Doldrums

On Phoning It In

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 

If you studied the British Romantics in college (or whenever) you probably had a preference for either Wordsworth or Coleridge over the other one. There were more than two British Romantic poets (there were six that mattered, actually) but they came in two pairs and then two odd-men-out and you had to have a favorite from each pair. You had to like either Wordsworth or Coleridge better, and you had to like either Keats or Shelley better.  I didn’t make the rules. Nobody liked William Blake the best and Byron was actively the worst.

I didn’t then and still don’t understand why their movement was called Romanticism, because it has very little to do with what I think of as “romance” and mostly it is about imagination and nature and occasionally it’s about a guy whose grandiose plan comes to folly like (eg, the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Ozymandius).

Anyway that’s why I mentioned the Romantics, because I always liked Coleridge better than Wordsworth and he wrote a whole poem about a ship stuck in the doldrums, which (nautically) refers to the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a cloudy belt around Earth’s middle with little wind where ships get becalmed.

On a related note, I have a pet parrot in the house (Ruby) and while I would never harm Ruby, she is very loud and annoying and as an adult and a parrot owner I sympathize with the Ancient Mariner who got so frustrated with being stuck in the doldrums that he shot an obnoxious bird out of frustration (BIG!!!! mistake).

In a metaphorical sense, to be in the doldrums refers to being in a state of slow or no growth, of inactivity, inertia, inactivity, low spirits, or stagnation. This is the sense it was used in The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, a sort of modern-day Gulliver’s Travels, if the 1960s were the modern day. Protagonist Milo finds his car mired in The Doldrums home of the Lethargarians, who lay around and sleep and eat all the time. This is also something I appreciate more now, as an adult, than I did in my wasted youth. (In my best Liz Lemon voice: I want to go to there.)

If you have read The Phantom Tollbooth you know what I mean, and if not I will herein provide spoilers, because this book (and movie) are outside the statute of limitations on spoilers, so it doesn’t count. This is actually a whole book about the importance of being industrious of mind and body and the perils of laziness, aimlessness, and boredom. It’s a really cool book and a really terrible message to send young people because actually being “lazy” and aimless sometimes is great. (“Lazy” in scare quotes because Laziness Does Not Exist.) Stagnation is not the worst thing. There’s something way worse.

This time of year I always find myself a bit becalmed because the weather is getting cooler (I’m always cold), the sun sets early in the day (I’m always tired), and all I want to do is eat soup and drink tea and hibernate (I should get my thyroid checked). That is why you’re getting a low-effort Shelf Life today instead of a High Effort Shelf Life™ on a more engaging subject. I know from experience that readers like low-effort Shelf Lifes the best so every now and then I try to dial it in for you. I like to give the people what they want.

Today’s low-effort Shelf Life is an essay on why it’s good to let yourself linger in the doldrums for a while if you find yourself there. To lounge around with the Lethargarians, doing as the locals do (that is, nothing much). To spend some time on a ship stranded at the equator (but refrain from shooting any birds!!!!!). Not everybody is going to have this during the fall/winter. Some people probably have their doldrums in the height of summer when people with normally active thyroids find it too hot to do anything and my extremities are finally beginning to thaw out. But most folks probably experience this at some point—an overwhelming desire to do nothing, possibly accompanied by a fear that you’re letting your life pass by without making the most of it and perhaps with a side order of guilt (especially if you were raised Catholic).

Maybe you’re not writing enough (writing is how this related to the overarching Shelf Life theme); maybe you’re not exercising enough, not socializing enough, or even not putting in the effort to excel at your job like you usually do. As a person who is usually burning the candle at at least three or four different ends, when I’m in a low-energy period I might be able to focus on only one thing and not keep all the balls up in the air. Like I go from juggling (many balls in air) to volleyball (one ball in air with support from bikini-clad friends).

If that sounds familiar, read on and then bookmark till you need to read again.

Industriousness Is Overrated

The idea that constant, diligent effort is a high (or the highest) human virtue is ridiculous. Look: We’re only generations removed from subsistence agriculture as the dominant way of life globally. Like a few generations. Subsistence agriculture only yielded to market capitalism in the US and Europe in the late 19th/early 20th century. Like a hundred years ago. Like your grandparents’ parents’ lifetimes. Subsistence agriculture meant daily, hard farm labor to grow enough food to live with enough surplus to trade for the things you couldn’t grow or make yourself. It was the norm to have to work all day, day in and day out, to survive.

Then the world had a huge leap forward in technology that changed the way people work and earn their living. Big shift from agriculture to manufacturing. We have technology (bio and mechanical) that makes farming less labor intensive than it was 100 and 200 years ago. You need fewer people farming to feed the population. More people manufacturing goods. Then a further shift from manufacturing to knowledge work in the mid-to-late 20th century to now. 

There’s still an expectation that people work all the time because busy-ness is as a virtue. Like being  “hardworking” and having “a good work ethic” are moral values and wanting to rest or take time away from income-producing activities to do other things are moral failings: “laziness” (which does not exist).

But it’s during those nonworking minutes and hours that people get to pursue the things they’re passionate about. Some people are lucky enough to be passionate about their work and that’s great, but many or most people are working to earn income so we can live. There’s a reason that for most of history humankind’s “Master” artists and creatives have been wealthy people—these are the people whose energy was not used up every day working for subsistence.

