The Cycle of Outrage: Exhausted by Patterns

    

        Strange confession: I am exhausted by patterns.

            I don’t know if it has to do with my mental health struggles or if it’s just something that’s always been deeply ingrained in my personality, but patterns exhaust me. I’m not talking about leopard print. I’m talking about the endless predictable scripts through which we interact. I’m talking about everything from the way we interact with older relatives to how controversial moments play out in the cultural sphere. I don’t know why, but these patterns have always exhausted me.

I distinctly remember a moment in first grade: I had gotten into trouble, again, and I knew exactly what was going to happen: My teacher would take me by the wrist (always the wrist) and pull into the hall with the person I offended, make sure to look evenly at both of us as she scolded us even though I was the only offender, force us to apologize to each other, and look for signs that we would be getting along now. Even as a six-year-old, this drove me nuts. It was always the same script, and it never actually resolved anything. It was just what you did in situations like this. I’d still hit somebody or said something wrong, and I would again, because I was an aggressive kid and that wasn’t really ever addressed properly. But it seems that no matter what I did, so long as it wasn’t severe, the same script would play out, and that, somehow, left everyone satisfied. The teacher tuned out after “I’m sorry” was uttered. The child I’d wronged would toss their little shoulders, my egregious offense forgotten. And it drove me nuts. I felt like I was trapped in a Groundhog Day-style cycle.

Eventually I began to manipulate the whole mess—to “cut through the bullshit.” The moment a playmate’s eyes began to well up with tears, or the moment I struck someone, I began to play the pattern before the teacher could grab me. I’d bow my head, apologize, give my playmate a hug, and move on. Everyone seemed satisfied with this. The underlying issue remained: I continued to be a bully until I was twelve or thirteen. But so long as I played out the script, everyone seemed satisfied and moved on.

I am now decades older than that temperamental little first-grader, and those decades have taught me that these infuriating patterns are legion: We use them for everything. Everything. Discussion with your boss? There’s a script for that. Arguing with your lover? Here’s the pattern. I can’t tell you how many times I used to get into trouble with my parents or my partners by snapping just before an argument started: “Look, you’re upset, so you’re going to react irrationally first, you’re about to say something you don’t mean, and then you’re going to cry and run off and we’ll make up in an hour, so can we just fucking skip to that part?”

I’m not saying I’m right in trying to bypass these patterns in all situations. Trust me. I fall into them just like everyone else, and I know that in situations like arguments, many people need to process their emotions. The absolute last thing to tell a person who’s already in an emotional state is: You’re being irrational right now, so let’s skip it. I also know that I’m picking at the fabric of our society by challenging these long-standing patterns. Humans are intensely social creatures, and we create intricate social structures. Much of how we do this has to do with patterns: Rituals, consistent ways to react to certain situations. These patterns are what form communities, religions, traditions, even laws. Finding or creating predictable patterns of behaviour for certain situations is how we process the world and, undoubtedly, how our species has survived in it. And honestly, being so hyper-aware of these patterns has brought me little but grief, especially in adulthood, especially with depression.

Ladies and gentlemen, the aesthetic paragraph break.

When depression hits hard, seeing constant patterns makes everything so much worse. It feels like the entire world is a figurine in a music box, wound up and condemned to the same slow spin in the same direction. It feels like everyone is mindless and that every conflict or positive moment is pointless. Oh, something good just happened? You know how that’s going to go, Dee. You’ll be elated, and then the afterglow will fade. What once made you happy will seep into the fabric of your every day, and you’ll take it for granted, and eventually it will disappear and you’ll have to deal with pain. Oh, something terrible happened? Here comes the visceral boom, the jacked up heart rate, the turned stomach, the prickling dread. And now we have a weeks or months-long undercurrent of numb despair to look forward to until you adjust or enough time has passed to heal. Great.

I imagine sociologists and historians are the most frustrated academics on the planet Earth. For them, the hamster wheel of human behaviour is laid out in black-and-white. They have to witness those wheels turn in real time, every single day, in daily life and in big historical moments, and they can’t do anything to stop or to change a bad pattern because no one listens to them. We’re so attached to our patterns that, when faced with evidence that if we continue with this particular script, something bad will happen, we dismiss all evidence and barrel right ahead into disaster. We continue to spin in useless circles that do nothing for us as a people, and my in fact inhibit progress, because creatures of habit value their habits over all else.

