Resist irrationality: fight or flight in a time without lions

I’ve been thinking about a problem we humans have. I can express it in a formula:

Fight or flight response

+

Triggering media

+

Safest time ever to be a human

=

Extremely illogical behavior

Let’s pick that apart:

Fight or flight response

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar on Flickr

The fight or flight response is a very important function of our “lizard brain.” It’s what gets you to stop and fight when there’s a threat you can manage, or run like heck otherwise. It floods your body with adrenaline, gets your heart pounding, sends oxygen to your muscles, and leaves you totally exhausted and drained when it’s over.

We humans obviously needed this in the past. When faced with a hungry lion, we needed to be able to bypass our pre-frontal cortex “professor brain” and act quickly. But although fight or flight is very useful in situations of physical danger, it’s become maladaptive for modern times.

+ Triggering media

Photo by Picasa on Flickr

A lot of what modern media does is to tap into our lizard brains. Youtube cranks, 24-hour news, and social media all benefit when our hearts are pounding and we are full of emotion. They don’t do so great when we’re feeling calm and rational, because that’s the time when we’re more likely to want to hang with friends or take a nice walk.

The reason we like to be triggered by scary movies, news that makes us angry, or reading about the latest insults being traded by a comedian and a Fox News host is that it feels good. Our fight or flight response is set up to give us a huge payoff if we respond appropriately. Why? So that we feel up to doing it again if we need to.

So we like triggering media precisely because it makes us feel like we’ve been chased by a lion… and lived to tell the story.

+ Safest time ever to be a human being

This is a really hard one to get through to people. We are living in the safest time ever to be a human being. Don’t take my word for it. Read the numbers! Even with Covid, we’re still better off than we were (especially before the invention of antibiotics and vaccines).

And the things we’re actually scared of—sharks, strangers, earthquakes—are actually not that dangerous. Take a look:

Causes of Death in Comparison

= Extremely illogical behavior

There was a burglary on my block. As is often the case, the criminals were not the brightest of bulbs. They were caught because, um, they left the iPhone they stole from the house ON and it was pinging their location all the way to Nevada.

Oops.

But that doesn’t stop my neighbors from worrying that the endtimes are nigh, and shouldn’t we be recording the license plate of everyone who drives onto our street? Unfortunately, systems like that result in way more harm to innocent people than they do to criminals being thwarted.

When our children were little, we were the only family on our block that allowed our kids to play outside alone. We do not live in a war zone! (In fact, people in war zones often allow their kids to play outside. What choice do they have?)

Our country was much more dangerous in the 1970s, when my husband’s parents let him ride his bike over the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan and my parents didn’t ask to meet the parents of kids I visited. Yet parents now seem to believe that a child-snatching stranger is always hiding in the bushes.

We’re suffering from maladapted flight-or-flight, and we have to consciously resist

Yes, bad things happen. But bad things don’t stop happening when you shut yourself into a padded room. That’s how you make sure that a bad thing really will happen: You will be stuck in a padded room!

Yes, the human population is currently being ravaged by an awful disease. But the fact that someone was probably killed in a car accident near you in the last week doesn’t stop you from driving. The fact that multiple people near you died of heart disease doesn’t stop you from reaching for that éclair. Our media is terrifying us, and it feels good. The only way we can stop it from feeling so good is by resisting consciously.

Yes, the future of our beautiful planet is currently a bit bleak. But people who focus on bleakness, who revel in the human attraction to fatalistic, negative thinking, don’t get stuff done. And right now, we need people to Get Stuff Done. Global climate change is terrifying, and it’s making us freeze in place. We need to resist that urge and move forward.

  • Resist by being informed
  • Resist by being educated (and not by the University of Google, but by experts in their respective fields)
  • Resist by learning ways to calm yourself and practicing all day every day
  • Resist by being open and loving toward other human beings
  • Resist by not going immediately to fear-based decision-making

Resist.

An Open Letter to California Lawmakers about Restricting Educational Choice

Dear Lawmaker,

Today as I read in CalMatters that state lawmakers have introduced an amended budget bill that would require schools to offer independent study programs, it occurred to me that Independent Study is a particularly important issue for LGBTQ+ students. I am writing to urge you to keep our at-risk students in mind when you consider how to vote on educational issues.

