The One 2022 Resolution For Us All
I haven't committed to resolutions in any sort of list fashion for a new year in decades.
Sure, each December's end I find myself thinking about dropping some pounds, drinking a bit more or less, writing more, walking more, calling my family more often. It usually looks like a messy note to do more stuff I know I should be doing instead of what my inclinations lead me in to most of the time. Like binge-watching Love Island or playing Spire Blast until my eyes go screwy.
After two years of COVID, social justice demands, insurrectionists, the fact the Trump won't simply die from a goddamned McDonald's fueled heart attack, economic instability, cyber-attacks, droughts, floods, bizarre heat waves followed by epic snowstorms followed by massive wildfires and urban blacks beating up old Asian ladies on video, trying to find some sort of positive, self help path forward seems impossible.
First, let's get serious. Self help has become the popular spin on complete narcissism. Do your hot yoga but quit pretending it's about empowering your agency. You're stretching on a mat in a hot room to new age music, for crissakes. This is aerobics dressed up as spiritual experience with incense.
Second, we all need to drop a few pounds. We're Americans and we are the fattest bunch of numbnuts the world has seen since the high guard of the Roman Empire. Note that shed a few pounds and eat significantly less food don't sound the same but the latter is required for the former and, in the face of a bag of Southwest Spiced pretzel sticks and a delicious hoppy brew, the abstract of losing weight without depriving yourself of Cheetos seems more in tune with a pandemic procrastination.
Third, in order to do the thing you resolve to in 2022 it needs to be simple. The more complex the task, the harder it is to both accomplish and receive the rewards required to incentivize further behavior.
Here it is, kids.
The one New Year's resolution for us all is:
STOP WHINING.
If the past two years have honed a skill in society worth noting it is our facility at complaining without doing anything about the source of the complaint. The Collegiate Utopians whine about pronouns, fatshaming, Halloween costumes, being required to read and write in order to be admitted to school, and that work is, you know, work. The Good Ol' Boy Traditionalists whine about cancel culture, immigration, government overreach and the tendency for Democrats to eat babies.
I look around and the people changing things for the better have no time to whine because they're doing things to move the needle forward. These are the folks looking for solutions rather than problems, minding their own business, working with people rather than against them. They're also smarter than the rest of us because whining makes our brains smaller.
A 1996 Stanford study suggests it is time to stop whining. Complaining, or even being complained to, for 30 minutes or more can physically damage the brain.
Researchers used high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and found “links between long-term stressful life experiences, long-term exposure to hormones produced during stress, and shrinking of the hippocampus,” the study’s authors wrote.
The worst part is that the average person complains between 15 to 30 times a day.
So, when you resolve to stop complaining about shit that simply doesn't matter—your offended sensibilities, your demand for respect, your punitive version of justice—your brain stops diminishing and you will find you suddenly have more time to accomplish things.
Somewhere along the line, maybe all the way back in the very beginnings of the country's ferocious founding, Americans decided to adopt the rhetoric of the distinctly masculine. When we want change, we fight. We go to war. We win battles. We create weapons and beat those we disagree with.
This theme carries over to "battles against diseases," "wars" on everything from alcohol and drugs to the idea of terrorism. It seems we are perpetually in some state of aggression against any fabricated or real enemy.
As a feminist, I suggest we reject this terminology. I believe we can embrace a more feminine model and, instead of destroy and battle, we can build. The idea that we can "fight" the weather is silly; instead we build shelter from it. Build. Create coalitions. Construct roads to empathy and trust among even those we have chosen to despise.
Yeah, stop whining and build something rather tear things down.
