Your Sofa’s Not a Strategy

Being truthful, a lot of us love the feeling of a cancelled plan. The phone ping when we can’t be arsed, letting us know our mate’s too knackered to meet for a drink is akin to a grown-up snow day. Tracksuit and TV on, retreat to the sofa: protect our peace.

The Trap of Therapy-Speak 

A hearty slice of the modern cake of self-care is verging on solipsism. For the non-philosophy nerds, solipsism is the lonely idea that only our mind is sure to exist. It’s the ultimate version of Main Character Syndrome: the belief that our internal capacity and comfort are the only things that truly matter. The rest of the world (and your obligations towards it) is just background noise.

Boundaries in life are crucial for high-performers. That’s a given. But a lot of therapy-speak has moved from the chaise-longue into our daily choices. We now use it to justify avoiding minor commitments, prioritising personal comfort over what it means to live in communion with others. Going to a mate’s birthday party should not be a chore. Supporting them at their race or gig, even though we’ve got the new Peaky Blinders to watch at home, shouldn’t feel like a burden.

The certainty of regularity at home can be brilliant to recover from a hectic day; it can also become a habitual velvet rut of repetition, mindless consumption and the minimisation of what could otherwise be a fuller, more colourful life.

The ROI Siren Call: Embracing Negative Capability

We’ve become obsessed with “ROI" (Return on Investment) for our social lives. We look at a Thursday night Birthday invite and think: Will the conversation be life-changing? Can I really eat Chinese food twice in one week? Or… should I just stay in? 

Saying no on occasion when life’s wringing us dry is, of course, totally justifiable. But turning down plans because they’re mildly inconvenient is tantamount to hiding from the world. Engagement summons potential, who could you meet, what world-view could be challenged, what stories are left in the book of someone else?

The late, great, John Keats coined a term for this in 1817, negative capability. The ability to live “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” That, he said, describes a “man of achievement.”

In modern terms, it’s the ability to go to the party even though it might be a total shambles. It’s the capacity to sit through a shit event without checking your watch every five minutes. To stay in the awkward, unpredictable gap of a real-world experience, rather than always doing the mental arithmetic to determine whether something’s worth it.

Attention, the Rarest Form of Generosity

We’re all currently being force-fed a diet of outrage and "breaking” news that leaves us perpetually drained. It’s no wonder our knee-jerk reaction is increasingly to pull up the drawbridge, cancelling on people because we don’t have the bandwidth.

But Simone Weil, the French philosopher argued that attention is far more than a cognitive resource. It’s a moral act. She believed that the ability to see someone else as they are without centring yourself is the purest form of love.

When we let ourselves off the hook because we’re supposedly protecting our energy, when in reality we just can’t be arsed, we’re atrophying, losing the ability to proffer service to anyone outside of our immediate bubble. At ZAAG we talk of capacity often. A subjective measurement of this is the stability to hold someone else’s reality amongst our own even when our load is feeling heavy. A deep and full life can’t exist in a vacuum.

Adaptation Through Demand

We’ve been sold a lie that energy is a finite pile of coins we must hoard. The reality is that our nervous system is a machine that strengthens with use. Adaptation, the process of adjusting to demand before returning to baseline, only happens when there’s demand to meet. Work should not be swallowing up our entire being, nor should training or self-care.

Of course, our tribe is important, our inner circle, the five people we spend the most time with, or whatever other synonym you’ve seen on LinkedIn today. But there’s a world outside of that full of people who deserve attention in order to create a life that isn’t small and dull.

Service is a high-level skill. It’s the transition from a self-focused survival state to a system-level contribution. When we only show up for the people who refill our cup, we’re just treating relationships like vending machines. Real performance, the kind that actually changes things, requires the stability to show up for the community, the neighbourhood, or the colleague who isn’t currently on track to attend your funeral but will show up dressed to the nines at the end of the day because you deigned to do something that was a little bit taxing.

Next time you hover over send on a faux “Sorry, something’s come up,” text, ask yourself if you’re protecting your capacity or just being a bit of a solipsist.

Go to the thing and risk the uncertainty. Your sofa’s not going anywhere. In fact, you might just have something worth thinking about when you next plonk yourself on it.