Although we all hope that our students would be able to attend the school of their choice, sometimes this simply isn’t possible. Especially at sensitive times such as when they first come out, when they socially transition, and when they are going through medical transitions, transgender students often choose to transfer to Independent Study (IS), either permanently or on a short-term basis.

As you may have noticed, IS programs are under fire from California lawmakers. Starting with 2019’s ill-timed AB 1505/7 bills that restricted IS charter schools right before a pandemic, continuing with AB 1316 (which thankfully didn’t reach the governor’s desk), and now with Gov. Newsom pushing further restrictions in his rewrite of Independent Study law, transgender and other at-risk students are facing the clear possibility that they will not be allowed to seek a fair, free, and appropriate education.

The fact is that in-person, full-time schooling does not work for some students, and it is directly harmful for some. And the students that are most harmed by mandatory in-person learning are those who are the most vulnerable. Even restrictions like requiring mandatory daily contact with teachers places an undue burden on students who live in remote places, who are medically fragile, or who choose to homeschool in the real world, free of the narrow restrictions imposed by computer-based learning.

At different points during my children’s educations, we chose to homeschool. We were so lucky to live in Santa Cruz County, where we had our choice of IS programs. My students were full-time public school students while also getting an appropriate education. Both of them are now in college, one at a UC, the other at a small private college. They had their choice of colleges that suit their needs, just as they had their choice of K-12 education that suited their needs.

I beg you to keep our at-risk students in mind when you vote on educational matters. Restricting independent study, whether it’s through a district school or a charter school, is discriminatory and wrong. So many students are saved by that time at home, and go on to happy, healthy, productive adult lives. Furthermore, allowing IS programs to offer appropriate services to homeschoolers keeps those families in the public school system, a win on both sides.

Thank you again for taking time to consider the effect of your votes on at-risk, LGBTQ+ students.

Sincerely,

Susana Wessling

As we progress, let’s not regress

I walked up to the front door of my health club and waited. The owner opened the door and beckoned me in; he was not armed with a touchless thermometer.

“You can just walk in now,” he said.

“Well, that makes your job easier,” I replied.

“Yours, too!” he said. “Just scan your card and you’re good to go.”

Here’s the thing: I always knew that getting my temperature taken was jive. The CDC concluded pretty early on that temperature is not a reliable indicator of infection with Covid-19. All that work to take people’s temperature achieved nothing as far as health was concerned; not a single feverish person had arrived at our club in the last year.

So I’m happy enough that we don’t have to do it anymore. However, something positive came with the useless waste of time and batteries: people started to get to know each other.

Making connections

Before Covid, I didn’t know the owner of my club by sight, and certainly had never had a conversation with him. But as club membership dwindled and we were forced to exercise outside (fine for me, since I swim), club employees left, too. Soon it was usually the owner who checked people in, and we got to chatting.

In the past, I was happy to see the front desk manned by one of the more personable employees, but often the young person at the desk was more interested in their phone than the club members. The forced interaction at the club’s front door came from something horrible, but created something meaningful.

Let’s identify the changes we like

As I write, the world at large is gripped—in some places—with a worse situation than ever. The loss of life is tragic. But in coastal California, it really feels like things are getting back to normal. Cars full of kids head to school in the morning. Neighbors who had been out and about during the work day are disappearing back into their jobs.

These changes are part of a return to normal life, but they don’t have to be a return to the parts of that pre-pandemic life that weren’t so great.

Families are spending more time together than they did in their busy, pre-pandemic lives. (And they’re mostly happy about that!)

Adults are rediscovering passions or pursuing new ones.

Some kids have found that distance or hybrid learning actually works better for them.

…and try to make them stick

There’s no reason why we have to go back to “normal.” Normal, well…. normal sucked. The traffic. The overly busy families. The poor being evicted from their homes. The sterile interactions with people in our community. The people whose job it is to connect with you looking at their phones…

Let’s make sure to identify those things in our lives that have improved, and remember that as life gets back to normal, we can make them part of our new normal.

Are you suffering from outrage addiction, my friend?

I am a strong curator of my social media feed. When people I follow post back-to-back ugliness, I unfollow them. I’ve read the research and I know that a steady peek into the ugliest parts of their souls is not good for my mental health.

But then the 2020 election happened, and everyone was outraged. Conservatives were outraged, liberals were outraged, middle-of-the-road why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along people were outraged. We became a culture of outrage. Unlike some people I know, I didn’t leave social media, but I definitely limited my engagement.

