#11: 4 Ways To Deprogram From Urgency Culture
BRB, have to fix my brain
Laid Off Life is a place of respite for the weary workforce. Whether you’re unemployed, on strike or just trying to make it through the workday, let this be your 5-minute mental break from the grind of late-stage capitalism.
In this weekly newsletter, you’ll find musings and insights about work and life, things I’m finding useful (or useless) in my job search, gems from my DMs, clickable bits n’ bobs, and recs about worthy ways to waste time - from articles to TV shows and podcasts and beyond.
BRB, Deprogramming My Brain 🧠
Since becoming sans employment, I’ve been doing a lot of what I’ve been referring to as deprogramming.”
People usually follow that up with the question, “Deprogramming from what?”
The truth is, it’s taken me several months to articulate — even to myself — what deprogramming means for me.
Q: Isn’t deprogramming for people who have been in cults?
A: Yes. Time to rewatch Holy Smoke.
Q: Was I in a cult?
A: Companies are cults that you’re paid to be part of.
I thought the symptoms of burnout I was experiencing (insomnia, brain fog, chronic neck pain, lack of motivation) would magically disappear as soon as I stopped working. Remove the cause, remove the symptoms, right?
But even several months along, they were hanging on for dear life.
Why tho?
If I had to boil the deprogramming down to one thing that I needed to rid myself of body, mind, and spirit, it would be the persistent feeling that everything needed to be done RIGHT NOW.
I think my addled brain was trying to compensate for the lack of serotonin in the absence of non-stop Slack notifications.
My mind was filled — day and night — with spooling lists of the things that needed to be taken care of urgently. I felt suffocated by how much I needed to do, how quickly, and how few of the things on my list I’d accomplished — whether they were actually important or not, whether there was a real or imagined deadline, without consideration for how much time or energy they took. Everything from learning to play tennis to finishing the novel I’ve been working on for several years warranted an equal sense of urgency in my mind.
This VICE article breaks down the toxicity of urgency culture in the workplace and how it affects mental and physical health. As a journalist interviewed for the piece explains it:
“It’s a chain reaction – if someone is pressuring me into delivering something in the next half-hour, I will automatically end up pressurising the person who I have to take the input from.”
God, I know this feeling too well. The pressure to do things urgently for years on end has rendered me the equivalent of an anxious sloth — quick to worry, slow to move. A state of being that followed me into unemployment.
This anxious sloth state is a reality for so many workers and out-of-workers but it can be extra prevalent in certain industries. The hustle truly can feel like life and death! In digital and social media, for example, the rule “you have to be first or you’ll be irrelevant” is the first industry tenet that you learn. It’s the fuel that keeps the Internet chugging along.
I have friends who work in the medical field, where the work they do is actually life and death, but for most of us, not so much. Having industry leaders, peers, or LinkedIn tell us non-urgent things are urgent, doesn’t make it true.
So, now that I recognize I’ve been brainwashed, how do I un-brainwash myself from this toxic type of thinking — especially when my livelihood seemingly depends on buying into the lie?
I don’t have all the answers yet, but for starters, I’ve put myself on the following deprogramming protocol:
Prioritize the things that are most important to me, regardless of anyone else’s timeline. This is a big one for me. I let other people’s timelines take precedence over mine. No more!
Spend as much time as I need to do tasks well instead of doing them quickly. My survival in my last job depended on me doing everything quickly, sometimes doing multiple things at once quickly. This didn’t always yield a quality of work I was proud of. I want to be proud of my work going forward, which might mean it takes longer.
Relegate my phone to a place where it shall not be heard or seen when it’s time to focus. I have the privilege of remembering life before cell phones. It was so much easier to be present. Nothing was going on unless I was right there experiencing it. We can never go back, but we can try to take mini-vacations from our always-online mentality.
Avoid comparing myself to others. (Ahem, LinkedIn). As a job seeker, LinkedIn is the most insidious for falling into the self-comparison hole. Everyone has their own triggers for self-comparison. If you know something triggers your self-worth or gives you a case of the shoulds, unsubscribe.
These sound like simple antidotes to a pernicious problem, but when you’ve spent more than a decade being conditioned to salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs every time you hear the ding of a notification, it’s not so easy to do. On the days I am able to stick to my deprogramming protocol, I magically feel happier, more energetic, more purposeful, and more hopeful that my Etsy Job Spell is actually going to work.
Worthy Time Wasters
Here are my weekly recs to combat doom scrolling.
LISTEN: TrueAnon
Speaking of cults…TrueAnon is described as a “podcast about your enemies made by your friends.” This pod truly has it all. Comedy ✅ Conspiracy Theories ✅ Current Affairs ✅. I just finished listening to episode 233 which blew my mind. 🤯
WATCH: Starstruck (MAX)
If you haven’t already seen Starstruck, I’d like to bring to your attention this ah-mazing show about a young woman who has a one-night-stand with a guy she doesn’t realize is a famous actor. It’s awkward, hilarious, and delightful in the best romcommy way. Season 3 just started streaming on MAX. Avoiding spoilers here. Season 1 trailer above.
Link-A-Palooza
This week’s clickable bits n’ bobs
A breakdown of why your latte costs $7 now // 2023 International Pet Photography contest winners! // Thieves who stole three sacred figurines from a Hopi reservation in Arizona find themselves haunted by vengeful spirits…rightfully so! //690 new words have been added to the Dictionary — including the word MID // Slime! Slime! Slime! // Did Taylor Swift use SEO to distract us all from judging her carbon footprint? // “Love Is Blind” contestant claims she was sexually assaulted while filming the series // NYC’s first psychedelic library // Did you know that Kim Kardashian actually dated Travis Barker before he was married to her sister? 😬
💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻 Don’t keep all this fun to yourself! 🤸🏻♀️🤸🏻♀️🤸🏻♀️
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👋🏼 Hi. My name is Ami and I’m unemployed. This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To ensure that I keep writing it, consider becoming a paid subscriber!