around other people I feel myself try to glance at it casually, kidding myself that it looks as if I’m just checking the time. (This is made very clear when I put the phone away and then realise I may have checked for texts, messages, likes and emails... but I still don’t know what time it is.) Sometimes, when I’m alone, scanning through my emails, but hear someone coming, I chuck the phone, grab my book and wonder if whoever it is will telepathically sense my shame (or ask me something about what I’ve been reading).
I remind myself of the fourteen-year-olds in my Environmental Sustainability classes trying to ALT-TAB from their chat-screens to the rough draft of their essay without looking guilty. Other times I act like the best form of defence is attack: I keep reading but point out particular posts or articles about diet and nutrition or the campaign to get a Chinese author released from prison or the fact that the European Union won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. My subtext is clear (and embarrassingly loud): Don’t judge me; I just might be saving the lives of child soldiers in Africa or protecting the rights of women in Afghanistan.
(The Arab Spring, The Occupy movement... These days being on your mobile can be such a noble activity.)
Maybe all this shame just comes from the fact I’m still part of the generation who thinks it’s antisocial and plain rude to even look at my phone while in someone else’s company. But this explanation seems a little off, a little superficial, during those periods when
- I wake up from a night of weird dreams confused about what I’m doing with my life, and
- the first thing I do is check my phone to see if someone has emailed me the answer or posted a photo of it on Facebook.
The shame I feel is heightened, I think, by the fact that I feel like a child again: suddenly swamped by questions and confusion about whether or not I really got through stage two (Is it okay to be me?), or properly answered question four (Can I make it in the world of people and things?). These dilemmas appear to me to be tests about whether or not I’m okay: tests I might have already failed and need to re-sit. It’s embarrassing suddenly finding myself looking in teenage places for answers to teenage questions. Shamefully remedial.
If I look at Erikson’s ladder I should clearly be at stage seven by now. Damn.
*
"Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was once small. A sense of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably. His triumphs will be measured against this smallness, his defeats will substantiate it."
Erik H. Erikson (1902–1994), Childhood and Society, ch. 11 (1950).
*
I’ve re-written this post four or five times now. Each time, I got to about this point and then followed a different theoretical thread. (And there were a lot of threads! More and more layers of clever explanation!)*
Each time, I thought I was following a different branch of inquiry into the many root causes for my behaviour. I thought I was digging down, uncovering stuff, and shining a light on it. I felt hopeful that learning and sharing all this “stuff” was going to be useful. It was going to make reading this article useful and encourage people to read something else I’d written and go on to download Metta.magazine. I felt happy and a bit proud of myself, but each time I ended up retreating, rewriting, knowing that I still felt a bit uncomfortable and dissatisfied. Something didn’t quite fit. I had a sense that I wasn’t describing my experience: that I was, instead, describing a plastic model of my experience, a version, a simulacra. Somehow I was missing the point. Then something interesting happened.
I stopped being anxious about checking my phone.
Yes, I had gotten in touch with a few friends and heard back from them, which made me feel less like I had disappeared off the edge of the world. (It seems that, mentally, I live in a flat world and do a lot of sailing in tall wooden ships, so the idea of sailing off the edge of the table is one that has repeatedly caused me to feel anxious). But this wasn’t the “cure”. It was actually just before that that I relaxed. It was subtle and magical, like waking up from a great night’s sleep and suddenly just feeling better.
The only explanation I have for it is chemical. It seems that some biological process of hormone-release (or whatever) operating below my level of consciousness (and perhaps in concert with all the other explanations I worked through) kicked in, changed the chemistry in my brain, and as a result I stopped feeling so anxious.
But even that is an explanation - a theory. It may be a far better and more useful explanation than saying that the moon shifted into a new phase or that a black cat walked backwards under a ladder, but still: the only thing that actually happened was my experience: I was anxious; I checked my phone a lot; then I wasn’t.
In fact, I was never confused about why I was checking my phone so often: I was anxious; I felt like it. That information was clearly and freely available.
What I was confused about was not the experience itself but how to explain it. (And my explanation included Erikson’s, Crisp’s, Coyle’s, Syed’s, Gladwell’s, Medina’s… that woman from the TED talk about shame and guilt whose name I can’t remember… the person who wrote that text book on motivation… all of them!)
*
So, of the 10 ways I have been confused, #2 is simply by trying to explain an experience. Erikson says that confusion arises naturally throughout life. Anxieties come and go; crises rise up and fall away; but confusion stays with me as long as I hold onto it, probe it, poke it, seek to dissect and understand it. When I let it go it goes.
There’s a perfectly good reason to try to understand and explain things. If I have a good explanation then if, or when, they happen again I’ll know what to do. Learning comes from this process of experiencing, observing, explaining, applying and reviewing. In education circles this is called The Experiential Learning Cycle. I’m a huge fan. (Learning = growth = increased mastery of myself and my surroundings. I can drive better, hit a tennis ball harder, make tastier dinners, be smarter.)
