The clock rang six I woke up washed up dressed up ate food went to class then the next then the next then the next ate food did some work wound myself back up like a toy went to sleep.
That’s my day.
But not really. I am not a wind-up toy, going through motions mechanically without thought. The events of my day are not bullets fired from a machine gun in rapid succession, desperately chasing each other for their end goal. My day has commas and periods and colons and semicolons; it has pauses.
I value these pauses in my day. I need these pauses: we all do. Whether we like to admit it or not, most of our lives are designed like factory assembly lines. We have our routines and stick to these routines every day, day after day, with slight variance, if any. And these routines, like assembly lines, are created to maximize efficiency in our lives: get as much work done in as little amount of time as possible. This leaves us with little room to take a break from the world and let our minds wander as they wish.
Consequently, we live high-stress lives feeling dejected and dissatisfied. As Thoreau eloquently stated, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Today, slipping into a life of “quiet desperation” is made easy by the ever-growing role of technology in our lives. The evolution of the cellphone from a bulky calling device to a sleek, pocket-sized computer illustrates the impact of this role. Cellphones used to simply allow us to easily communicate with others while we were out and about during our day. Today, they have revolutionized the idea of the workplace. The ability to readily read our email allows us to access our work without physically being there. We can connect to bosses, professors, coworkers, and colleagues with great ease.
This ability, without a doubt has its advantages, but it has also made it so that we never actually leave our work. It’s not a matter of clocking in and out anymore, the work comes home with us as stowaways in the digital luggage we carry in our pockets.
To keep up with all that we need to do, we set events and reminders in the calendars in our phones. We set alarms to wake up because our bodies are unable to wake up when we want them to, exhausted by being stretched too thin. We make lists and memos of things we need to do or get. We set small increments of goals to achieve, holding dear to our heart the conditioned belief that hard work pays off. When all signs seem to contradict this “work hard, go far” mentality, we hurl ourselves into the future, silently chanting “it gets better, it gets better,” which soon becomes the mantra of our lives. We march to the beat of those four syllables in desperate pursuit of happiness, but it’s too late. We have sunk into our “lives of quiet desperation.”
We refuse to acknowledge this state of our lives and remain fatally optimistic. We turn to technology to sustain this optimism. We create virtual realities with rose colored lenses for all to see. We filter photos displaying manufactured creativity. We capture selfies from our good side, at just the right angle, with smiles that don’t reach our eyes: self-portraits of packaged, split-second moments. The final products of our photoshopped virtual worlds are faint shadows of our actual realities. We become masters of illusion, starring in our own reality television shows.
In actuality, our lives are not so bleak, but many of us can’t help but feel dissatisfaction. Unsurprisingly, the use of medication to treat anxiety and depression has risen in the past ten years. According to a study by Medco Health Solutions Inc., “America’s State of Mind,” one in five adults took medication to treat a psychiatric disorder in 2010, and that during the decade between 2001 and 2010, there was a twenty-two percent increase in the use of prescription medication to treat mental disorders.
Although there is no agreement about the cause of this increase, high amounts of stress and inadequate amounts of sleep, especially when coupled together, have been linked to anxiety and depression. Perhaps taking a moment of pause may help to reverse this increase.
We all have busy lives, but we can’t always make room for breaks in our schedule because there will always be something to do. How can we make sense of our lives if we never have a moment of reflection? In the midst of daily life, it’s easy to lose sight of the things that matter. Having moments to ourselves allows us to shift things back into perspective and feel more appreciative of our lives. Our daily routines, though comforting in their predictability, can be numbing. Taking time to pause and reflect can bring back the feelings of life we may have forgotten existed.
Maral Margossian is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at [email protected].
