What’s the difference between a hobby and a hobbyhorse? I think it’s a matter of whether or not you’re able to let the thing go. A hobby is a pastime, a hobbyhorse is an obsession.
People are creatures of habit. Some habits help get us through hard times by allowing us to navigate through the turbulence on autopilot, but it is generally better to try to base behavior on realistic awareness of what is happening around us rather than programmed reactive patterns of thinking.
Unfortunately, few of us escape childhood without developing habits that, while very useful in helping us cope with the peculiar circumstances of life in the home we grow up in, often are blocks to happiness later on in life.
You don’t have to go any further than the comments posted after online blogs to see the effects of people getting gummed up in balls of nasty emotions. What people refer to as the polarization of American politics to me seems more like watching the entire population of the country falling in slow motion down an enormous flight of stairs, tripped up by ropes they’ve wrapped around their own emotional legs.
Frighteningly large numbers of people are nursing habitual anger and resentment, self-medicating themselves with rage directed outward to escape—God, I don’t know what. Lack of love? Overpowering feelings of isolation? Fear of their own feelings of powerlessness? Fear of their neighbors? Fear of their own shadow?
Whatever the origins, the habit ain’t healthy. I say round up these people and get them all into 12 step. What’s the addiction? Are they rage-aholics? Politicaholics? Wing-nutaholics? Anxiety addicts? Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn’t.
In any case, I’ve become convinced that nobody is going to win the mid-term elections this fall. A USA Today poll last week found two-thirds of those surveyed describing themselves as “angry” about conditions in this country, the highest percentage in the decade the question has been asked. By nearly 2-1, they would rather vote for a candidate who has never served in Congress over one with experience.
It looks more and more certain that most people will vote no this fall, and that is bad news. If this is a nation of rage-holics, this election will play out as the fullest national expression yet of the classic reaction of angry addicts of all stripes to all of life’s setbacks—“I’ll show you, I’ll hurt me.”
This country is trapped in addictive reaction. That defines the hair-trigger defensiveness that sends people into a rage at any challenge to the way they’ve been doing things. It’s what turns couples counseling into an argument designed to prove to the therapist that the other partner is the real crazy one, rather than a search for ways to get out of such knock-down-and-drag outs when they explode in the privacy of the home, where there’s no referee around to make the final call.
Therapy—and the coming to serenity and peace that the therapist and client together should be working to achieve—has nothing to do with who gets kicked off the island, who gets fired, who’s the last man standing. Right now in America, nobody’s interested in serenity, and nobody’s playing by the rules. The therapist is nowhere to be seen. The ref has thrown up his hands in disgust and left the playing field.
We’re in the middle of a spastic, thrashing, hysterical free-for-all that will throw a lot of people out of office who may not know what we should be doing about this mess, and replace them with people who almost certainly will not know what to do.
Most people who go to the polls will be there to vote against what we’ve got. Not enough people will be there to vote for what we might have. We’ve got plenty of no votes; what we need are more people willing to vote yes.
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