But…
My experience was this: when I let it go it went. When I stopped trying to explain what had happened there stopped being as much to explain.
Learning is future-oriented. It’s only useful if the experience is going to come back again. In the field of science that can be hugely beneficial, but in the field of my own experience I doubt how useful it is. Who am I to predict the future? Why would I choose to constrain the possible futures I am willing to embrace? Maybe I will never be anxious again? Maybe I will never check my phone again? That’s one reason not to do it.
The attempt to explain my way through my confusion actually held me in its web; it stuck to me; it held on for dear life as if my confusion was actually my way of staying connected to my entire personal history and bringing it in coded form into the present and onwards into the future. I seemed to be packing it up, even, and sending it forward to wait for me, ready to be unpacked the next time I get anxious and start to check my phone too often. It seemed that my confusion, which is my past, had a life and that if I let go of it it would die. And killing something felt, to me, essentially cruel, regardless of what it is: a thing, a person, an emotional experience, a history.
The process I would normally think of as “learning” - the formation of a neat, useful explanation for why things happened - stopped me from letting go of the past. It prevented me from moving as easily into the place and time where I am not necessarily defined by anything that has happened before. It kept me digging, uncovering more and more ways to understand and explain my anxiety, but also creating more and more confusion over why I was spending so much time underground seeking to understand something that wasn’t actually my experience anyway.
But even this is all just another explanation!
*
I woke up one morning and was less anxious.
Sorry if that’s not much of an explanation, but that’s what happened, and how it was for me.
Erikson theoretical model is one of psycho-social development, so the questions it poses have internal and external elements. Am I okay? or Am I successful? are questions that can be answered either way.
In another version I went on to write about theoretical models of shame and guilt. One is based on the idea that we feel shame about any activity that might lead to us being excluded. That idea is built on the notion that our greatest desire is to belong, or at least to feel as if we belong. The other is based on the notion that anyone with a “fixed mindset” (i.e. they believe that people are born with a fixed set of attributes or talents - you either have it or you don’t) will tend to feel more shame, and to lie more, than someone who thinks that people grow and change (i.e. has a “growth mindset”).
In another version I described a model of memory that drew on quantum physics and brain science. Quantum physics has a notion of “super-position”, which is the idea that an object is everywhere at once until the observer looks at it. In my memory I can be everything from the child who was abandoned by his mum, hasn’t been properly toilet trained, can’t dress himself, is afraid to try anything, sucked at school, doesn’t have any friends, can’t get a girlfriend, won’t ever get a real job or become a parent and, if he lives that long, will be a bitter, sad old man, sitting on his own bitching about what a waste his life was or dreaming pointlessly about how good it could have been if only… all the way through to the kid who has got all of Erikson’s questions “right”: who is hopeful, confident, purposeful, energetic, competent, social, trustworthy, authentic… and has grown up to be loving, caring, wise and content. Who as a baby felt safe and was encouraged to explore and, as expected, went on to do well at school - both socially and academically. He was good at sport and developed a sense of humility as well as confidence and integrity, traits which helped him get a good job and a loving partner. I am simultaneously both of these and every other possible version in between until I turn around and look. It’s at that moment, and not before, that I become one version, one story. Brain science confirms that this is how memory works. It is not a file retrieval system, but rather a subjective process of re-imagining, re-creating, re-membering, each time the memory is recalled. The end result is that it is possible for me to have periods when I turn around and suddenly find that I am looking at a particular version of me - that is, when I am a particular version of me - that I don’t like.
In still another version I looked at the idea of automaticity, belief, the process of learning and those disastrous episodes of unlearning known as “choking”. When something is learned and practiced so well and deeply that it becomes automatic, it moves into a different part of the brain. It shifts from the explicit system to the implicit system. We become able to perform the task without consciously thinking about it. When it comes to driving a car or hitting a golf ball this is very useful, because it gives us more mental space and time to focus on other things, like what other drivers are doing. It’s also useful because the patterns of movement are so complex that it is only when they are automatic that they can become really fluid and graceful; the decisions and movements are too numerous and complex to be able to perform effectively if we have to consciously think about each step. When it comes to belief systems, like the belief that it’s okay for me to trust, the more automatic or deeply unconscious the response the more fluid, graceful, generous, real and reliable it feels.
When a golfer chokes - when someone who was once able to perform an action with sublime skill and grace suddenly looks awkward and can’t hit the ball or move his body in ways we all know he can - then what has happened is simply that he has become conscious of what he is doing. A movement pattern that was once one seamless action stored deep in his implicit memory is now being processed step by laborious step in his explicit memory. The result is ugly.
So when my belief that it is okay to trust is suddenly shaken, it can be rattled out of the implicit system and suddenly I find myself clunking my way awkwardly, unattractively, through the process of thinking about each moment, each opportunity to trust or not trust. Or perhaps I’m wondering if it’s okay to be me, or if I can make it in the world of people and things, or if I can love, or if I can make my life count.
Thinking about those things doesn’t make them easier to perform, in the same way that thinking about driving doesn’t make it easier to drive.
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