Sunday Scaries

Re: Election Mania

I value all responses to this newsletter, because everything I write here is a work in progress. I’m navigating this stuff as I go, and the deeper we get into uncharted political territory, the more complex it becomes to distill my thoughts down into an 800 word segment. Exposing my opinions to criticism here is how I become a better writer and thinker.

The biggest dissent to my piece about the election last week was this: When Trump tells us he will not accept the outcome of the election, we should believe him – the media is doing their job by sounding alarm bells where alarm bells are due.

I said in that newsletter that the media – an amorphous being that doesn’t really exist, I know – was pushing the narrative that Trump is going to steal our election. I said that it would be harder to steal the election than these articles were letting on, and I was worried about the impact such a one-sided narrative was having on liberal voters.

Well, a few things have happened since last week. The first was Trump’s response in the debate Tuesday to the question, how confident should we be that this will be a fair election, and what are you prepared to do over the next five plus weeks? Here’s a chunk of what he said, for those who missed it:

So don’t tell me about a free transition. As far as the ballots are concerned, it’s a disaster... They’re sending millions of ballots all over the country. There’s fraud. They found them in creeks. They found some, just happened to have the name Trump just the other day in a wastepaper basket. They’re being sent all over the place. They sent two in a Democrat area. They sent out a thousand ballots. Everybody got two ballots. This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen. The other thing, it’s nice. On November 3rd, you’re watching, and you see who won the election. And I think we’re going to do well because people are really happy with the job we’ve done. But you know what? We won’t know. We might not know for months because these ballots are going to be all over. Full Transcript

So Trump very emphatically reiterated the statements he had made the week before about the likelihood of election fraud and the need to discount mail-in ballots. My case for this being a media “narrative” seems far less compelling when it’s the reality we’re all witnessing.

The second thing is an acknowledgement that the polling I referenced last week, on the strength of our democratic values, does not capture the whole story. The Atlantic wrote about a study that found only 3.5% of voters would change their vote if their candidate behaved undemocratically. It’s easy to say something is important to you, but much harder to put that into practice when it’s your candidate on the line. As the study’s authors put it, “If you just ask people whether they like democracy, there’s a social norm that says they have to answer yes, democracy is good, 10 out of 10—and we should also stop global warming and save the whales and whatever.

So we are absolutely at risk as a country. We’re not “too big to fail,” as one friend characterized my argument from last week, and my insistence that we not all discredit the election before it happens probably feels reminiscent of some of history’s most infamous optimists and apologists, right before they hanged themselves by accommodating a tyrant. I fully recognize that Trump’s words out of Erdogan’s mouth in Turkey would lead to calls for international election monitoring, plain and simple.

I don’t have an answer here. My faith in the country and its future is genuine, and I think we would all be better served by less pessimism and more optimism. Our outrage mechanism feels fine-tuned to the point of incapacitation, and I think that’s a bad thing.

Does that mean dismissing the danger Trump poses to our democracy? No. But it does mean choosing to reinforce our democratic norms now, before the election, rather than helping him break them down. It means that every major newspaper needs to reiterate, on the front page, that mail-in ballots are not fraudulent instead of paying lip-service to what Trump has said. It means politicians need to remind their constituents to vote in every way possible, and reassure them that they will be safe doing so. It means we all need to sound a lot like Biden in last Tuesday’s debate:

Show up and vote. You will determine the outcome of this election. Vote, vote, vote. If you’re able to vote early in your state, vote early. If you’re able to vote in person, vote in person… When the votes are counted and they’re all counted, that will be accepted. If I win, that will be accepted. If I lose, that’ll be accepted. But by the way, if in fact he says, he’s not sure what he’s going to accept. Well, let me tell you something, it doesn’t matter, because if we get the votes, it’s going to be all over. He’s going to go. He can’t stay in power. It won’t happen. It won’t happen, so vote. Just make sure you understand, you have it in your control to determine what this country is going to look like the next four years. Full Transcript

And as if that weren’t enough, Trump now has coronavirus, and all attention has pivoted away from mail-in ballots and Trump’s taxes, and towards tracking the virus as it moves through our political world.

How do we even respond to this kind of information? Is it important? Clearly yes. Should we worry about it? Follow along closely? Probably not. I imagine we’d be better off with this much focus aimed at the next round of stimulus, but instead we’re given a few days cute red and green infographics from the NYT:

We’re in the middle of strange times for sure.

