To find the words for why we do what we do

WE need labels.

Well not the bigoted kind. Or the consumerism sort.

We need some practice at putting labels on our feelings, and reinforcing some structure into our thoughts.

The debilitating pandemic eliminated physical interactions for much of this year, so we've lost some practice in verbalising mental and emotional clarity.

It can leave us a little unsettled, with our thoughts clouded in a psychological fog.

Just as we've discovered virtual meetings are no substitute for face-to-face interactions, we found too that it takes us time to adapt from working in loungewear, to returning to social interactions - reading the room and taking in social cues.

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And in the return of deep conversations with trusted friends, we eventually all return to a fear that we've lost purpose.

Languishing? Find flow

Organisational psychologist Adam Grant organised a collective sigh of relief when he crowned "languishing" as the defining emotion of 2021.

There has been less joy, more aimlessness. Life feels a little hollow.

If 2020 was governed by grief, 2021 has been sculpted by what Dr Grant calls "the neglected middle child of mental health".

"It's the void between depression and flourishing - the absence of well-being... languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you'll cut back on work."

In his latest TED talk, Dr Grant returned to his essay on languishing, to call out the problem with "toxic positivity" that makes it harder to crawl out of this dullness - that pressure to be optimistic and upbeat at all times.

Instead, he advocates the concept of flow - "that state of total absorption in an activity". Dr Grant points to three conditions to hit peak flow: mastery, mindfulness and mattering.

Mastery can come from small wins (like lockdown baking), while mindfulness focuses our intentions.

The problem though is that in the last couple of years, we've switched between tasks so frequently that we increasingly work with "time confetti".

"We take what could be meaningful moments of our lives and we shred them into increasingly tiny, useless pieces... If we want to find flow, we need better boundaries," he said.

Mattering is most relatable given the Great Resignation, as workers got tired of a job that did not reflect purpose.

Dr Grant cited his research that found fundraising callers bringing in alumni donations made nearly three times more revenue when they met one student whose scholarship had been funded by their work. The way to give your work more purpose is to think about the people who would be worse off if your job didn't exist.

More importantly, he added: "The antidote to languishing does not have to be something productive, it can be something joyful. Our peak moments of flow are having fun with the people we love, which is now a daily task on my to-do list."

Cancel 'hustle culture'

That brings me to my second point. Have you felt this year like a walking to-do-list when it comes to work? A colleague this week sent an article from Fast Company that reminded us that "hustle culture" misses the point about productivity.

"Accomplishment is good, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to become a better version of yourself. But productivity... is the means to an end."

If an organisation is going through deep disruption - as many are - there may be the temptation to clear tasks robotically because that makes us feel like we're doing something in the day.

Of course, some tasks just must be done. But there must be a larger goal. What's the big picture behind these tasks?

We can hustle to break down a meaningful mission, but we should know what it's for.

That industriousness drilled into us may make us want to extract every last drop of "value" from every hour, task and person. But it has wrongly equated work ethic with ethics. As the article says, "hard work isn't its own reward".

Zoom differently

My favourite problem-solving tactic has been to break down a complex problem via the rule of threes (as done here), and by unpacking big numbers into fractions. A large target offers a sense of scale, but zooming into the smaller sums makes a goal accessible and achievable.

I learnt this week there's a name for this mental exercise of estimation: the Fermi mindset. The New York Times this month ran a column that details the use of Fermi Problems, so named after physicist Enrico Fermi.

So if we ask: how many piano tuners are there in Chicago? As the column showed, we could figure out its population, then its number of households, then the number of households with a piano. By then defining how much tuning work is demanded, we can guess the supply of tuners needed in the Windy City.

"The goal here isn't knowing the exact number but rather being able to estimate the right order of magnitude using nothing but common sense," wrote the author Caroline Chen.

The investigative reporter says the point is to "imagine the infinite cosmos, not to organise it, label it or conquer it".

It brings up the words of Oscar Wilde. "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

Perhaps that is the poetic form of the Fermi mindset. We can be overwhelmed by the vastness of dark enveloping nights. It can feel like that same scene is rotated on repeat.

Still, we scrap some purpose from our mundane existence from staring out at the diamonds in the sky.

Why do we do what we do?

That question alone can be paralysing when we're languishing.

So we pause for the words.

It may take a longer time to gargle them out from our silenced, monotonous presence. But eventually, we do want to mean what we say.