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What, Me Worry? Yes, Me Worry.

Caution - long thoughtful post ahead.

For some reason over the last month nearly every time I start really worrying, or notice some else with a great deal of worry or frustration, I've been struck by the fact that worry has become a lifestyle accessory, no different than an iPhone, a mortgage, the decision to be a Republican or Democrat, or going out to a nice dinner.

Worry equals concern that something you did in the past won't cause your future to be exactly what you want it to be. Or, it is concern that a decision you are making right now will not lead to your life being exactly what you picture it to be. Whether you are worried about if your child will grow up to be a reliable member of society, or if your DVR is taping "Lost", or if you are going to get out of debt, or how you're going to get back at the guy in the office who's being a total a-hole, or how you'll manage to pick up your prescriptions during lunch break, or if your business/relationship/life is going to succeed or fail, you are either looking back or looking forward and creating an imaginary future that you can then be concerned about.

Until a few thousand years ago (invention of agriculture) every single human being on the planet was employed in the same business - finding food and shelter. In that context, worry is a good thing - it's actually a biological function. Having an ego that makes you feel important combined with a healthy sense of concern of the future = finding food and shelter = survival of the species. We hear a lot about how "fight or flight" is a leftover response from our primal past, and how the constant activation of our adrenal systems ("fight or flight") leads to stress and physical breakdown in modern society. But we don't often hear about how worry is also a relic of our past.

Think about this for a minute: Several billion people on the planet are worried about whether they are going to starve to death today. That's something to be worried about. Everything else will work itself out if you make a series of the right decisions. Worry does NOT help you make right decisions. Worry takes energy from being a rational, emotionally grounded human being and redirects it into the complicated business of helping your ego think that the future cannot exist without you in it. We all know that this is simply false - at some point the future will most definitely exist without you in it, so your presence in the lifestream at this exact moment, while glorious, incomprehensible, and golden, does not guarantee you anything beyond this precise shining moment. So without worry, I become free to act based on the reality of now without being encumbered by a dimly imagined future full of problems or triumphs that rarely manifest as I think they will.

So, why worry? Well, for one thing I suspect there truly is a biological component to worry - it may be what compelled us to find food and shelter before these things were woven into the fabric of towns and cities. Worry is also a way for my ego to assert its false sense of immortality. Worry is also a way to avoid responsibility for the present moment. If I'm worried about my past, or I'm worrying about my future, I get to avoid facing the fears, hopes, dreams of the right now, and I get to make arms length decisions about my life based on my deluded ego ramblings. For example, I'm not sure I am making sense in this post, and if I let myself I could easily become concerned that people reading this will think "Who the hell is he to think he has the insight to write this?" I could even imagine people laughing at me or calling me a fake. All that worrying would do is dilute my clarity in the moment of typing each word; it might even keep me from writing altogether. And that is the beginning of the death of the now in favor of the survival of the maybe.

So why do I call worry a luxury? Because anything that we carry around with us that we don't actually need is by definition a luxury. And for nearly everyone reading this, you live a life far removed from the fear of starving or not having a place to sleep. You might be able to convince yourself that you should worry about those things, but you probably aren't really facing going hungry or homeless. And even if you suddenly did become hungry or homeless, the time to worry about that is then, not now. Living in the warm embrace of modern life and then expending your incredible life energy worrying about trivial (and even not so trivial) things is a kind of hoarding. It's a waste of resources, literally. It take so much raw material to keep first-worlders alive (considerably more than it takes to keep alive the people who actually have something to worry about).

Have we gone to all the trouble of wasting and destroying vast tracts of the earth and other human's environments and energy, to provide ourselves with fabulously outfitted environments full of artificial light, thinking machines, food distribution systems, and machines that move us around, just so I can be comfortable enough to concot ever more worrisome fantasies about my future? Has worry ("I'm worried, I'm Stressed, I'm too busy, What if?") become just another lifestyle accessory, a luxury I allow myself without realizing how grotesque it would seem when faced with things I should genuinely be worried about?

I see someone at work with their face screwed into a mask of worry over whether what they've done will be acceptable - I listen to them pre-apologizing for the problem they think might happen that they think they might be blamed for (aka "covering the ass"); I catch myself worrying about if I'll catch up on sleep tonight, or if I've done enough at the office today, or why I can't seem to stay in touch with my family enough, or if I'll ever have exactly the body I want to.

And then I realize, none of these things matter. And that the energy I've take to think about them could have been better spent being present, doing them or not, being here and compassionate and radiant, rather than there and distant and dim.