I think we crave pressure because it forces us into focused action. But we don’t need it to get there.
You might disagree. The human body, for instance, needs pressure to function. Literally, at sea level, we live at ~15lbs per square inch of pressure. Remove that pressure and we’re in trouble. It’s not the cold of space that would get us, it is the lack of pressure.
Too much pressure, however, and we break. Mentally, we burn out. Physically, it doesn’t work out well either. As a scuba diver, I routinely experience multiple atmospheres of pressure and don’t notice. However, I once had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Mackenzie Gerringer, whose team filmed the world’s deepest fish. She shared with me that the housing for one of her cameras once failed at depth (roughly 5 miles below the surface of the ocean). The pressure pulverized the camera into dust!
Pressure is a forcing function
In our lives, pressure is a forcing function. As it increases around us, we have no choice to focus on the most important. The higher the pressure, the tighter our focus. We have our biggest personal growth spurts or giant societal advances under duress. There is something inherent focusing about a dramatic increase in pressure.
The added pressure of really bad things(tm) happening to us – as individuals or as a society, makes it easy for us to drop everything that is unimportant. Maybe another way of putting it, is that it changes our filter for what is important. Instead of saying No for any number of reasons, we are saying No because we are saying Yes to addressing this crisis head on and it needs all of our time. Our actions become focused out of necessity. To channel William Ury in The Power of a Positive No, our No’s become more powerful because they are backed by such an important Yes.
After the crisis ends and the pressure lifts, we go back to a semi-rudderless existence where we lose those powerful Yes’s and end up more focused on trying to figure out why Netflix made us wait a month between the first and second halves of Stranger Things Season 4.
But we don’t need it
I think this is because most of us haven’t put the work in upfront to figure out what is truly important to us. When the universe makes the decision for us, it is easy. It is way harder to do it yourself.
Here’s what I’m hoping I can do about this. Dig deep enough to find those things that are so important to me, my deep-seated Yes’s. Use those Yes’s to say No to all that random crap that seems so important in the moment but gets dropped in a second when a crisis shows up.
Random postscript
As a scuba diver, I spend a lot of time thinking about pressure. Each 33ft of water adds another “atmosphere” of pressure load. It is kind of interesting to be down 100ft below the surface and realize I’m under 4 atmospheres of pressure. The pressure on Dr. Gerringer’s camera was over 11,000 pounds per square inch. However, the most interesting part of this puzzle to me is that the air from sea level to space weighs as much as 33ft of water!
Thanks to Yannis Papanastasopoulos for the underwater photo from Greece and Stephen Crowley for the photo of the sea and the sky.