Grief Padding Your Annoyances
Today I’d like to talk about the little, tiny, mildly infuriating annoyances in our lives. I had a grand metaphor all worked out about making pearls out of those annoyances. Just like an oyster creates a pearl out of an annoying grain of sand. Unfortunately, my wife informed me that the process of making pearls commercially is not something pleasant to talk about (or experience I would guess), so I’m going to coin another term for all of you.
Your phrase of the day is “Grief padding”, as in finding the tiny annoyances in your life and changing/covering them with something pleasant to make them easier to live with.
The first step in the process is remarkably easy — get annoyed by something.
Some of you just got annoyed with how inane that first step was. Good, use it. Feel the heat of the emotion and fire up your resolve to finally do something about it. I would bet $100 that you’ve been annoyed by that thing before. That thing has been a pain in the rump for a long time now and it’s high time someone (else) did something about it. Stupid thing.
The second step is a little trickier — figure out the root cause of your annoyance.
I agree with you that most of the time your kids are annoying, but that’s not their default setting. Sometimes they’re asleep. The biggest challenge for step 2 is not simply venting your spleen and moving on with your life. Most people stop at the complaining phase, but you aren’t most people. You’re here for (marginally) good advice, and you’ll get your money’s worth.
Break down that annoyance and the context for your feeling. Someone is running down the hall during your conference call = they’re being inconsiderate to you. You bought an expired product from the grocery store = your investment of time and money was wasted, and you don’t have the item you wanted. You’re annoyed because something happened to you. Put it in context — was that thing actually done to you deliberately, or was that your reaction to what happened? You can choose to act instead of yell. Yes, I know that yelling is an action too, but it’s rarely a helpful action.
(Side note — some of my regular readers may have sensed the Stoicism connection there. Congratulations, you are now my favorite reader. Don’t tell my wife or mother.)
The third step is to figure out how to pad that grief
You decided to act in order to reduce your annoyance. What needs to happen now? That’s right — do something about it. You know the root cause, so you should have a rough idea of how to fix it. If you’re upset that you bought expired food, tell yourself you still spend the extra 10 seconds in store next time to check the date. Minimal investment for a less annoying future. Does your knee hurt? Wear a knee brace or finally call the doctor. Wear that brace like a badge of honor. You got that injury in the battle of “Sugared-up 4-year-old Hill” and you deserve some respect. Got a spreadsheet that steals hours of your life each week? Break the spreadsheet into its core components and ask for help on the pieces. I’ve lost track of how many “we’ve always done it like this” files that I’ve streamlined and utterly shocked the file owners that pain relief was possible.
The fourth step is deceptively simple — keep it up
Keep finding those areas of your life that annoy you and keep finding an option to prevent the problem or minimize the pain. Picture your future self yelling about something minor and resolve to take another path. Explain to your kids that running around during a conference call means you can’t focus. If they aren’t grasping the concept, then wait until they’re playing a game and run past them repeatedly. It’ll help you teach a lesson and get your daily steps in. Double win.
Your mantra for the weekend is “don’t endure it — improve it”. Look around your house and I guarantee you’ll find half a dozen things that you’ve learned to live with (family members not included). Let this article be the kick in the pants you need to try something new. If it doesn’t work, then you can blame me. If it does work, then I guess I’ll see you back here next time.
-Philip