Sundays

I love Sundays. I probably sound like a sicko to some of you, and a liar to the rest, but I really do love them. The final day of the week is when I go on my long runs, when I buy my groceries, and when I do some cooking for the week. It’s when I can sit down with a new book, call my family and go for a nice long walk with Anne. Since quarantine, it’s also been the day when I’ve written my weekly newsletter and practiced my Spanish with my new friend, Farith. Sundays are when I get to do a lot of what I really enjoy doing.

I probably sound like a liar because Sundays are typically reserved for the Scaries, and I’ve had my fair share. In high school, Sundays were tinted with a dull gloominess that made everything less enjoyable, and at Wake Forest they were truly miserable, days spent denying the amount of work I had left to do, trying to sound like a mature adult on the phone with my parents, and hoping my cold sweats and accelerated heartrate would calm down by Monday.

In doing some cursory research for this newsletter, I came across a CBD company called Sunday Scaries that, on top of cashing in on our skyrocketing levels of anxiety, has the cleanest definition of the phenomena I’ve been able to find:

“Sunday Scaries are the feeling of stress, nervousness, and worry that many people experience on Sunday nights. They are the ping of fear that hits when you realize that the weekend is over and Monday is near – and it sucks!”

They even have a nice little timeline on their website that I’ll recreate here:

10:00am: This weekend was a blast, saw some of my besties and forgot about all of my worklife worries
12:30pm: Checked my bank account and starting to regret that extravagant brunch with the crew
2:00pm: Ummmm where has the day gone? Still debating going to the gym and afraid to check my schedule for tomorrow
6:00pm: I know I’m not supposed to go on social media… buuut I’m on social media. Currently scrolling on autopilot and feeling down
8:00pm: F*ck my life. I need my bed, Postmates, Netflix, a glass of wine and a hug from anyone

If that sounds familiar to any of you, that’s not surprising: In what appears to be the most frequently cited study on the topic, LinkedIn found that 80% of American professionals experience the Sunday Scaries each week.

I had largely considered my Scaries vanquished until this morning, when I woke up, later than usual, with a sense of dread about the upcoming work week, my still-unwritten newsletter and a handful of other irrelevant, yet suddenly urgent, worries. I laid in bed for a while, unwilling to face the day. What the hell was going on?

Much of the feeling comes from self-applied pressure, whether over something small like doing the laundry, or much larger like progressing in our careers. Alain de Botton, a contemporary philosopher, put it well in an interview with Tim Ferriss:

No wonder I get that Sunday feeling when I’m thinking, my god, I’ve got my dreams on the one hand and my reality on the other, and the gap is too large, and I feel desperate. No wonder we feel that, because that is what the whole system helps us and makes us feel. And I don’t want to say that it’s all wrong, but it is certainly very demanding… The more you know what you really want and where you’re really going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish. So the moments when your own path is at its most ambiguous, that the voices of others, the distracting chaos in which we live, the kind of social media static, that starts to loom large and become very threatening.

It becomes very easy, faced with a poorly spent Saturday and unprepared for a busy Monday, to indulge in some of the cognitive distortions that Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff believe contribute to the rising levels of anxiety and depression in young people today:

Fortune-telling: You predict the future negatively: things will get worse, or there is danger ahead. “I’ll fail that exam,” or “I won’t get the job.”

Catastrophizing: You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it. “It would be terrible if I failed.”

Negative filtering: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”

Emotional reasoning: You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”

And that’s what it always turns out to be: overblown worries that a reality check, not CBD, will do a lot to diminish. In college, I’d spend all day worried about homework, only to get to the library and be done in a couple of hours. Particularly stress-inducing Mondays have generally turned out to be way more relaxed than I expect. Things are never as difficult as they sound in our heads.

– Emmett

What I’m Reading:

How the News Took Over Reality – Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian 2019
“For a certain segment of the population, the news has come to fill up more and more time – and, more subtly, to occupy centre stage in our subjective sense of reality, so that the world of national politics and international crises can feel more important, even more truly real, than the concrete immediacy of our families, neighbourhoods and workplaces.”

What I’m Listening To:

Investing in the Only True Recession-Proof Asset: Yourself! with Lewis Howes – Bigger Pockets Podcast

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