One Red Hot Country Mama!

Interesting post today on Everyday Wonderland called 5 Ideas for Stressful Living. It is based on the idea that many of us choose to live our lives in ways that are painful for us. Although I find this idea oversimplifying and cynical of the human motive to do things it is funny and makes me think.

As the first stress-inducing tip, the author suggests trying to control everything, including other people:

Try to control other people; both what they do, and also what they
think. The reason why this is so effective is that we can easily
perceive other people to be difficult, incompetent, and unreliable,
which gives us plenty of reasons why we need to control everything
ourselves. The stress factor here lies in the fact that trying
to control other people is much like herding cats; requires enormous
effort, and you know deep down that it’s futile and ridiculous to even
attempt.

This makes me laugh because of all of the stressed out bad managers I have encountered in my career who have tried to control people rather than trying to get the best out of them. A recipe for stress for themselves and everyone else!

The third tip is to look for satisfaction "out there":

Most people look almost exclusively to external things and circumstances for their satisfaction, instead of looking within.
And apart from being an important factor in the perpetuation of stress,
it is also what mainly drives the mechanics of western society. It’s
the reason why people spend most of their time
working for the purpose of accumulating more things, and then their
free time on trying hard to extract as much satisfaction as possible
from these things in order to justify the means of attaining them.
To be caught in this upward spiral of more and more work for more and
more sensory satisfaction is what characterizes the affluent parts of
our culture, and the potential for stress on this path is endless,
simply because more is never enough. Never has been, never will be.

I think this is a very good summary – especially the part about collecting things and then trying to extract joy. It is kind of striving for happiness by proxy instead of experiencing it directly. Why not deal direct?

The last tip is to "be more to have more":

At the core, all of the above ideas can be summed up in a single method: simply convince yourself that you need more than you have at any given moment, and you will be able to maintain a steady feeling of anxiety throughout the day.

Never being contented is something that runs in my family – but it is definitely not a great way to run a life and we all admit it. It is hard to strive at the same time as being content I suppose. Nice to see some creative work going on in the blogs.