Futzing
In this episode, we explore the least-recognised but perhaps most common response to over-stress…
Okay, I admit it: I’m futzing. Again. Maybe almost all of the time now.
Which doesn’t help.
Futzing: “to waste time; to busy oneself aimlessly”. Much ado about nothing, while the important somethings don’t get dealt with at all.
(And yeah, I stopped at this point for a couple of hours, to pointlessly futz around with something else a lot less important even than this. Addicted to avoidance. Not A Good Idea…)
So where does futzing fit in with the picture? Well, in essence it’s one of the four main responses to adrenaline-overload that we see in fear or overstress: fight, flight, freeze or futz. (Yes, there’s another well-known response that does sound rather like ‘futzing’, but let’s just say that in my own case that one hasn’t been relevant for some decades by now?) So when we’re up against a threat or fear:
in the fight-response, we run towards the threat;
in the flight-response, we run away from the threat;
in the freeze-response, we stay still on the spot, often hiding, and not moving at all;
whereas in the futzing-response, we run sideways, back and forth, neither towards nor away from the threat, nor frozen on the spot, but instead just moving for the sake of moving.
Moving, without focus or purpose.
Energy is expended, doing nothing useful at all.
Exhausting.
And, obviously, unhelpful, often in the extreme.
And in the meantime, time passes, with time fast running out…
Why all the futzing, though? Why is this happening for me right now? Well, part of it is that I’m under a lot of pressure to get a book done - a new edition of one of my older books, but it’s turned out to much harder than I’d expected: a straightforward edit for a minor update has turned into something more like a complete rewrite to incorporate all the research and development I’d done on that topic over the past decade. That part has been hard enough, particularly after the blurriness that that unjoyous bout with COVID has still left me with, even three months later. COVID ain’t fun, folks - even a relatively-minor bout like I had.
But the big challenge for me right now is that the landlord’s selling the house that I live in. I have sixty days to pack up and go - and, more important, find somewhere else to live, in this worst housing-market in decades. Wish me luck, I guess.
You’ve seen this place often enough in these posts here. It’s perhaps a century old, and not in good condition: a bit delapidated all round, it has no insulation, there’s only one room that has good-enough heating in the winter or any cooling in the 40˚C+ summer, there are gaps between the floorboards, mice in the ceiling sometimes, and occasionally a bird will fall down the chimney and have to be rescued. But it’s been safe, quiet enough as a place to get work done, and has served me well in difficult times. I’m going to miss it.
What I’m going to miss much more is the sense of certainty I’ve had here, of being in a stable place where I can get my work completed while I’m still able to do it. That certainty is now gone, replaced by a living-nightmare instead: unless I’m extremely careful, and also extremely lucky, I’ll be literally homeless in a couple of months from now. That fear is all too real for me right now. And yeah, that’s the kind of stress that makes it kind of difficult to keep the focus on the writing and the like - and yeah, does tend to make a bad habit of futzing even worse than before.
As you’ll know from previous posts here, I loathe, with a passion, all of those many dysfunctions of the money/possession-economy. That passion has become a lot more intense right now - especially as those dysfunctions have just become a whole lot more in-my-face personal.
Yeah. Wish me luck, I guess? Oh well…
But it’s not just “wish me luck”, of course: it’s “wish all of us luck”, because that tendency towards futzing is all too evident just everywhere right now.
As communities, countries, as a species even, we’re facing cataclysmic changes: a likely collapse of the global weather-system; a now-certain collapse of availability for some of the more crucial resources; the almost-certain complete collapse of current economics as it tries to keep on ‘growing’ way beyond non-negotiable limits; and, all too soon now, vast migrations of people, animals and more, as entire regions of the planet become all but uninhabitable. Whole regions already on a war-footing, too, or even actually at war. Huge, huge threats, on a scale never seen before.
Yet what’s the most common response that we see to those threats right now? Yeah, you guessed it: futzing. Lots and lots of running sideways, back and forth, neither towards nor away from the threat, nor frozen on the spot, but instead just moving for the sake of moving.
That’s futzing: moving, without focus or purpose.
Energy is expended, doing nothing useful at all.
Exhausting.
And, obviously, unhelpful, often in the extreme.
And in the meantime, time passes, with time fast running out…
So yeah, in that sense at least, it’s not just me: all of us need to stop futzing on these issues, and get down to the real work that needs to be done.