It’s The End of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
Posted by Steve Munroe | Under Life, thought Tuesday Jun 10, 2008
Forget the four-hour-work-week, the power of positive thinking, lifehacks and winning the lottery, there’s only one sure fire way to turn yourself from a sad, underpaid, unfulfilled depressed loser into one of life’s, serene, impossibly positive and happy-to-be-alive winners. It’s something available to all of us and guaranteed to happen to you on a not infrequent basis. Each of the people below discovered its life altering powers, and here are just some of their testimonies to its awesome, life affirming badasserdry (taken from Daniel Gilbert’s book “Stumbling On Happiness”).
- “I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way.” - JW from Texas
- “It was a glorious experience” - MB from Louisiana
- “I didn’t appreciate others nearly as much as I do now” - CR from California
Can you guess what it is?
We’re Running the Asylum Now
Here’s the context to those quotes, provided by Daniel Gilbert: “Jim Wright, former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives made his quote after committing sixty-nine ethics violations and being forced to resign in disgrace. Moreese Bickham, a former inmate, made his remark after being released from the Louisiana state penitentiary where he’d served 37 years for defending himself against a Klu Klux Klansman who’d shot him. And Christopher Reeve, the dashing star of Superman, made his remark after an equestrian accident left him paralyzed from the neck down, unable to breathe without the help of a ventilator.” What these extraordinary individuals all share is that they had experienced the life changing (affirming?) power of disaster. Yep, it would appear that there’s no surer way to improve your view on life than having one almighty catastrophic event crap all over it.
Well, either this tells us that we’re all totally insane freaks with a permanent suite booked at L’hotel Bedlam, or perhaps it tells us something about the nature of adversity and its effects on our ability to innovate our viewpoint and values. Well, I’m not sure about you, but I’d rather forego my night’s stay in the mentalist motel and explore the alternative.
The Power of Disastrous Thinking
It would appear that disasters can teach us a lot about ourselves - that’s nothing you haven’t heard before I’m sure. But it seems to me that they are good for us in the following ways:
- They lay bare some of our most habitually held assumptions about what we want in life, what we think is important, and what we are spending our time doing/chasing/dreaming about. Such a wholesale re-shifting of our perspective can feel fresh and enlivening.
- Overcoming a disaster feels damn good! It increases our feelings of self-worth and makes us feel like our lives have a hint of the epic about them.
- Finally, and linked to the last point, it allows us to tell others and ourselves cool stories about how we overcame adversity, and how we displayed our mettle when times were tough. This building up of a meaningful personal narrative can be extremely satisfying.
(I feel I need to add something here lest you all get the wrong end of the stick. I am not advocating we go out and create our own disasters! Life will surely provide us all with more than enough to go round without requiring us to deliberately chip in. What I’m getting at is that we should try to get away from a purely negative reaction to them and see them as potential opportunities for change and renewal. In fact the alternative is that we all lay down on our beds and assume the fetal position - perhaps that’s ok for a while, but its not a viable long term strategy. Got it? Good, I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.)
In terms of this blog (Yes, I haven’t forgotten), disaster provides a great big seething melting pot out of which great creativity and innovation can spring. Both in the personal as well as the commercial realm, disaster can often be the point where things get torn down and new things can emerge. This is reflected in things historical (the rebuilding of Germany after WWII, commercial (the rebirth of IBM in the 90’s after it’s performance became so bad the company was almost split up), to the downright inane (the divorce diet seen applied by any numbers of recently dumped celebs).
(I wonder if there’s a way to calculate the ratio of disaster size and the rate and quality of innovations that occur in response to it. Yes, I do spend my days wrestling with such conundrums - bite me 
).
Besides, we all know what happens to successful people. They lose their edge. They sell out and go middle-aged and -of-the-road. Helter Skelter…
becomes The Frog Chorus!
and De-Niro goes from Taxi Driver…
to Meet the Fockers…
shudder!
…And I Feel Fine
One other effect that disaster can have - perhaps the most important effect of all - is that it can (though admittedly not always) shift focus from ourselves ‘in here’ to what needs doing ‘out there’. To take an extreme example, it can help people as brave as Christopher Reeve to develop the tireless motivation to promote research into spinal injuries as he so courageously demonstrated. It cuts dead the psychological posturing we all engage in, the vanity we all have about ourselves, and remorselessly rubs our noses in what’s important in life. I’m sure we would all doubt our own ability to handle paralysis as well as Christopher Reeve did - but I bet he would have too before his accident. It’s only after the fact that these inner resources come to light; created and brought forth by the disasters that befall us. And I guess the key point here is that when we are rid of all the everyday frets and worries we carry about ourselves, we are able to cut directly to the heart of matters to see what really needs to be done - that to me is what true innovation is all about - the ability to create real and worthwhile change; whether that is in your own personal life, or in your professional work life.
It may be the end of the world as we know it, but we feel fine precisely because we know, at that moment of disaster, we are capable of creating a better one.
Great insights! I know a lot of people who are focused solely on themselves and ignore those “out there.” I hope it doesn’t take a disaster to turn them from navel-gazing self-centered people into more generous souls, however, like happened to Christopher Reeve and (note spelling) Jim Wright.
I’ll also mention that disaster sometimes has the opposite effect, and turns sweet people into bitter ogres. But often, that’s temporary.
@Stephen: Thanks for the comment. I agree, we shouldn’t wait for disasters to force us to take a look at our lives and make changes, rather we should always be on the look out for what we can do to better our lives. I do think we shouldn’t be afraid of them though (well, at least the non-devastating ones), and live our lives knowing that we can only learn no matter what happens to us, and try not to let disaster’s turn us into ‘ogres’.
Spelling mistake noted and changed by the way
thanks!
Steve