There was a palpable drop-off in outrage after Biden’s inauguration. Most people not on the fringes moved on. But some of the people I know seemed, for lack of a better word, stuck in outrage. Outrage had become their drug of choice, and they simply couldn’t stop.

I started unfollowing people whose feeds were stuck in pointless outrage. In a few cases I attempted to post moderating comments, but the ugliness of the responses gave me pause. I decided I needed to calm my own brain and I unfollowed them all.

Righteous anger is not outrage

There’s a place for—and a grand tradition of—righteous anger in our culture. Righteous anger is focused and in its own way positive: its goal is to get people to sit up and take notice.

The BLM protests were initially fueled by righteous anger. And though they had been lied to and misled, a lot of right-wing voters who believed that our election was stolen were also initially inspired by righteous anger.

But I make a distinction when I use the word outrage. Outrage is a knee-jerk reaction that is unfocused and has no particular end-goal:

  • If you’re outraged by racism, you yell a lot, you riot, or you live in anger and fear.
    If you are experiencing righteous anger about racism, you take part in peaceful protests, you communicate the reality of the problem to others, and you vote.
  • If you’re outraged by voting issues, you yell a lot, you riot, or you decide not to vote because it’s pointless.
    If you are experiencing righteous anger about voting issues, you learn about how the system works, you read the data, you get involved to keep the election secure, and you vote.

This year has given us plenty of examples…

like racism

The BLM protests did a lot of good. They focused the attention of a lot of well-meaning white people in power whose attention really hadn’t been focused. People influenced by righteous anger got to work and pressured their lawmakers and their communities to do better.

But when you look at the outrage that accompanied the righteous anger, there was a fair amount of collateral damage. Property was damaged, people were harmed or killed, and lots of fundamentally decent people got really nasty in their social media feeds.

Righteous anger fueled real, positive change. Outrage fueled anger, depression, alienation.

and voting rights: on the right…

The concern over voting rights is shared by people all over the political spectrum. America without secure elections is not America, that’s clear. But on all sides of the political spectrum, you see the difference in outcomes between outrage and righteous anger.

On the right, people who listened to outrageous lies felt their outrage grow. Righteous anger would have led them to listen to conservative politicians and officials who did the research and found the facts. But the people who broke into the Capitol on January 6 were not fueled by righteous anger. Clearly, there is no logical world in which breaking windows and zip-tying Nancy Pelosi would end in a more secure vote.

There were those on the right who had, if not righteous anger, well-researched concerns. And you may have heard their voices if you were reading the mainstream press. But right-wing media feeds on outrage at this particular time, so that’s what most conservatives heard (and continue to hear). Conservatives who actually understand election security seem to be screaming into a void.

…and the left

The left wasn’t immune to voting rights outrage. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard—and saw in my social media feed in the last year—people saying things like “all politicians are the same so my vote isn’t important” or “the party has the vote rigged.” My observation is that this attitude is more common in younger adults, but there may be other factors than youth. Lack of interest in or understanding of the political process is probably also a factor. Although this may not feel like outrage, this attitude is often accompanied by outrage responses to particular triggering topics such as immigration. The same people who rail against Democrats being “as bad as Republicans” generally don’t take the positive steps that result from righteous anger. They just get pissed off and alienated.

I’ve had to turn off feeds from liberal friends because now that they got what they wanted, they are continuing to bang their nasty words against that wall of outrage. Their hatred of any politician who disagrees on policy is intense, immediately writing them off as “racist” or “in the pocket of corporations” if they don’t agree on the best way to solve a problem.

How are you feeling?

I’m worried about you, friends who are still fueled by outrage. I did turn you off, it’s true, but I think of you and hope that you will be able to step off the outrage machine. It’s not good for your health or for our society.

I believe that we need lots of righteous anger. We have so many difficult problems to address in this country, and so little agreement on how to address them (and sometimes, so little agreement as to whether there’s a problem at all).

But I’d like to see the smart, fun, creative, and energetic people around me step back and assess whether their righteous anger is giving them the energy they need to solve problems, or if they’re allowing their outrage to make them part of a problem.

Educated: A belated book review

I have to admit that I resisted reading Educated by Tara Westover when it came out with a big splash in 2018. I was, frankly, so done with the “homeschooling as child abuse” trope that I didn’t even bother picking it up.

