Fear Bradycardia and the Normalcy Bias

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Everybody’s favorite clown, Dougie, ventures out a little too far in the lake.

“Didn’t you hear the old, Native American woman say something evil lurks in that there lake?” one of the great-looking people on the shore screams. Dougie ignores them, apparently unaware of the golden rule of modern cinema: Always listen to Native Americans, especially if they’re old and speak in hallowed tones. “You’ve gone too far, Dougie!” the great-looking people on the shore continue to shriek. “Come back!”

“C’mon, you chickens!” Dougie says, backstroking leisurely. “It’s fun, and there’s nothing out here!”

The music that cues Dougie’s impending doom spills out of our Dolby surround sound. A subtle roar follows, and those of us in the audience tense up. We grip the theater armrests so tight that our forearms flex. We join the gorgeous people on the shore, mentally screaming to Dougie to try to get him out of the water. We then join the collective hysteria that erupts when the water of the lake begins to swirl.

“Dougie, please!” we shout with the great-looking people.

“Aw, shut it!” Dougie says, waving off the warnings. 

The trouble is the actor who plays Dougie is unattractive and chubby, and those of us who have watched thousands of movies know our horror movies, and we know casting. We know unattractive and chubby types are doomed soon after they accept their role in a horror movie. 

The monster roars to an impossible height. Dougie looks up at it, and as his fate becomes apparent, he screams. Is the monster truly evil, or is it just hungry? We don’t know, and we don’t care. It’s going to eat Dougie, the comedic foil in our movie. The monster takes its time, so we can see the full breadth of its horror. It gnashes its teeth a little. It swivels its head about. It looks menacingly at Dougie. Dougie continues to look up, and his screaming continues until the monster lowers onto him and bites Dougie’s head off. The idea that this macabre scene took a full thirty seconds leaves those of us who have watched too many horror movies nonplussed.

“Why didn’t he just move?” we movie screamers have screamed for decades. “Why did he stay in the water, screaming, for thirty seconds? Why didn’t he just swim away?” It might have been pointless, as the monster was aquatic and Dougie is not, but we horror movie aficionados want to see some evidence of the survival instinct from our favorite victims. 

When we learn that actors have to stay on their mark, so directors can get the shot, we are a little less disgusted with the actors who played Dougie roles. We still want them to move, but we know they must obey the director who commands them to stay in a designated spots for the decapitation scene.

This cliché scene may strike horror in some, but I would venture to say that either the terrified are under the age of thirty, or they haven’t watched enough horror movies to know the tropes. For those of us who have crossed both thresholds, we know it’s just plain irrational that a person wouldn’t move or do something to get away from a menacing monster. We certainly wouldn’t just stand in one spot, looking up, screaming, at the person, place, or thing looking to seal our fate.

‘Are you sure?’ author David McRaney asks in his book You Are Not so Smart. “Of course,” we say. “Look at that thing. Look at its teeth. I don’t want to get my head bit off.” ‘How many times have you been confronted with an aquatic sea monster? We all know Dougie is an absolute moron for just standing there, but not only are Dougie’s reactions normal, they are a lot closer to a truth than anything you monster movie screamers might expect.’ In McRaney’s incredible book, You Are Not so Smart, he suggests that the one detail of this monster scene that might counter how we would actually react in a similar moment of unprecedented horror is Dougie’s screaming.[1]  

Those of us who aren’t students of psychology know what we know. We know there are two basic reactions to catastrophic, chaotic moments: action and non-action, or as we call it acting and choking. Those who act can also be broken down into two subsets: The selfish who fight to save their own lives and the heroes who act to save others. Either way, casual, non-psychology types know there are only two reactions to such situations. Either the individual involved in the situation does something to save their lives, and the lives of those around them, or they choke.

McRaney argues that there is a third reaction, though casual, non-psychology types are more apt to view this course of action as little more than an extension of choking. Psychologists call it fear bradycardia. The difference between fear bradycardia and choking is that a choker will experience an acceleration of their heart rate, and a victim of fear bradycardia experiences a heart deceleration in a traumatic situation. An acceleration of the heart could lead a potential victim to fumble about and select an unfortunate reaction, or choke, but a deceleration might lead the potential victim to freeze up in a manner psychologists call attentive immobility. Fear bradycardia is a reflex, an involuntary, automatic instinct that often occurs in moments of unprecedented chaos and horror, heaped upon the unprepared.

