Karat Stick EP 3
It is good fortune for a person to know their lot in life. A fortune that did not befall me at a young age, though it has since hit its mark. From the outside, success appears to come easy or as if by luck. There exists a certain aleatoric element to fortune, no doubt, but that is hardly the whole story.
Most mornings I am reminded of a painful moment in life. On the surface, it would seem it is misfortune that plots my morning commute along a path that marks an early career failure.
I was once tasked with soliciting restaurant managers with a business proposition: you let me put up a display to entice prospects to trade lunch for a financial sales pitch, and you get additional customers. Most had the wisdom to see that this arrangement did not align with the quality experience patrons typically desire, but I was to sell the idea, nonetheless.
One day, my motivation collapsed and I could not bring myself to walk into the targeted establishment. Not because I lacked the ability or belief in the idea – I was too young to have such an informed opinion. It was because the process was uncomfortable due to its inherently high rate of rejection.
I never entered the building and the manager unknowingly avoided what was surely to be an inconvenience. But that manager had a valuable lesson to teach had I been willing to learn. It is through fortune that my commute and this corner of memory lane overlap; now a near daily reminder that discomfort is where we find growth.
My motivation still falls short of my expectations, but less so as I accumulate life’s lessons.
The easier conditions are, the more challenging it is to thrive. Anxiety fills the void left by the absence of productive stress. It is an emptiness so disquieting it begs to be filled expediently. Thrashing about like cats in water, we lunge for our digital distractions like lifelines.
Have you felt the pangs of a neglected self? The mind and body hunger for attention and yet we afford it little, a trained response to avoid discomfort. It has become too easy to console inadequacies with indulgence. Do not mistake a mind bursting with such malnutrition for healthy exertion.
What was once called gluttony we now refer to doom scrolling and binging. Blithe redefinitions that dull the sharpness of the sin, masking its potency. An observant Gen Z population has managed to self-diagnose, coining a phrase to describe a powerful antidote: go outside and “touch grass”.
We live in the age of the “Anxious Generation” as coined by Jonathan Haidt in his aptly named book The Anxious Generation. Here, we exist with the world at our fingertips, yet our destinations have never been so distant.
It is here we find the chronically online teenager with more expectation than direction;
The (also) chronically online, exhausted parent still chasing their dreams and unregulated children;
Education institutions overburdened by bureaucracy and operation creep, fulfilling household roles they were not designed for;
A deteriorating quality of service from institutions as the art of human connection slips from our culture;
And we find ideologies masquerading as salvation.
But this is also where we find Licensed Clinical Professional Counselors like Katie Dixon with ThrivePointe Counseling, fighting with families on the front line for a better present and future. It is a rewarding career field with much more demand than capacity - a promising combination for students of psychology.
We sat down with Katie for over an hour to find out what challenges families are facing today and how they can course correct. She shares many valuable insights applicable to all families.
One of her key messages is that we need to get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable. To our ancestors, it was more than just an idea, it was survival. The discussion is much more nuanced than you will find in this short write up, so I would encourage you to have a listen to give the topic justice.
All will need course correction from time to time, this is inevitable. Motivation isn’t so abundant to have perfection as an expectation.
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