But strange things happen in a pandemic, and one of those is you are sitting on the couch in the evening, having finished your latest book, scrolling through your mom’s Kindle account and you come across that book you resisted reading…

And so I read it, and was (perhaps not surprisingly) pleasantly surprised. Westover’s book does not promote the “homeschooling as child abuse” trope in the slightest. In fact, I would suggest that anyone who maintains that opinion read the book as a way to understand the difference.

On the fringe of the fringe

Westover was raised in an Idaho Mormon community in a family way at the fringe of the fringe of their community. Westover considers her father bipolar, though he has never been diagnosed. Whatever his diagnosis, he was clearly manipulative, paranoid, and delusional. Westover’s mother was both victim and then co-conspirator with her husband. The family maintained fragile ties with their more mainstream extended family and community, but they lived largely insular lives where the children had no idea what the outside world was like.

The psychological abuse and neglect from her parents stemmed from their extreme views: about the roles of women, about eschewing modern medical treatment, about blind obedience to the father’s authority. Another source of abuse was the constant psychological distress of living in a household that is constantly preparing for the end—which is always just around the corner. The physical abuse, however, came from an older brother. Himself a victim of their father’s paranoia and manias, the brother takes the “education” of his sisters into his own hands, his physical abuse stopping time and time again just short of murder.

The “homeschooling as abuse” trope would have you believe that this abuse was able to happen because of homeschooling. But throughout the story, Westover documents the complicity of relatives, neighbors, and their community. Homeschooling, it turns out, was neither a cause nor an affect of the abuse.

Through the support of a different older brother, who has escaped to college, Westover decides to “educate” herself. She eventually gains a high enough score on the ACT to go to college, and from there proves a brilliant student who can’t be kept back.

Is this homeschooling?

In some ways, Westover’s “education” at the hands of her parents was classic unschooling. Her mother taught all of the children the basics of the three R’s, and both parents gave them life lessons. Her father put the children to work in his (physically dangerous) business and enlisted their support for his constant preparations for the end of days. From a young age, Westover also acts as assistant to her mother’s (illegal) midwifery and then her highly successful essential oils business.

Since unschooling focuses on releasing children from the tyranny of standards and curriculum so that they can pursue their own passions and do meaningful work, one could argue that Westover was “unschooled,” albeit unconventionally.

However, this is not Westover’s view or mine. What happened to her was not unschooling, but baldfaced neglect. She entered the world only with the skills that she fought for. She often had to hide her studies from her domineering father and her passive or enabling mother. She was lucky to have mentors in her college-bound brother and a friend in town. Any resemblance her education has to unschooling is only on the surface.

The village raised the child

Westover’s story, in the end, isn’t about homeschooling at all. In fact, she makes a point of noting other homeschooling families in her extended family who are giving their children a real education.

Her story is about the strength of the human spirit, the importance of believing in factual truth, and perhaps most of all, the role of “the village” in raising children. Westover’s father’s manias and her brother’s abuse make her family an outlier in some ways. But in other ways, her story is a classic one: what her immediate family couldn’t give she got from others.

An older brother acted like a parent.

A friend in town acted like a brother.

A college administrator recognized a need to meet her where she was.

A roommate patiently educated her in the ways of the world.

As much as Westover’s father believed that it was his family against the world, it was the world that made sure that his neglected children could thrive.

A final rift

There is one sad theme to the book that feels unresolved. Near the end of the story, Westover muses about the fact that her siblings who “got out” are successful, with PhDs and lives in the mainstream. The children who stayed, without even a high school diploma, are still fully within their parents’ sphere of influence, their choices limited.

Westover realizes that this rift forces her to choose between her education and the myths her family survives on. Like many survivors of abuse and growing up in extremist communities, she has to choose between fact and family, a break or a continuation.

In the interview linked below, she draws a connection between the choice she made and our current political environment. It’s worth a read.

The ultimate homeschooler?

Westover’s education didn’t come from homeschooling. But in another way, Westover is the ultimate homeschooler—despite her parents’ influence. She took ownership of her education and her life, a process that is difficult for teens even in the most supportive families. She educated herself, then she let herself be educated.

This isn’t a book about homeschooling, but it is a book about learning, perseverance, and coming to terms with family. It’s well worth a read.

Further reading:

Now available