Emotional competence and incompetence, work, and life

A slightly edited copy of this has been published  here (https://medium.com/@kayleen.white.58/emotional-competence-and-incompetence-work-and-life-d297ad45bbc1)

When I was younger, into my late 20s and 30s, I could do what I termed “shake my hands behind my back”, with one arm passed behind my back, low down, and the other over a shoulder- although it wasn’t what a normal handshake looks like, palm to palm, mostly just hooking my fingers around each other and pulling my hands closer (maybe I could shake near properly in my teens ... ). 

I can’t now. Why? Well, my shoulder (and other) joints have gotten stiffer, and maybe a bit of weight gain as I’ve aged has had an influence (although little of that weight is in areas that would affect shaking ones hands behind ones back). 

Why the weight gain? 

Well, conventional “wisdom” would talk about diet and exercise, and be as off target as a housing inspector criticising houses in a slum with a “why would anyone choose to build such a flawed house?”, to which the answer is “because it is all they could afford, you amathia-suffering fool”. 

Similarly, the reason for weight gain often isn’t not knowing about diet or exercise, it is the stress, pressure, and exhaustion of modern lifestyles - and such pronouncements seem, in my experience, to be made by medical people who are either younger, meaning - from my current perspective - middle aged, or people who are in the middle or upper class of society. 

Why? 

Well, a wide range of reasons - wanting to be accepted (in the cases above, the belonging is to professions), taking the easy way out by assessing issues on the basis of what is easily accessible and assessable, fear of making an error leading to sticking close to conventionality, fear of being different, wanting other approvals including professional (although parental stays with many people until the day they die), etc, etc, etc.

All of which are fundamentally emotions. 

It is truly ironic that, in my experience, when professionals in workplaces say that emotions have no place in the workplace, they have all - without exception - been emotional at the time ... and have been so incompetent with emotions that they failed to recognise it. 

It is easy enough to recognise the nincompoop who, with red face and raised voice, declaims against their version of unacceptable emotions - whilst being silent on emotions such as sadism, sacrifice, dedication to other people’s profits (I like a social media suggestion to replace references to “economy” with “rich people’s yacht money”), hostility, greed, and even masochism. 

However, those few who do make such declamations without any overt emotion are showing another, even more insidious problem: suppression or lack of emotion. 

Emotions are fundamental to being a human - and also many other sentient beings. You cannot experience satisfaction, let alone happiness or joy, without the emotions of - respectively - satisfaction, happiness, or joy (I’ll set aside the issue of primary and secondary emotions for the purposes of this post).

Now, there is a connection to the little story I started the article with: what I found personally, and observed in many - not all - others in age 30s and 40s, is that problems of modern living can cause a decline or even loss of the enjoyable emotions (such as satisfaction, happiness, and joy) as one gets overwhelmed with unpleasant emotions (such as survival fears [which tend to be relative to our circumstances], stress) and the pace, pressure and resulting exhaustion of mid-level corporate work. 

So, as I’ve already written, my experience with most medical practitioners who pontificate about such things as middle age weight gain is that they FAIL to understand or acknowledge, let alone recommend ways to manage, the importance of life circumstances. 

One of the biggest sources of such stress is, in my opinion, the desire for oversized, complex, glitzy, and flimsy, under-insulated, inadequate strength (especially for the coming effects of the climate crisis - which also impacts strength) houses - which we mislabel “homes”.

I was different: I was born hating the boxy houses, crammed in too closely to others, and the so-called “rat  race” lifestyle.

I had the same “what should I do with my time” stuff as everybody else, including “I’m bored, Mum”, but I also had the good fortune to grow up in a decade of “consciousness raising”, with hippies (many of whom turned out to be traitors to their professed concepts), New Age, tree changes, etc but especially Buddhism - which had a major constructive influence on teenage me. 

I know there were similar influences in many other eras, but I wish to acknowledge the good fortune I had in my life, good fortune which helped me see the rat race for what it is.

Others were not so fortunate. 

Most others, when asking their parents what they should do, get directed into doing the same as everyone else which leads to everyone doing the same, and fearing any sort of difference - perhaps because of the guilt at a suppressed realisation that they could have done something different and less damaging. 

That fear of difference is particularly savage when faced by any difference which is significant enough to be a challenge to the worldview they were inculcated with - as shown by resistance to climate action, but also in other areas such as changed housing options (where the resistance is partly greed) and bigotry of all forms.

The limited emotional competence of most of those people means, in my opinion, that they mistake their emotional discomfort at having to change plans/abandon cherished dreams/stop being greedy/be inclusive for something of genuine worth for something justifiable, which it clearly is not.

One aspect of that is that many people build their self esteem around proving they are of worth to their (possibly no longer living) parents by living loudly to no longer appropriate notions, including having to be busy in order to justify existing - which was shown in cisgender males recently but  this article, but other genders also have this fatal flaw - including ciswomen who, in my experience, have sometimes been active proponents of conventionality and enforced conformity. 

I used the word fatal quite deliberately: the fallacy that we have to be busy in order to justify existing is responsible for: overwork that is killing individuals, the evils of colonisation and empire building, and the current climate crisis - all circumstances where, to simplify for the purpose of emphasising my point, people put “values” based around being busy ahead of genuinely caring for people and place.

In my opinion, we need to be able to question what seem like fundamental aspects of our inherited/taught worldview - especially those aspects around purpose of living (i.e., whether we HAVE to be busy to justify existing), how we pass time/occupy ourselves, and whatever leads to the obnoxious proselytising of our views into other peoples worldviews - also called arrogance, control, sexism (misogyny!), racism (especially white supremacism), mini-me parenting, colonialism  / colonisation / empire building, conversion therapies and all other forms of the evil known generally as bigotry. 

But for us to be capable of doing that, we need a modicum of self awareness (the old adage “Know Thyself” applies here), and, first and foremost, we need emotional competence - emotional competence of the type taught by Karla  McLaren, and encapsulated into the concept of emotional intelligence. 

We also need a society that allows us to do this questioning - at any stage of our life - without other people (especially parents) reacting out of feeling threatened (including insecure), and where people doing such questioning and the alternative lifestyles they may adopt (especially those along the lines that used to be described as “hippy”) are seen by young people growing up, so that those young people can make informed decisions about how much they want to be drawn into modern economic servitude, whether they want to commit to the extreme wear, tear and financial demand of a conventional house as a home, what sort/amount of interactions with people they want, and what sort of purpose for living (if any) they will adopt - and such a thing would, if successful, possibly be measured by a higher proportion of people who choosing to have a life purpose and lifestyle that is NOT the same as their parents (my life companion’s family is a good example of that - including how healthy it is for the individual and the family).

Such a thing, if widely implemented, would result in changes away from a numbers based (“rich people’s yacht money”) economy, as well as other changes, but ultimately it will result in healthier and happier people, and thus will be more humanly sustainable than our current ludicrous lifestyles.

My doc and I have often discussed damage done by work expectations (she illustrates that my point in the fifth paragraph above was wrong - it excluded those good doctors who aren’t that way), but I am now largely in the work-till-you-stop-and-then-die bucket (too many commitments made outside of work), although my awareness is enabling me to try to change that to whatever extent that I can.

To summarise: we - individually, as societies, and as a species - need to break out of formulaic living, and start living in the way that best suits us - for us as people, and all life on this planet.

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”; 
  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

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Finally, remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing.