Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [37]
We observe the link between acceleration and division when a child arrives at a playground after a long and bitter absence. Attracted simultaneously to all the rides, he can’t fully enjoy any one of them without divisive longings for the others. So he takes one quick run down the slide, rushes to the monkey bars where he clambers to the top and immediately descends, goes up and down on the seesaw three times, and runs off to the swings. Having fulfilled his agenda as rapidly as possible, he returns to a single piece of equipment and gives it his undivided attention.
The divided state that leads to acceleration is in turn caused by either anticipation or resistance. Anticipation ultimately produces accelerations of the first kind, and resistance is responsible for accelerations of the second kind. It’s instructive to see how these two sequences of mental traps develop.
If we had only the present task in mind, we wouldn’t rush because there would be no other condition to rush toward. Thus the first step on the road to acceleration is a thought about some future activity. Eating dinner, we begin to contemplate the even greater pleasures of the bedroom that await us. If the future project can wait, thinking about it now when we already have something to do is anticipatory. Furthermore, the anticipated project competes for our attention with the task at hand, creating a state of division. And then we rush through the present activity to terminate our division. The possibility of enjoying dinner having been undermined by anticipation, we try to get it over with as quickly as possible. Yet we have all the time in the world. This is acceleration of the first kind.
On the other hand, if the present task can wait but a future project cannot, we’re guilty of resistance for not dropping the former altogether. The commercial is just about over, and still we hold on to the idea of finishing our article. Clutching the old as the new forces itself upon us, we’re again precipitated into a state of division, and again we try to shorten our pain by rushing through the task at hand. In this case, however, the better course would be simply to postpone the task at hand. This is how acceleration of the second kind comes about.
In sum, we have the following relationships:
The steps on the journey of life appear one at a time and at their own pace. If we lunge ahead or lag behind, we stumble and fall. Lunging ahead is anticipation and acceleration of the first kind. Lagging behind is resistance and acceleration of the second kind.
Festina lente—make haste slowly—another proverb on our side.
We’ve seen that both anticipation and resistance often develop into chronic conditions. We may always be trying to anticipate another step into the future, and our backlog of unfinished business may always be a source of resistance to the new. Either of these maladies may be further compounded by chronic acceleration, a condition in which we’re perpetually rushing through whatever we are doing in order to get to the next thing.
Chronic acceleration is the state of always being on the way to somewhere else. We rush through the main course to get to the dessert. We rush through dessert because we can’t live with the dirty dishes. We rush through the dishes to get to our book. If the book is interesting, we’re beckoned by each page to rush through its predecessor—an acceleration of the first kind. If the book is dull, we read as quickly as we can to get it over with—an acceleration of the second kind. Life is just one damn thing after another.
On a larger timescale, we see each