Put succinctly, fear bradycardia is the idea that in our movie not only will Dougie not scream or scramble out of the way, he will reflexively stop moving and simply stay put, hoping beyond reason, for the best possible outcome. If we were watching ourselves in a movie, we would expect that we would unbuckle and exit a plane soon after it crashes. That is the way we imagine that we would react to a plane crash, and we all know that that is what we would do if we were lucky enough to land that role in the movie. We suspect that we might need a moment to deal with the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to us, but after that moment was over, we’d come to our senses and unbuckle and exit. 

“I know that when a plane crashes, it often leaks jet fuel that often leads to an explosion,” we’d say. “So, yeah, I’d unbuckle and exit.” We naturally assume that that would be our reaction to surviving a plane crash in real life, but we tend to forget how scary the plane crashing into the ground might be. If a movie monster scares us, we might need a little time to recover, if our child survived a minor tragedy, we had to take a moment–hand on heart–to digest what just happened before we kiss them and hug them and scold them for coming so close to a precarious situation. We need a moment to come down from those emotional extremes, and we might need another moment to internally deal with the euphoria that nothing actually happened. We’re talking minor instances here that could’ve been worse, but even if the worst case scenario happened, they would still be minor compared to surviving a plane crash. How much time would we need to deal a horrific tragedy that we were very lucky to suvive? We suspect that we might need a moment, but we would eventually come to grips with it and exit the plane.  

The concept psychologists are describing, when they talk about the term fear bradycardia, suggests that we will remain frozen beyond what we consider the norm. McRaney, and other psychologists suggest that even if that plane is on fire, and first responders and other survivors are screaming in our faces that the plane could blow, we might need a moment, or some space, to deal with everything that just happened and is now happening, before we act. We might even remain frozen hoping that this moment somehow passes. This fear bradycardia reaction involves an automatic, involuntary instinct that exists in all of us. Some refer to this state as tonic immobility, but no matter the name, it falls under the umbrella of another psychological term, normalcy bias.

McRaney details several incidents in which people experienced fear bradycardia: an F5 tornado in Bridge Creek, Oklahoma, survivors of floods, and even the infamous 9/11 Trade Center terrorist incident.

According to some first responders, the one commonality in most unprecedented tragedies is that most victims wander about in a dreamlike state. These first responders say that their first responsibility is to shake survivors out of this state, so the survivors can hopefully achieve full consciousness and save themselves. For even if their world is falling down around them, most survivors shut down and go to a safe, more normal space in their minds, if no one is around to shake them out of it.

In the aftermath of the 9/11/01 terrorist action, most first responders spoke of the calm that evacuating survivors exhibited. They stated that most of the survivors obediently followed instructions, without any panic, allowing for a safe exit that ultimately saved many lives. The first responders we saw interviewed on news networks stated that this evacuation, led by heroic first responders, provided a model for proper evacuation procedures.

Other first responders agreed with that sentiment, but they later added that it was almost too calm and orderly. They said it was so calm and so orderly, it was almost eerie. Very few survivors were screaming, the responders added, and though there wasn’t room to sprint, there is no record of anyone pushing, shoving, or doing anything out of the ordinary to get out of the burning, soon to be falling buildings. There is no record of survivors complaining about the slow, orderly exit, or attempting to find an alternative exit, if there was one available. When we first heard about this orderly exit, we considered it laudable that they avoided their impulses to get out of the buildings as fast as they could by whatever means necessary, because their actions ended up ensuring a greater number of survivors. Yet, we’re talking about approximately 14,000 to 18,000 of employees and customers who managed to escape before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. That level of decency could be characterized as uncommon.   

McRaney cited some of the accounts first responders of 9/11/01 reported of some survivors taking a couple extra, crucial moments to complete the log-out procedures on their computers. With first responders screaming out instructions, some survivors decided to gather their coats. Other first responders made note of the mundane conversations some survivors shared with their coworkers on the way out of the office. Why would a survivor of one of the nation’s worst tragedies talk about adding marshmallows to a flan cake recipe, or the reason their favorite player missed a dunk last night, on their way out of a burning building? To try to establish some level of normalcy amidst the chaos happening falling down around them.  

