However much we try, we will all be distracted by the US election this week. Even if it’s telling ourselves it doesn’t matter.
I don’t think I have ever been so attached to a political outcome that I do not even get a vote.
Even in the last six weeks, the word “election” was said on 100 earnings calls of S&P 500 companies, the most in that timeframe ever, according to CNBC. (Morning Brew)
But as we often say, “When the US sneezes, Canada catches a cold”, so the outcome has an oversized impact on us and this one could be more than ever before.
I found two pieces of writing by Oliver Burkeman, author of 4,000 Weeks, helpful as I went down the next social media election rabbit hole.
1. This article from his newsletter The Imperfectionist – How not to freak out about the US election.
“For years now, since long before I started writing books, I’ve found solace and breathing-space in a question from Eckhart Tolle: “Do you have a problem now?” “Narrow your life down to this moment,” Tolle writes. “Your life situation may be full of problems – most life situations are – but find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now.”
Personally (though it depends on how you define ‘problem’) I don’t think the point is that the answer must always be no. If you’re in acute physical or emotional pain, or staring at a negative bank balance on the day the rent is due, you might answer ‘yes’. But it’s stunning how often my answer is no – because the problem I was fretting about hasn’t happened yet, and indeed might never happen at all. Even when there does seem to be a genuine problem, Tolle’s question has a way of reframing what that problem demands of me, shifting it from something hopelessly amorphous to something compact and manageable.”
2. The chapter, The Watermelon Problem, from his book 4,000 weeks.
“As you surface from an hour inadvertently frittered away on Facebook, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the damage, in terms of wasted time, was limited to that single misspent hour. But you’d be wrong. Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling – instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful – it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are – and all these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well.”
So by all means check the headlines for the election results. But don’t let it define you for this week, or likely several weeks. You don’t have any control over the results and giving control of your thoughts on it to the algorithms will only make it worse.
With thanks for the image to Elaine Bernadine Castro on Pexels.com