Now technology has met us halfway (more than halfway) to make our work efficient to a degree that was unimaginable 30 or 50 years ago. In 1999 I had a job as a secretary at a nonprofit downtown and part of my job was to take recordings made by my boss, use the Dictaphone to transcribe them, print the transcription out on letterhead, and take them to him to sign, and then at the bottom of the letter beneath his signature would be this:

SS/cf

If you don’t recognize that, it means “this letter was written by Stewy Smith (SS) and typed by Catherine Forrest (cf). This was a thing you really had to do back in the day, presumably so if there was a mistake in the memo somewhere Mr Smith would know who to blame it on.

Anyway today 99 percent of those steps are eliminated and even CEOs understand how to use email. It has only been twenty-three years since then.

But all that time technology saves for us doesn’t go into our (workers’) pockets, so to speak, at least in the United States. It just means businesses expect more work from the same or fewer people. The idea that hard work and industriousness are especial virtues comes from a time when hard work and industriousness were easier to achieve and maintain.

Anyway that’s why industriousness is overrated. People will never be industrious enough to satisfy corporate demand for productivity. Which brings me to the second point:

Creativity Doesn’t Have to Be Commoditized

The next thing that happens in this late-stage capitalist hellscape in which we’re living is that everything we do outside of income-generating work has to be examined for its suitability as a side hustle. Oh, you write? How much money do you make from your books? Are you selling your short stories? Why aren’t you publishing this? You like to draw? Are you selling artwork on Society6? Taking commissions on Twitter?

This is because people don’t understand (A) why you would create something if not to profit from it, and, more to the point, (B) if you enjoy doing something why are you not trying to make it into your income source?

It’s fine to produce how much you produce, whether that’s at work or at your creative hobbies. The idea that everyone should be reaching for that next breakthrough so they can produce more, or climb up another rung on whatever ladder they’re scaling, or get to the “next level” of whatever it is they do, is burning people out.

Let me explain: I know a guy who had the most competent assistant in the world. She was excellent at her job; best of best. She kept this guy functioning at the highest level and his whole division of the org running smoothly. Never any problems. All administrative business was taken care of the instant it appeared. Everyone adored her and recognized that she was at the very top of her game, the game being “Executive Assistant.” Every year at her annual review he would demand to know how she intended to grow and expand her role in the next year. She confided in me that she told him that she felt she was at the top of her game, if there was something she needed to improve he should tell her so, but otherwise she was satisfied with her role and her success at that role. “If you’re not growing, you’re dying. How are you going to keep getting better and doing more?”

I have to assume she got tired of hearing that question because she works for a different executive at a different company now, and “if you’re not growing you’re dying” guy is hiring.

Burnout Is No Joke

I talked about burnout a little bit in a recent article, possibly as recent as Tuesday? In the doldrums every day blends into the next one. Burnout is not a joke. It can wreck a person’s career and it can also wreck organizations that overwork their best folks and then hemorrhage institutional knowledge when their people leave to go do something else.

When you’re burnt out on something, you can’t just push through it to get un–burnt out. You have to step down and heal from the burnout and then work back up to the level of activity you have before. It’s just like when you push yourself too hard in sports or the gym and you injure yourself and then you have to do some PT and recover and then you work back up to the level of fitness you had before. Whereas in the same amount of time, if you didn’t push so hard and didn’t injure yourself, you would be at a higher level of fitness now because you didn’t experience a setback.

Having been down both of those roads (sports injury and work burnout) and had the good fortune to be able to recover from both, I will tell you candidly it’s better not to get injured or burnt out in the first place than to experience it and have to recuperate. To that end, with anything you do a lot of—work, or writing, or painting, or knitting, (or exercise), or whatever it is, you should watch out for the signs of oncoming or impending burnout. Let me tell you what some of those are.

• Difficulty concentrating or paying attention because you feel like you don’t have the energy to do it.

• Losing interest in, and motivation to do, your work or creative work, when you previously were interested and motivated.

• Feeling no sense of satisfaction or accomplishment in your work or creative work, even when you complete something.

• Feeling generally tired and lacking energy.

In other words, all those feelings you get when you’re “in the doldrums.”

To sum up, that’s why I recommend feeding a slow, low-energy period of time with rest, relaxation, and leisure activities that you’re not trying to turn into an income stream. As I said, you can’t always push forward through this kind of pre-burnout fatigue; you have to kind of lean into the direction it’s already going so you can recover and get back to feeling normal.

Feeling burnt out on writing? Don’t write for a while. It’s fine. You’re still a real writer. You don’t stop being a writer—you don’t have to turn in your “writer” card or change how you identify yourself—just because you’re taking a break from writing right now. Looking at your knitting makes you want to cry? Shove it in the closet for a few weeks then look at it again. You’re still a knitter—or a fiber artist if you prefer.

What about with the things you can’t stop doing, like your job? Probably a professional counselor can help better than I can, but having been there my advice is: Do the minimum for a while to get by at your job until you recover enough to go back to excelling. Maybe that means you don’t get a stellar annual review this year or a big raise or promotion because you weren’t “putting in 110 percent”—which, ick, vom dot com—but it’s better to stagnate than to decay.

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