Those of us on the outside looking in might view this as absolute lunacy. If I were in that situation, we might think, I’d be running, screaming, and I might be crying. I might even knock an old lady down in my departure, but I would do everything I could to get out. I don’t care what this author says I’m all about survival brutha.

How many of those 14,000 to 18,000 survivors would be screaming at a Dougie to get out of the water? If Dougie were in the exact same scenario as they were, during the terrorist tragedy of 9/11/2001, and he logged out of his computer properly, gathered his coat, or shared his flan cake recipe, how many of them would’ve shouted at him to get out of the collapsing buildings? We’ve all placed ourselves in the shoes of dystopian movie characters, and we know we would do things differently. We’ve all shouted condemnations at our various screens when the Dougies just sit there as a monster nears them, and we all know how we would’ve reacted before the menacing monster bites our head off. If these survivors were shown security cam footage of themselves evacuating in such a nonchalant manner, would they scream “GET OUT!” at themselves while watching themselves in the footage? They would be more shocked than we are at their nonchalance. “I honestly can’t remember what I was thinking,” is something they’d likely say.

“If you haven’t experienced a true tragedy,” McRaney writes, “You can never know how prepared you will be, and you can never know how you’ll react. The ideas we have about how we will react may be lies we’ve told ourselves so often that we might end up not knowing the actual truth until it’s too late to rectify it.”

Shutting down computers, gathering coats, and having mundane conversations are automatic, involuntary responses that occur because of this dream-like, faux normal state we defer to when it becomes clear that no amount of rationalizing will ever render the horrific, unprecedented, chaotic moment normal. We shut down to block out the flood of external stimuli that might cause us further panic if we didn’t.

“The people in the World Trade Centers on 9/11 had a supreme need to feel safe and secure,” McRaney writes. “They had a desire to make everything around them go normal again in the face of something so horrific that their brains couldn’t deal with it in a functional manner.”

As stated previously, most casual, non-psychology types might characterize this as choking in the clutch, but McRaney states that it goes beyond that, because they do not freeze as a response to panic. “It’s a reflexive incredulity,” McRaney writes, –attributing the term to Amanda Ripley– “that causes you to freeze up in a reflexive manner. This reflexive incredulity causes you to wait for normalcy to return beyond the point where it’s reasonable to do so. It’s a tendency that those concerned with evacuation procedures –the travel industry, architects, first responders, and stadium personnel– are well aware of, and they document this in manuals and trade publications.”

Sociologists McRaney cites say, “You are more prone to dawdle if you fail to follow these steps and are not informed of the severity of the issue.” Failing to gain the necessary information leads to speculation and to the inevitable comparisons and contrasts of other more familiar incidents.

Men, in particular, seem to have an almost imbedded desire to rationalize fear away. Fear, by its very nature is irrational, and most men feel it incumbent upon them to keep fear a rationalization away. In the face of a tragedy that alarms most, the rational, no fear, man is prone to say, “This is bad, sure, but it’s not as bad as a previous experience I once had?”

Their preferred culprit for unwarranted fear is the media and politicians. “Fear equals ratings,” we say to tap into cynical truths, “and they want to keep us in a constant state of fear, so we’ll vote for them.” There is an element of truth to that, of course, but it’s also true that the terrorist incident on 9/11/01 was one of the most horrific to ever happen in our country.

“That is true, but there was just so much fear they spread that I smelled politics in it,” some cable news viewers said regarding the coverage of 9/11/01, “and we should all start viewing the hype of politicians and media players as nothing more than that, hype.” Most of us recognize that some media outlets and politicians make their bones on promoting fear, but at times, a bit of fear –an emotion that can ignite awareness– might save our life.

For these reasons and others, it is crucial for a city facing an ensuing crisis to allow the local media to inundate us with reports of that impending storm, because the media needs to help us redefine our norm. It is also a reason for those of us who make fun of our friends for paying attention to the flight attendant’s pre-flight instructions, to drop our macho façades and listen. We may also want to drop the pretense that as frequent flyers we are prepared for anything. We must redefine our sense of normalcy in preparation for the many things that could go wrong in the air or upon our return to ground.

“So, you eggheads are telling me that I’m a Dougie?” we might ask students of psychology.

“We’re saying we don’t know how you would react,” the eggheads would reply, “and either do you.”

