Industry is the Enemy of Melancholy

I was fortunate to retire from my traditional work career at the relatively young age of 56. Retiring early had become a goal of mine ever since I observed how much my father enjoyed his 30 year post-work life. My father was perfectly content to leave the working life behind and fill up his days with fishing, tending his vegetable garden, solving the daily crossword puzzle, taking naps and watching the home town Sports teams on his television.

When the time came for me to retire, I had an idyllic vision of spending my days in similar fashion. Finally, after 56 years, I was looking forward to being my own boss – thrilled to have the opportunity to wake up every day and do whatever it was that interested me. I believed that every day would feel like Christmas!

And those first few months of retirement really were magical. Gone was the stress of having to be available 24/7 to my company’s sales and management teams who were battling to close million dollar deals, gone was the daily 3 to 4 hour commute in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and gone was the chronic sleep deficit.

It was goodbye to all that. What replaced it was the pleasure of deciding which book to read from my list of “books I always wanted to read“, fly fishing in the beautiful rivers of New England, taking long rides on my electric bike, spending quality time with my grandkids, and attending stimulating concerts and plays with my wife.

Something begin to happen, however, that I was not expecting about six months into my retirement. As the novelty and thrill of being retired began to subside I began to notice that I was experiencing melancholy moods and moments of soul searching. I was spending time reflecting on topics like past loss, the certainty of my physical and mental decline, and the uncertainty of how future generations will deal with the big existential challenges the world is facing.

Without the rigors of work to occupy my attention, my mind was set free to wander where it wanted to go and to my surprise I discovered that it often wanted to contemplate dark and doleful topics. I was not that concerned about these sometime melancholy moods because I reasoned that it is one of life’s natural reactions to harbor feelings of both happiness and sadness; and I remembered the wise old grandmother who once said: “A good day is a laugh and a cry“. Still I wondered why my pensive thoughts were increasing in frequency at a time in my life when I expected to be most content.

Then I happened to read about a study conducted by Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert which could help to explain the phenomenon I was experiencing. These researchers developed a smartphone app that allowed them to collect the thoughts, feelings, and actions of a broad range of people at random moments as they went about their daily activities.

Using the app, Killingsworth and Gilbert asked people what they were doing and how happy they were while doing it. They sifted through 25,000 responses from more than 5000 people and reported that 46% of the people were thinking about things other than what they were actually doing at the time (in other words, they were daydreaming about something other than what they were doing). They discovered that those people who were daydreaming typically were not happy; while those who were fully engaged in their activity were the happiest. 

The researchers wrote that unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating instead events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or will never happen at all. This “stimulus-independent thought” or “mind wandering” appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation.

Although this ability is a remarkable evolutionary achievement that allows people to learn, reason, and plan, it apparently comes with an emotional cost. “We see evidence that a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” they said in their report. The bottom line is that we’re more likely to think negative thoughts when we let our minds wander.

Maybe that is why people who are waiting in line or stuck in traffic appear to be more irritable. And maybe my melancholy moods have increased in frequency since leaving work simply because my mind is no longer required to spend 10+ hours a day focused on the demands of my job.

This study confirms that many philosophical and religious traditions are on to something true when they teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and by training their practitioners to resist mind wandering and concentrate on the here and now. Yoga teachers and those teaching meditation practices usually stress the importance of “mindfulness” or “being present” for a good reason — because when we do, it usually puts us in a better mood.

When I look back at my work career, I can see now that those moments when I felt most fulfilled was when I was in the middle of product development activities, being part of a team inventing electronic test solutions to solve complex manufacturing challenges. During those moments all the powers of my mind were fully engaged in solving the problem at hand and there was a sense that the results of the team’s collective work would have a positive impact on the company, our customers, and to a certain extent, society in general.

William F. Buckley put his finger on the unique ability that meaningful work has in preventing the onset of depressive feelings when he wrote “Industry is the enemy of Melancholy“. Simply put, if we are busy doing work that requires a focused mind it becomes difficult for the mind to wander and contemplate spirit dampening topics that are likely to cause the blues.

I happened to listen to an online homily about work that touched on a similar theme from a spiritual point of view that was given by Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron made the point that our very being is deeply influenced by our actions and that the kind of work we do has a lot to do with the kind of people we become.

People who have no work usually struggle with depression because our sense of dignity often comes from work. Those who suffer from unemployment feel not just the financial burden of a lost paycheck, but also the loss of dignity brought about from the loss of their livelihood.

When you are feeling down one of the things psychologists recommend is to get to work on a project. It tends to make you feel better because work engages the powers of mind, will, creativity, and imagination and we become awakened when we give ourselves over to a project.

It doesn’t have to be a grand or complicated project. In fact, Bishop Barron mentioned that he found that one of the things that brings him the most satisfaction is doing the dishes. His day is usually filled with meetings and intellectual activities, so it is a relief for him to do some simple physical work at the end of the day. It brings him satisfaction to make order out of a dirty kitchen and to see everything clean and in its place when he is done.

The Bishop referenced this lyric from Bob Dylan’s song “Forever Young” to emphasize that work is a blessing and that souls can not fully prosper when their hands and feet are idle.

