What Now?

A lot of people are anxious and worried.  A lot of people are also apparently depressed.  And there are plenty of drugs to treat both anxiety and depression.  There are also thousands of books about combating anxiety and depression if you choose to reason your way out.  If you go to Amazon.com and start typing in anxiety or depression, the creepy automatic thought reader will complete your search with the other disorder.  In other words type in "depr" and Amazon will suggest "depression and anxiety".  Or type in "anx" and Amazon will assume you mean "anxiety and depression".  Try it.  I'll wait.   Of course anxiety and depression, not withstanding Amazon's smart fill algorithm, are two very different disorders. With two very different solutions.

But I am not here to discuss the difference between depression and anxiety.  What difference does it make anyway.  We're just sitting around waiting for the next big earthquake or terrorist attack to destroy our way of life.  My goal here is to bring attention to the real scourge of the modern era.  An emotion that I have come to realize is the true root cause of our national anxiety and depression crisis.  Yet it gets no research dollars.  There are no TV commercials explaining its devastating effect on workplace productivity.  No university trial studies to sign up for.  Type "depression" into the Amazon books search engine and 22,707 hits pop up.  Type "anxiety" and 10,249 hits are listed (your results may vary).  Yet type in "aggravation" and Amazon can only come up with 162 references!  We are not anxious.  We are not depressed.  We are aggravated.  Don't misunderstand me.  Depression and anxiety are real organic disorders.  Probably just not for a large portion of those who have been told they are.

Okay, your teenage son driving his buddies to the mall can be very anxiety inducing but aren't  ninety percent of your emotions more like aggravation caused by his pig sty of a room and his 6000 monthly text messages on a 1000 texts a month plan?  Ninety percent of us are not self medicating with two glasses of red wine (news flash; your two glasses are really four servings) every night because we are anxious.  No.  We are stressed because the cable guy shows up at 3:59pm during a 12noon-4pm window.  Or the contractor doesn't show up at all and when he does it costs 40% more than the estimate.  Or the phone company has been over charging you for the past two years and it takes 22 calls and 816 voice prompts to straighten it out.

I have written about this issue before.  But I conceded my diagnosis to the drug companies and the self help gurus.  We don't need drugs for anxiety and depression.  We need drugs for aggravation.  And there are none.  At least none that are marketed that way.  And sure there are books with titles like "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff" but that title did not come up when aggravation is the search term.  How aggravating is that?  In fact when the Amazon search is narrowed down to health and wellness there are 5335 results for anxiety and only 25 results for aggravation.  And most of those are useless tomes on homeopathic remedies.

And because all of my blog posts must somehow be linked to a dig at the Tea Party I realized something else.  Think about what aggravates you on a day to day basis.  I know what aggravates me on a day to day basis in trying to run a small business.  It is not the federal and state regulations, which are indeed burdensome. But if you make at least a half-hearted effort to comply and set up the systems you don't really think about them every day.  And let's face it, there usually is a global benefit, like fewer mercury fillings being dumped into our water system and fewer needles washing up on New Jersey beaches.  Nor do taxes aggravate me everyday.  I have been audited twice by the NJ Dept of Labor and once by the Sales and Use Tax division. But because I am honest and at least comply with the law in spirit, it went well.  And I do pay way too much in taxes and licensing fees but that just sucks.  It doesn't aggravate me everyday.  It is not the government that aggravates me.  If one is honest and forthright, the government, in general, will leave you alone.

It is, in fact, private corporations and businesses that cause me untold amounts of aggravation, grief, consternation, and outright disbelief at how all decisions are based on the bottom line, every single day at my practice.  My IT provider raising its fees without telling me because they know I have no choice.  Or the frustration in having software upgrades every year that take 9 months to iron out the bugs and then it's time for a new upgrade.  Or my bank, even though they are doing quite well now, thank you very much, cries how they need to charge me for every single stupid little thing, like withdrawing my own money from an ATM.  Or insurance companies paying me thirty percent less than the UCR rate (look it up) for a gold crown even though the cost of gold has risen by four hundred percent.  And signing a one year contract with an internet marketing company endorsed by my software provider then Google changes the rules the next week thus making my one year contract immediately obsolete yet unchangable.  Etc, etc, etc.  I feel way more squeezed by the private vendors I must deal with in my business every day than by the federal government or even the overly burdensome State of New Jersey.

The Occupy Wall Street crowd has gotten it right.  I believe in capitalism and the power of the private sector to move us forward, but on a day to day basis I am entirely more aggravated by corporate greed and indifference than I am by government incompetence.  And I bet that if most of the Tea Party supporters would give it half a thought themselves, instead of listening to the Koch brothers, they would walk over to the Occupy Wall Street protests and say "You know what?  You guys are right".