What grinds our gears…

People telling me about stuff that pisses them off seems to be  getting worse – both in frequency and level. Whether it’s worthy for historical comparison is open for wild debate, but Mallowpuffs are absolutely not what they once were! Yet we also don’t don armour to battle the ‘rabbit’s ears’ atop those monolithic screened boxes once sitting in most western world living rooms. Contextually, of course, comparisons are tricky and could have us ranting here till Christmas. But what are the top three things in our everyday life today, which piss us off the most? Number One: Bad driving.…

People telling me about stuff that pisses them off seems to be  getting worse – both in frequency and level. Whether it’s worthy for historical comparison is open for wild debate, but Mallowpuffs are absolutely not what they once were! Yet we also don’t don armour to battle the ‘rabbit’s ears’ atop those monolithic screened boxes once sitting in most western world living rooms. Contextually, of course, comparisons are tricky and could have us ranting here till Christmas. But what are the top three things in our everyday life today, which piss us off the most?

Number One: Bad driving. More specifically, slow drivers, or more accurate again, those old mates having gained their driver licenses on the moon, and now navigating (trundling) these huge white ‘crypts on wheels’ across and through craters all the way to the horizon.

Number Two: Customer service. Or, more precisely, crap customer service. Or more accurately, the banks and insurance companies’ phone support; “Thank you for your call, it’s important to us, I’m Jane your helpful chat bot. For best directing your query, please say clearly the nature of your call by using one of the following phrases….blah blah…” or “You are the next in line, your call is so important, we’ll record it for training purposes”.

Number Three: Mainstream media, or more specifically, the dreary and triggering six-o’clock news. Hoards now admit they find the ‘news’ so bad they’ve given it away, while others  suffer the start in case the sky really is falling, though yielding immediately “Christopher Luxon has…” or “Business confidence sits…”.

Coming in as mentionable fourth place, is tech frustration…software updates, printers that don’t, things that once worked now not, and of course bouncing back to two, not just poor but negative help on real problems.

We also get pissed off about other stuff too. So what’s the point here? Well, there are simple and clean explanations – one by design to deliberately piss us off – for which understanding can help in our everyday lives. We go into more detail on our YouTube channel (#nohooks #keepitreel), but it’s lots to do with our reactions and responses of and to being pissed off, which, actually piss us off more. Put simply, here’s why we get pissed off in the first place.

In our distant past we learned (like all other animals on the planet) being negative was critical to survive. This was and remains our first line of defence in managing physical risks, in a world where we hung out mostly being chased around by things that wanted to eat us, like cave bears and sabre-toothed tigers. Our immediate (subconscious) responses to all environmental events (inputs) have us immediately gravitating to negative. That’s how nature works.

But this is not how our daily lives work today. Our subconscious though finds it tough to see a difference from a life-threatening flesh-eating spider to that of a “CORRUPTED FILE”.

We respond to far too many inputs as being of a physical risk in nature – and lean on either fighting, freezing or flighting (our first line responders) unless we tell (and train ourselves) that things are actually ok – in a physical sense. There’s a bit more.

We hesitate and sometimes refuse to use our social skills in a space for which helps us re-categorise these ‘life threatening’ risks’.  As such, something as simple as shrugging off those triggering news items as nothing worthy of our time can do the trick. Instead, though many of us end up yelling and cursing at the phone or TV, and which raise our adrenaline levels (and other subconscious responses) into a vicious cycle.  We should, however, learn to let the first emergency crews (sirens already screaming and lights blazing and about to leave the station) know that they can stand down. Problem is not everyone wants us to do this. Partners in arguments, violent offenders, school children (and parents at weekend sports) and many modern media news platforms would rather have us in our physical response mode – or as we like to refer it at the top of their Resilience Pyramid.

Why would they do this? Because at that state at the top of the pyramid we are likely to pay more attention, remember things for longer, and think of things being truer. This is true. Once we learn this, these deliberate efforts are easy to spot, and then we can move down our pyramid, or lower the water level (back down our pyramid) into social mode. Think about that. We STOP (think) we DROP (pause) and ROLL (with the punches!) using our social skills – more expanded as the diagram below… Think of your conscious self as sitting in a boat above the water line, and your subconscious self (your sub) is below the waterline. We lower our tide to use awesome social skills lurking in the depths – BUT only on those matters we choose to have sit in our wheelhouse and the things we decide we need to take care of.

And here’s the gravy stroke – our social skills are the single most important trait we humans developed to survive as a species – developed at its core hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago. Disastrously it would seem it’s only in the last few generations this trait is becoming regarded less and less important, often in the name of efficiency and profitability. Just consider how many in a busy shopping mall make eye contact with you while on their devices – when texting and only head raising to avoid accidents with others (mostly) doing the same thing.

Our social skills (as simple as listening or shaking one’s head) separate us from all other species on the planet and are understood rest at the feet of the gritty, determined survivors of the last global cataclysm. That’s you, and me.

Let’s use our social skills as often as we can!