We can all see some element of ourselves in McRaney’s findings, but we find it impossible to believe that we’d be a Dougie. If we strive forobjectivity, we might cede that we wouldn’t be as heroic as we imagine, but it’s impossible for us to picture that Dougie’s near-catatonic reactions are closer to the truth than we are about our reaction. We live with idea that a fight or flight survivor’s instinct will kick in if we are facing impending doom. We think of ourselves the badger in our scenario that suggests those dumb enough to corner us will get what they get, and it doesn’t matter if we’re as chubby or as unattractive as Dougie was, we know we’ll do whatever it takes to survive. The difference is the badger knows how he’ll react, because the badger has been cornered so many times before, and he’s honed the fight or flight skills. We’ve all experienced some moments that could be characterized as traumatic, and most of us have a decent batting average when it comes to reacting to them. Will that be enough to avoid experiencing fear bradycardia, tonic immobility, reflexive incredulity, or any of the normal bias tendencies we have in the wake of a horrific incident of unprededented levels? We don’t know, McRaney writes, and we won’t know until the decisive moment reveals if we are so ill prepared that we fall prey to automatic and involuntary instincts that result from lying to ourselves for so long that we end up rationalizing ourselves to death.

[1]McRaney, David. November, 2011. You Are Not So Smart. New York, New York. Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

The Wicked Flames of the Weird

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I get a perverse joy dancing in the wicked flames of the weird, but it has never been a calculated maneuver to draw people out from behind the barriers they erect for others. I just like the weird affectation.  I like the effect being weird has on people.  I like to see them think less of me.  I like to see that crinkled face that tells me that they don’t get it.  I like the confusion that asks the question, “Are you serious?”  I also like to get booed.

WeirdThese boos result from the fact that they don’t get the mental dance.  They’re never audible boos, but everything in their body language suggests that I just got booed.  People get uncomfortable when a joke you tell isn’t funny…Especially when it bombs.  They’ve been raised to be polite and laugh politely.  Little kids tell you when you’re not funny, point blank, but adults will usually try to soften the blow of your bomb.  Some of the times they can’t though.  Some of the times, they just don’t get it, and this frustrates them to a point where they may call you out on it.  It’s a perverse joy I derive from this dance, but it’s still a joy.

A funny thing happens to people when you start really grooving in this fire of the weird though. If you do it right, and you do it often enough, you’ll eventually run into the genuinely weird, the wacked, and the insane. You’ll find out a lot about your fellow humans by the way they react to your dance, for most of the truly weird ones can’t hide their reactions.  Like a dog that has its instinct to chase triggered when you start to run, the weird comes out of the weird when you start in on weird.  They accidentally start telling you where they stand on the various demarcation lines the separate the normal from the weird, and the insane.  They can’t help it.  It’s a biological function as indigenous to their makeup as sleeping and eating.

Most people have a view of where they stand that lacks true objectivity.  Their parents taught them where to stand in the world to avoid being perceived as weird, their friends and family ridiculed and bullied them into the knowledge of how to stand, and everyone else tells them where they stand when it’s all said and done.  The question that must be asked is what happens when everyone in their immediate world is weird.  Parents are the single, most prominent influence on our lives and our mental state, but what if they’re weird?  What happens to that kid who has those parents that have weird built into their DNA?  Their weird heritage is normal to their insular world but weird to everyone else.  What if all their friends and family members have lied to them, to be nice, for most of their lives?  The occasional potshot will come out, in reaction to a weird statement that a person makes, but for the most part most people are too polite to tell another when they are fundamentally weird.  Some may recognize these niceties for what they are and seek true definition that they can get nowhere else.  Some of these people may turn to TV, the movies, and other mediums, but most of these mediums exaggerate the true definitions of weird for entertainment purposes. Regardless where they think they stand, or where they’ve found solace for their definitions of what is weird and normal, one dance in the wicked fires of the weird will reveal them.

The key to my particular dance in the wicked flames of the weird is that I’m not afraid to follow the trails that lead to weird.  I know my way back to normal.  I’m so normal it bores me, and that’s why I do this dance in the first place.  I also do the dance because most of the people I know are normal, and I like to separate myself from them in varying ways.

