Overwhelm: ❌😵💫
Overload is a terrible feeling, isn't it?
It starts in your head and moves into your chest like a tight squeeze of anxiety. It's no wonder we all feel it. Picture a stick person with 62,364 electric lines plugged into his or her head, each one at full speed.
That's the image I have of the human race these days. When I stop and think back to my childhood cultural landscape, it was so dramatically different. A TV with a handful of channels, a phone hanging on the wall for one person to use at a time, no internet to surf, no emails to send, no digital calendar or banking online. It seems like another world.
Our technology is not all bad, but it is all-consuming.
I've been told that people my age look at the past with a nice layer of polish and a bunch of A+ ratings. We leave out the dysfunction when we reminisce. I am sure, in some ways, I do. But I am also confident that we were better off without all the screens hooking us by the nose and leading us around like cattle. We were less overloaded by an hourly rush of dopamine hits. The hits we did have were simple, natural pops when experiencing ordinary things like riding a bike, building a fort, or swimming with friends in the lake. We had more mental and emotional space; we had natural outlets that let the stress fizz die down.
All the research reveals it.
But here is the beauty of being human: we have agency. We get to choose how many wires connect to our brains. We get to turn off the power button and go outside. Overload may fall on us at points by no fault of our own. Life circumstances can hit like a tsunami, leaving our insides on high alert. It is unbearable at points.
However, there is a level of overload we get to control.
Shutting the lock button on your phone in the middle of a mindless scroll or closing the screen on your computer when you don't have any specific reason to be on it will cut the legs off the overload giant.
I know we have to check our calendar. I know we have to pay a bill. I know we have to respond to an email or text. This is not what I am talking about. The best way for me to describe what I see in myself is a "destination-less" activity on a screen. It lacks effort, energy, and creativity. It is easy, and it is boring. And this is what leaves me feeling off and melancholy. This is what results in a mix of anxiety and joylessness.
I tell my students all the time, "Wisdom and maturity do not come with age. You don't turn 27, and a switch flips. We are always becoming." Likewise, adults can stop growing. We are as susceptible to becoming less mature, especially in our day and age of social media.
When I think about Legacy, I am well aware that leaving one should never be assumed. It's motivating to take the road less traveled. So how do we continue on toward wisdom and maturity? I have two suggestions:
Take a regular inventory of your overload. Ask yourself, am I participating in my own internal chaos? Learn to listen to your body and mind. How much is going in and how much of that is necessary?
Invite Jesus to give you what you need to push back the overload. We simply can't do it. Statistics have proven that we don't know how to turn off our screens. They are designed to keep us scrolling, and the design is working. So we need someone who had the power we don't have. Remember, it's in our weakness that he is strong...
Let's be people of wisdom, self-control, and balance. We can't waste anymore time. Life is too valuable.
I leave you with this quote by Anne Lamott,
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”