Every week, my inbox fills with a version of the same sentence. People tell me they’re doing okay. And then comes the word that gives the whole thing away.
They’re doing okay despite the world being on fire.
Despite. It means the verdict is already in. The fire isn’t up for debate anymore. It’s just the conditions now, what you wake up to. The only question left is how you’re holding up inside it.
I see the verdict spelled out plainly, too. Not in those emails, but everywhere else:
The world is a dumpster fire.
Life out there is a shit show.
In my book, there’s a section called “Extreme Language Causes Extreme Emotions.” (Hat tip to Christian Conte for the phrase). The point is that the words we use don’t only report how we feel, they help build it. Tell yourself your sore back is killing you and a tight muscle starts to feel like a genuine threat. Tell yourself the world is a dumpster fire and you’ve decided, in three words, where you’re going to live.
Last week, the New York Times ran an article on stress and perspective, and I was glad to be part of it. The writer, Jancee Dunn, opened with her father.
When he visits her, he inspects the house. Then he delivers the findings. Last week, he came up from the basement looking grim and announced that there was mold down there. “Get that inspected, pronto,” he told her, “or it’s your funeral.”
Her father isn’t a pessimist exactly. He’s something more recognizable than that. He’s the part of all of us that takes a real thing – a damp basement, a sore back, a rough week of news – and reaches for the most extreme frame on the shelf. Mold becomes a death sentence. A bad week becomes a dumpster fire. It feels like we are taking the threat seriously. But most of the time, it’s just the loudest word within arm’s reach, and we grab it because it’s loud.
“Dumpster fire” describes something real, but the problem isn’t that it’s negative. The problem is that it’s a half pretending to be the whole.
A well-known phrase in Eastern cosmology speaks of “the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows.” In this view, “ten thousand” stands in for everything, the full range of human experience. And the idea is that all those ups and downs are usually happening at the same time. Not in sequence. At once.
We tend to lean toward the negative. We zoom in on what’s wrong and lose sight of everything that isn’t. One bad moment, a fight with your partner, a headline, can take over the whole mental landscape, and suddenly you don’t notice the beautiful day, the kind thing a coworker said, the lunch you actually enjoyed.
In my book, I suggest a small fix for this, one magic word: and. My car is in the shop and my friend is nice enough to pick me up for lunch. My job is a struggle and my family is healthy. The country feels frightening to me right now and the dog and the little girl staring each other down in line at the coffee shop are the best thing I’ll see all day.
We are aiming to see reality more clearly. The world is hard, and there is good in it. We don’t have to get rid of the bad things out there. We often can’t. But when “dumpster fire” is the only frame we’ve got, we’ve agreed not to see the rest.
When you catch yourself reaching for the loudest word, it’s worth asking whether it’s also the most accurate one. Most of the time, the honest answer is bigger and more mixed than the word you chose.
Try This: For one week, notice when you describe the world, or your day, or your back, in its most extreme terms. Dumpster fire. Killing me. Disaster. When you catch one, don’t correct it for the sake of being positive. Just ask: Is this accurate? Is this the whole picture? Then try the sentence again with and in it. See what shows up on the other side of the word.
Reflect on This: What’s one hard thing that’s true for you right now, and what’s one good thing that’s also true, at the very same time?
What is your “AND” statement?
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