            Which brings me to the cycle of outrage.

            Recently, I discovered a series by The New York Times called Retro Report on YouTube. In 10-20 minute bites, this series runs through big moments in history and major headlines of certain eras and analyzes them from a modern perspective. It covered stories like the McDonald’s hot coffee controversy, the boy in the plastic bubble, and the Satanic panic of the 80s and 90s.

            This series might be the final straw for my sanity.

            Retro Report uniquely lays bare some of mankind’s most callous and destructive patterns. So many of the videos can be summed up as such: Something happens. Our media wildly misrepresents it. Everyone gets angry or turns something serious into a joke (I can’t tell you how many callous Seinfeld clips show up in this series.) A ton of unnecessary bullshit happens. Innocent people are hurt or demonized. Lives are destroyed or even ended. The hysteria passes. Everyone says they’ll know better next time. Repeat.

            Repeat.

            Repeat.

            Repeat.

            Repeat.

           

The woman who was burned by hot coffee at McDonald’s suffered third degree burns all over her thighs and groin and only asked McDonald’s to cover medical costs. Her family tried to settle out of court multiple times. McDonald’s refused. The boy in the plastic bubble had a crippling auto-immune disease and did at the age of twelve from a botched bone marrow transplant. There were no Satanic cults molesting children in the 90s and countless children grew up with false memories of horrific ritualistic violence permanently planted in their minds. A daycare center was unnecessarily shut down, families were ripped apart, children placed in abusive foster homes (one was murdered by his foster parents as they used an abusive “therapy” technique called ‘holding’ popular with Evengelicals at the time.) A six-month-old baby girl was dragged off and eaten by a wild dog in Australia. While mourning the loss of her child, her mother was convicted of child murder (to the public cries of, “We got the bitch!”) exonerated, and spend the next three decades battling to get her district to change her infant’s cause of death to what had actually happened.

We have a plethora of evidence of patterns we follow that cause us harm—hysteria and prejudice, for example. And yet we play them out, over and over again, every single day. And it’s enough for me to want to throw myself out of a window.

Which brings me to school shootings.

Yes, marvel at my seamless transition.

Nothing makes me avoid social media more than news of a shooting. I simply can’t handle it at this point. Not only is the pattern painfully predictable, but it’s particularly vicious and it’s utterly useless. This pattern is so pervasive that everyone is aware of it. Yet we all participate. We post something, dissenters respond, insults are hurled, false statistics are flung. Congress does nothing. Nothing happens.

I know that many people will argue that discussing these issues does do something: It mobilizes us! Keeps us mad! Makes us more determined! And sure, that may be true to an extent, but these facts remain: Very few of us call our Senators, update our voter registration information, mark election dates on our calendars, donate to helpful organizations, participate in protests…you know, mobilize.

What we do do is post memes and argue with each other until our outrage has faded or moved onto something else. We’re left with the feeling that we’ve done something, but nothing has changed.

But we’ve stuck to our script.

Thankfully, in this particular instance, the pattern does feel different, because some people actually have mobilized: The victims of the shooting. And it is unbearable to see these kids preyed upon by yet another long-loved pattern among mankind: Older generations trivializing and demonizing younger generations.

Those who know me through Facebook are aware of my obnoxious fixation on the way generations interact with one another, particularly Boomers and Gen Y, my own generation. Most of my generation reached adulthood in a time of economic struggle and predatory corporate practices. We are saddled with debt and unable to find jobs that justify or even accommodate said debt. We are often overworked and disposed of rather than promoted in our occupations, denied benefits, and denied a living wage. Yet the Boomer generation’s favourite pastime seems to be blaming us for our own hardships: We’re entitled brats who want gold stars for every little thing we do, we’re too sensitive, we’re too young, too ungrateful. I won’t get too much into this particular topic because, well, most of you already know about it and are as infuriated by it as I am.