Most people are normal.  If they weren’t, it would be weird to be normal and normal to be weird.  Most people see my dance for what it is, and they laugh, and clap, and encourage me on.  They’re the normal ones.  They have their own bread crumbs laid out on the trail back to normalcy, and they don’t mind watching a normal person occasionally act weird.  They think it’s fun, and they have occasionally added a few dance moves of their own to my performance, because they get the sense that that’s what it’s all about.

Some people think I’m a fool, and they have no time for me.  They’re the serious, normal people with serious and normal ambitions in life.  They have no time for my playtime and my weirdness.  I’m not going to tell you that I’m not a fool, for that would be an opinion you would have to shape based upon my performance.  Plus, if I were to show you the pictures of people who think I’m a fool, you would see that most of them are much better looking than I am, and you would be prone to side with them.

As I said, I’ve never started this dance of the weird to gauge people.  There has never been a calculated decision on my part to find out more about a person I’m talking to, but it has been very instructive nonetheless. “Why would a person would act like?” is a question an abnormal person asks when they see me dance.  They don’t go beyond that question, for doing so might reveal them.  If they did, it would probably go something like this: “Why would a person who is normal, act so abnormal?  Why would he enjoy dancing in the wicked flames of the weird if he is, as you say, normal?  Why would he dance in a fire we all try to avoid?  Is he making fun of us?  He must be weird, because no normal man would act like that on purpose would they Irene?

The completely rational types that grasp for mental health are usually my favorites.  These people are perpetually grasping at different rungs of the monkey bars, trying to determine if they’re abnormal, weird, or just as normal as you and I are.  Most of them choose math and science as their definition of normalcy, because it creates order in their otherwise chaotic minds.  Those who are truly adept at math and science can usually quash my attempts at bringing chaos to their minds, for I have never been a great student of these subjects.  I know just enough to know their basic order however, and I know just enough to funkify that basic order for the individual that clings to them like a life preserver.  I know just enough to remove one block of the order and twist it around and try to insert it in another part of the chain.  In other words, I take what I know of their rational world and present it to their rational mind with an irrational tweak, and I let them figure out the rest.  Also, and this is the important part, I phrase my question in the form of an answer.

As any propagandist will tell you, the best method of convincing another person of your point of view is to let them think they’ve arrived at your answer independently.  The best way to funkify a mind is to have them arrive at your irrational answer through the rational order of the subject. This dance involves me earnestly turning to them for an answer, “You’re good at math…” I say to introduce them to this irrational world, and they enjoy the compliment.  Then, when the heart of the question arrives, they are then eager to live up to that compliment I offered them.

As I said, those who know the schematics of math and science, would simply throttle me with their knowledge.  For those insecure individuals clinging to sanity through their limited knowledge of the mathematical order, my dance of the weird is not a pleasant experience, and there have been occasions when my little dance has nearly led us to the brink of physical confrontation.  They’ve worked hard to maintain their order, and there is a severe punishment waiting for those that dare to shake it up.  It’s been the only barrier they’ve been able to construct to keep the confusion of the random at bay, and they’ve worked hard at fortifying it.

Some of the weird ones have started out with laughter when I start this dance, but they usually stop when it dawns on them what’s really going on here.  Why did they start laughing?  Did they think they were being granted an opportunity to laugh at another weird person, to take a step up on them, and gain a greater foothold in normalcy among their more normal friends?  Why did they stop?  Did they stop, because they were in awe of my ability to step in and out of the weird with ease, and this frustrated them because they’ve never been able to do it with such ease? Or did they see how far out of the normal I chose to go for fun, and it frightened them in the manner it would frighten someone to see another laughing while dangling off a building?  Whatever the case is, they don’t like me after all this.  They can’t quite put their finger on it, except to say “He’s just weird,” and they leave it at that.

