Genki Sudo: like Seneca, only with a better spinning backfist.
Picture the scene: you are on an escalator where the rule, as in most civilised societies, is to walk left, stand right. Someone in front of you, perhaps a drunken football fan or Italian student, is blocking the left aisle. Do you:
a) Shrug.
b) Boil with inner fury.
c) March up the escalator bellowing ‘Excuse me!’ and shove past them.
If you answered b) or c), congratulations! You’re ready to live in London. And then have a heart attack at 55.
Regular readers of this site may not be surprised that I have done all of the above. Regular readers of this site will also, hopefully, know that I am all about a) Self-improvement and b) Not dying at 55, and so I’ve been thinking about how to deal with it.
The answer? Empathy.
If you’ve got 20 minutes, read David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to Kenyon college from 2005. If not, here’s the gist:
When you’re angry on the underground, or the supermarket’s crowded with people waddling around in front of you, filling their baskets with crap, or someone leaves all the plates on the leg press at the gym, or otherwise disturbs your perfect, beautiful existence, maybe you should consider the possibility that their life is harder, more stressful, or more painful than yours. Maybe the person with that shopping basket hasn’t had your opportunities to learn about nutrition, or they’re having a bad day and just need comfort food. Maybe the guy on the leg press only had half an hour to squeeze in a workout because he’s having the most stressful week of his life, and the iron is the only thing stopping him from going crazy.
Maybe, maybe not. But your reaction is what’s important. You can spend your life boiling with rage, or you can spend it empathising. One might kill you, the other might make you a better person. In the words of DFW:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
Maybe that sounds patronising. I certainly don’t – and can’t – do it all the time. But I’m trying, Ringo. And when you’re ready for level two, check out this TED talk by sociology professor Sam Richards, in which he’ll try to take you through empathy on a bigger, tougher scale. And since I don’t have a better closer, I’ll steal his:
‘Step out of your tiny little world. Step into the tiny little world of somebody else. And then do it again and again and again. And suddenly all these tiny little worlds, they come together in this complex web. And they build a big, complex world. And suddenly, without realising it, you’re seeing the world differently. Everything has changed.’
No drugs required.
HOMEWORK: Seriously, read that speech and watch that TED talk. And if you’ve still got a taste for expanding your empathy after that, read Scarcity. It’s the best book I’ve read all year, and a real insight into the brain-science of why people act in a way that’s illogical and infuriating, especially under conditions of stress. And, of course, when you get angry at someone this week, consider why they might be acting the way they are. It won’t happen overnight, but it might eventually change your world.