The Boomer v Gen Y war isn’t new to generations. For as long as we’ve had the concept of a ‘generation’ of humans, the Older Generation has lobbed insults at the Younger Generation, and they’re always the same: The Younger Generation is so selfish, so entitled, so focused on trivial things that don’t matter. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re ruining everything. They’re dangerous.

This is the single most maddening human pattern to me. The absolute worst for my mental health. The fucking worst. I truly can’t handle how justified people feel in oppressing young people because they’re afraid of change. Because that’s what it boils down to. As a generation ages, their lives become more stable, they hold fast to their traditions and values (other words for ‘pattern,’) and they pretend that their traditions and values are The Way To Live. They forget what adolescence was like, romanticizing their own teenage transgressions while demonizing the exact same behaviour in their children. And as for technology, education, opportunity, or some modern advance that wasn’t a part of their upbringing? Abhorrent. Disgusting. Frightening. Dangerous. Books will rot your brain, you know. TV is turning our children into zombies. All these entitled kids today care about is MTV. Never mind the decades of predatory economic policies that destroyed our childrens’ opportunities for a life as good as ours! Smart phones and avocado toast will destroy the fabric of our society!

You want to know the worst thing about all of this? The most unbearable thing in all of this? The thing that makes me feel like I’m actually living in a Groundhog Day Hell? Gen Y is starting to do it now, too.

As Gen Z reaches voting age, we’re doing it to them. We’re criticizing their turns of phrase, like bae and extra (never mind our own stupid phrases. Totes and da bomb are totally acceptable…) and what they’re doing online.

In yet more arguments about school shootings, I saw this quote floating around: These kids are eating Tide Pods, and you’re saying guns are the problem?

I.

I can’t.

I need a second.

…

Okay.

I’m ready.

To see something like that really just…broke me. This is being said by Boomers, of course, but it’s also being flung at kids by people my fucking age. Not only is it ignoring the fact that school shootings have been our reality generations before this one, it’s placing blame squarely on the shoulders of current teenagers because they do stupid challenges.

Stupid challenges.

You mean like the cinnamon challenge?

The ghost pepper challenge that even soldiers in Iraq were doing?

The Diet Coke and Mentos trend in 2006?

The salt and ice challenge in 2005, where we literally chemically burned themselves?

How about the gallon challenge, where a classmate of mine threw up a gallon of water while we were all on a school trip. On the bus. Fifteen years ago.

The saltine cracker challenge in the late 90s?

I can go on, but I think I’ve gotten through some of the thicker skulls at this point.

Teenagers have always done stupid shit. Teenagers have always lived in extremes and felt immortal. That is human adolescence.

Pretending that teenagers are somehow dumber than we were, than our parents were, than their parents were, than their parents were, is idiotic and has been disproven countless fucking times by documented human history.

Patterns are maddening to me, but this one takes the cake. So I’m putting my foot down. I’m not doing this, guys. I’m going to get older, and with that, I’m going to occasionally feel less relevant in society, less secure, less in control. But I’m not going to shovel that insecurity onto the next generation. I’m not. And WE shouldn’t. Because Gen Z is pretty fucking awesome. Yes, they’re still the same gossipy, arrogant little shits that we were in adolescence, but they’re already so much better than we were.

Yes, I just said that. Now you’re defensive. Immediately dismissive. And you don’t to read anymore. Fine. Go follow out your little pattern. But I’ll continue.

Gen Z is more tolerant than we ever were of LGBT and persons of colour, of different religions and cultures. They’re far more realistic about the future than we were (remember, we were raised during the self-esteem movement,) and, especially now, they’re far more politically aware and active.

I have so much hope for the future because of Generation Z, and, as I see more and more of my darlings having kids, our own progeny--Generation Alpha. So I’m not going to play out the stupid, self-serving pattern of hating younger generations. And I beg you, dear imaginary reader, not to, either. Please. Our future is in the hands of the young. This particular human pattern is monstrously self-destructive and, as you should know if you’re a “Millennial,” truly unfair.

Let’s break the pattern, like the students of Stoneman Douglas High School are. As the Boomers are forced into retirement (with any luck, but that’s a whole different topic,) we will be in charge of cleaning up the dumpster fire they spent decades building and burning. Let’s start by embracing our children instead of putting them down.