The insane ones are the scary ones. When I write the word insane, I’m not talking about the clinically insane.  I’ve never met a clinically insane person, so I know nothing of them.  If I met a clinically insane person, and they introduced me to their definition of the fire, I’m quite sure I would be so frightened that I would never dance in the wicked flames of the weird again, but I haven’t so it’s still a fun place for me to visit on occasion.  When I use the word insane I’m using a literary license to describe those fully functional, insane types that walk among us and take a point I’ve given them and use it as a launching point to dive deeper into the depths of the weird that my fun, weird brain could never understand.  When I use the word insane I’m using it as an extension on the word weird to describe those brains with cylinders so lubricated with pharmaceuticals that they aren’t the same person at noon that they were when they awoke to take their medicine.  There have been a few occasions where I thought they were purposely being weird to add a few steps to the dance, and I wanted to applaud their gamesmanship, until I realized this was no game for them.  This was the world that they woke to that morning and the one they would sleep in that night, and if I took their hand and followed them into the dark caverns of their mind I might never find my way back. My “what do you think of that?” smile quickly fades when they introduce me to their first shadow, and I realize it’s no dance to them.  I realize that this is their land, their home field advantage, and that they are welcoming me into it.  They’re just glad to have some company.

The Healthy Nature of Illusions and Delusions

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“They’d listen if I complained,” a delusional friend of mine said moments after I told him I went to the boss man and complained, and that I didn’t think that my complaint would register. He said this in the midst of one of my fell-fledged rants, and he said it in such an egocentric manner that I felt he was in dire need of a reality check.

If you knew my friend, you’d know that he wasn’t the type to say such things to tweak people in a good-natured, competitive sense. He believed he was a more valued employee than I was. He believed that he was one of the most valued employees in the company.

t1larg.boss.gettyAnd if the world operated in a fair manner, my friend would’ve been an employer’s dream.  He was a hard worker, and an eager student for those that could inform him how he could do his job better today than he did yesterday. He was a quiet man who didn’t care for socializing on the clock, and he even tried to avoid drinking soda, not for health reasons, but to avoid taking too many trips to the bathroom on the company dime. He tried to avoid speaking in meetings, because he didn’t want to be perceived as a complainer, or trouble maker. He wanted to do the work he loved and be compensated accordingly.

He believed in the old adage that if you keep your head low, and your nose to the grindstone, they notice. They may not have said anything to him, but “trust me they notice. And if I ever did complain, all that hard work, and obeying the rules, would pay off. Trust me.”

I worked for too many corporations to trust him however, for I knew it was human nature for an employer to take model employees for granted. I did not have the temerity to tell him that his beliefs were delusional, however, and that he would one day have his unhealthy delusions shattered.

When I would later read, in a Psychology Today article, written by Merel van Beeren*, is that psychologists believe that the delusional are exhibiting greater mental health than I am.  This would prove to be a direct contradiction of the beliefs I’ve had about the unhealthy nature of the illusions and delusions we have about the power and control of our day-to-day lives.

“People overestimate their agency, but it’s for the best –those with an accurate sense of their own influence are often depressed. Participation in lotteries goes up, for example, when players can choose their own numbers, even though they are no more likely to win.”   

“I choose to stay employed at the company,” is something we might say to bolster this argument. “If the boss man changes the rules on me in a fashion I don’t care for, I can always quit. It’s not like I’m being held against my will, or locked into employment at this company. This is America, the land of opportunity, and there are numerous opportunities out there for someone like me.”

Fair enough, but how many of us do leave the company? How many of us get locked into the fear that we cannot do anything else? How many of us get locked into the “At least I have a job!” mentality that helps us deal with the changes the boss man makes that affect us in a negative manner?

“Well,” we say, “I guess I do have the option to leave the company I work for, and I guess I could drop out of the workforce altogether if I want to go live with my mom, but I choose to live free of those constraints.  I choose to live by certain constraints, beset upon me by my boss, so that I might be a self-sufficient individual who lives free based on the payment he gives me to live within his rules.”

The point, as I see it, is most of us do not view these matters in such constructs. We think everyone has to have a job. There is a “40-hour a week, paycheck on Friday, and put up with constraints” mentality that we have.  If you think this is an exaggeration, try quitting your job and going out on your own. Try existing in a realm that is free of constraints in a relative fashion. The first, and most prominent aspect of life that you’ll miss is the routine of a work day, and then you’ll miss the structure that that mentality provides. You’ll feel an odd sense of worthlessness that you cannot explain, because you’re used to being a drone, and you’ve trained yourself to be an employee and to accept what the boss man says.  You’re locked into this mentality.