“May your hands always be busy, may your feet always be swift, may you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift”

Bob Dylan; Forever Young

Not all work is physical, though. Pope John Paul II categorized different kinds of work for the faithful. There is physical work (the work of the body), intellectual work (the work of the mind), spiritual work (the feeding of one’s soul), and moral work (charitable work on behalf of the poor and mistreated). When we are attentive to each of these categories of work in our daily life, it is then that we best fulfill our divine potential and become collaborators with the purpose of God.

I like that idea. May we all come to see our work, in all its different manifestations, as collaborating with the purpose of God and as bringing us into a more perfect union with a higher power.

Parable of Perhaps

My town has what is called a Transfer station where residents can bring their home trash and recyclable materials to be collected for proper disposal. This is one chore that I actually look forward to every week because it gives me an opportunity to stop and peruse the on-site Book Swap Shack. It is typically stocked with an eclectic mix of adult and children’s books that reflects the diverse reading habits of our small community.

I have picked up – and dropped off –  many books over the years in that messy little book shack and I have discovered topics and titles that have served to send my mind wandering off in interesting and unplanned directions.

One such book I picked up last year,  “The Wheel of Life and Death” by Philip Kapleau, combined historical writings of Eastern and Western religious literature to examine how death, if viewed as an extension of life, can become a joyous occasion.

The book explains that our past actions influence not only our present life, but also our future death; therefore life and death are interrelated and desiring a good death highlights the importance of living a good life. With this in mind, the author explains that practices such as suicide, euthanasia, and pain-doping are obstacles to achieving the good death.

The book provides practical guidance about hospices, organ donation, living wills and funerals – along with helpful advice on meditations for the dying, ways of consoling the bereaved and checklists of things to do following a death.

The parts of the book that I found most appealing, however, were the supporting stories and perspectives on life that conveyed the wisdom of numerous authors, including Tolstoy, Socrates, and Ghandi.

One such story that I call the Parable of Perhaps is about a farmer who is trying to understand the meaning behind a series of sudden events that happen to him. I often think about the lesson of this parable whenever I experience unexpected misfortune or sudden good luck in my life.

Parable of Perhaps

A man’s horse broke out of his barn and ran away during the night. His neighbors came over to console him saying that it was very unfortunate he lost his horse. The farmer said “Maybe”.

The next day the farmer’s horse returned bringing with him seven wild horses. His neighbors then said how very lucky he was to gain seven more horses for his farm. The farmer said “Maybe”.

On the following day his son tried to ride one of the new wild horses and was thrown and broke his leg. “O how awful!” cried his neighbors. “Maybe” answered the farmer.

The next week soldiers came to conscript the young men of the village to fight in a war but the farmer’s son was not taken because his leg was broken. “How wonderful for you!” said the neighbors. “maybe”, said the farmer.

The lesson is that we cannot know the outcome of the things we experience in this life and whether they will turn out good or bad or both. What appears “good” to us today may be the cause of some future misfortune. In the same way, we may look back tomorrow with appreciation at something “bad” that happened to us today.

To illustrate, I can relate a series of events from my own life. When I went off to College I was a quiet boy lacking in confidence as I took my first steps toward independence. I became attracted to a beautiful girl who I met in one of my classes but I felt that she was out of my league and would never be interested in going out with the likes of me. Over the course of time I noticed that her and her friends were particularly interested in the members of a certain on-campus fraternity and they encouraged – even dared me to pledge the fraternity.

I really didn’t want to join this particular fraternity, as it had a reputation for harsh hazing practices and crazy campus stunts, but I signed up to pledge anyway, hoping it would encourage Miss-Out-of-My-League to look my way.

The hazing that occurred over the two week pledging period was even worse than I had imagined, but I managed to survive the ordeal and to my great excitement also to win the first of several dates with that prized girl.

I approached the first date with nervous anticipation and high expectations but it didn’t take me very long to notice that her beauty did not extend to her personality. It became obvious to me fairly quickly that she was self-centered, shallow and somewhat mean-spirited. I was not surprised or disappointed when she broke up with me after a couple weeks of dating.

I joined the fraternity for the wrong reasons, but when I think back on it I realize that my involvement with the club had the unintended effects of helping me to become more social and to gain the self-confidence that I was lacking – so much so that I eventually rose to become President of the Fraternity where I used my position to begin to modify some of those “harsh” hazing practices.

But even more important, my membership in the Fraternity made it possible for me to meet a Sorority girl, one who was beautiful both inside and out, who would eventually become my wife and the mother of my children.

So, in retrospect, the decision to join the Fraternity that I thought would be a “bad” experience, turned out to be good not because it won me a date with the girl (which turned out to be “bad”) but  because it helped me to gain confidence and lifetime friends and started me down the path that led to the true girl for me.

Some Eastern Religious philosophies teach that assigning events in our lives to tags like “good’ or “bad” is a prescription for suffering because these ideas just cause us to fear events that may never happen in the future or lead us to disappointment when events do not bring us expected good fortune.

That is why Mindfulness meditation practices instruct practitioners to look at events in their lives objectively and unemotionally as neither good or bad. If we can detach ourselves from these tags then we can better focus on the moment and not expend energy wishing things were different or worrying about events whose outcomes can not be known.

Taking this approach to its logical conclusion, we should also consider death, not as the  ultimate “bad” event in our life and something to be feared – because we cannot know what lies on the other side. Maybe it will be good…