In the freest country the world has ever known, we get locked into a mindset that this is all we can do, so we will put up with the boss man’s constraints.  In order to support ourselves, and continue to be free, and self-sufficient, we make compromises.  But Where is the Line? the singer/songwriter Bjork once asked.  Where is that line between the freedoms we give up and the freedoms we enjoy, and how much freedom are we willing to give up to be free?  As the writer of this Psychology Today article suggests, analyzing all of this can lead to depression, and it’s much healthier to delude one’s self into believing that we’re free and in total control of our own universe.

It’s much healthier, for example, to believe that we have some say in the rule changes that the boss man employs than it is to examine how valuable we are in lieu of the changes the boss man has made to affect our work dynamic in a negative manner.  It’s much healthier, to think that we are such valuable employees that there is some fear in the boss man that prevents him from making such drastic changes that would affect our decision to stay with the company than it is to acknowledge that the boss man often decides what is best for his company’s bottom line first, what is best for all of his employees second, and then what is best for the individual employee last, unless we fit into the second group of course.  If we don’t, the boss man will find a way to sell his change to us in a manner that satisfies our ego.

There is a great website out there that has a single joke on it.  It’s called Office Versus Prison, and it details how the office space mirrors the day-to-day activities of the prison.  The following are a few of my favorites:

IN PRISON…you spend the majority of your time in an 8×10 cell.
AT WORK…you spend most of your time in a 6×8 cubicle.

IN PRISON…you can watch TV and play games.
AT WORK…you get fired for watching TV and playing games.

IN PRISON…they allow your family and friends to visit.
AT WORK…you cannot even speak to your family and friends.

IN PRISON…all expenses are paid by taxpayers with no work required
AT WORK…you get to pay all the expenses to go to work and then they deduct taxes from your salary to pay for prisoners.

IN PRISON…you spend most of your life looking through bars from the inside wanting to get out.
AT WORK…you spend most of your time wanting to get out and go inside bars.

IN PRISON…there are wardens who are often sadistic.
AT WORK…they are called managers.

My friend lived with the delusion that if he ever decided to take the floor and complain, the higher ups would sit up and take notice.  Things would change.  ‘They may not listen to the average employee, but they’ll listen to me,’ was his mindset.

I would barrage him with a list of complaints I had about the way things were done on a week-to-week basis.  He would remain quiet, with a quiet smile on his face.  “Doesn’t that frustrate you?” I would ask.  Most of them time it didn’t.  Most of the time he had already developed a rationale for the way things were done, but some of the times he would get just as enraged as me.  “Too bad there’s not a darned thing we can do about it!” I would say to sum up our unified frustration on those occasions.  I would tell him that I complained to the boss man, and I was given some lame excuse for why things would continue to be the way they were.

“They’d listen if I complained,” my friend said.  Of course that statement bothered me, as it fed into my insecure belief that, in Merel van Beeren’s words, my friend’s agency was more valuable than mine in the company.  I told him that he, again in the words of van Beeren’s, overestimated his agency in the company.  I warned him that there would come a day when he risked letting people know his opinion of the way things were done, and he would find out that the boss man just wanted him to shut up and go back to being that face in the crowd that accepted his changes for what they were.

My knowledge was not theoretical.  It was firsthand knowledge that I gained by being a man that kept most of his complaints in check, until that moment arrived when something meaningful came my way.

I used to think that if you picked your battles for subjects that you had deep concerns about, the boss man would be more apt to listen.  I was wrong.  I learned that the boss doesn’t care for complaints, and he doesn’t give more weight to complaints that come from a person that doesn’t complain often.  They just want you, and the person that complains all the time, to shut up and learn your station in life.  Coming to that realization was, as Merel van Beeren pointed out, caused me a sense of depression that I wished I could walk back.

My friend did complain about the way things were done, after a time, and he found that he had overestimated his agency, and he quit the company.  My friend didn’t quit right away.  He loved the company, but his moment of epiphany was just as painful as mine.  He learned that by avoiding the complaint, you don’t gain the respect of the boss man, you slip into the favored status of rarely seen, never heard, and the minute you pop that delusion, you shatter everything you once held dear.

If Merel van Beeren is to be believed, and I must say he puts forth a pretty decent argument, my friend was the healthy one in our friendship, until I poked so many holes in his delusions that I brought my unhealthy skepticism to his life and depressed him.

* van Beeren, Merel.  The Skeptic’s Cheat Sheet.  June 2012. Psychology Today. Pg. 22.