Don't Worry, Baby

Help from the Beach Boys

Equilibrious readers! Today, I’m sharing a cognitive hack that has helped me with what I imagine to be a fairly niche problem, yet one that may well be statistically overrepresented among subscribers to this newsletter (thank you for your support!). For some years now, I have had a tendency to punctuate my daily activities with loud exclamations of distress. The content varies from “UGHHH!” or “HORRIBLE!” to “Oh, brother,” “Oh Lord,” or, sometimes, “Lord in a handbasket.” The precipitating circumstance is generally a daunting train of thought, the kind that automatically starts running when I’m engaged in any rote, mechanical, or errand-like task, including walking down the street (where any vocal self-control I ever had has been systematically eroded over the past 20 years since the popularization of goddamn Bluetooth (“HORRIBLE!”)). I didn’t realize how often I was doing it, or how loudly, until it was brought to my attention by someone in an adjoining room, not only that I had shouted “TORTURE!” while doing the dishes, but that some similar remark could be heard every time I went into the kitchen.

I promised to take the matter in hand, but soon found the necessary effort to be vastly greater than I had anticipated, bringing about waves of self-pity and defensiveness, and, ultimately, expressions of despair. (“These past months have been so hard and now I can’t even be like ‘WHYYY’ while I’m folding laundry” → “WHYYYY”). I then made the terrible discovery that there is a social contagion element to these vocalizations, such that at some point I overheard the aforementioned person in the next room saying “AGHHHH,” in a way that was so clearly not meant as an interaction, or a call for help or engagement, but just an expression of despair—and it was so depressing! To think that others were now making these sounds that they didn’t want to be making, because of me (and now I had to hear them).

The next time I caught myself about to say “UGHHH THESE PEOPLE,” I was able to pause and think about the cause of distress—an eternal lack of energy, let’s say, in the face of an unbearable and impossible list of things to do and decide, exacerbated by the limitations of the body and the interference of (to put it charitably) fools with no knowledge of reason or of virtue—and I understood that these things are part of being alive; they are the problems that living people have, and have always had; dead people don’t have these problems. The skillful way to live is not, and never has been, to avoid bad feelings, which are the counterpart to good feelings, but rather to understand them as waves, to ride them like waves. I then listened to “Surfin’, U.S.A.” several times in succession.

With one thing and another, I had totally forgotten about The Beach Boys, and I found that just remembering their existence seemed to “create some space” (to quote the mindfulness people). Furthermore, I found something profound about the opening verse—about how “if everybody had an ocean across the USA, then everybody’d be surfing like Californ-I-A,” and they’d be wearing baggy whatever and bushy hair. The rest of the song seems to be a list of actual places where people go surfing, both inside and outside the U.S.A., which, OK, fine; but the powerful idea, to me, is that, if there was “an ocean” everywhere, if the whole U.S. was a beach, then people everywhere—in the middle of the country, in the red states, etc.—would be “surfers,” just as much as in California. In other words, we are all conditioned by our environment, in literal, objective ways that are just as visible and real as the features of the natural landscape—or would be, if we could see inside people’s houses all the time, which we can’t, but that’s why we have novels.

After adding several Beach Boys tracks to my Spotify, I am happy to report a drastic reduction in the number of times I say “UGHH” or “TORTURE,” and the only downside is that sometimes I say “SURFING,” which everyone, including me, finds more restful. So, if you or anyone you know has been having an issue with loud laments, that’s something you could try!

More chilling than anticipated: “Inside a dungeon equipped for torture, five smiling young men are holding a surfboard, like the Beach Boys”

Coming up, as a special thank-you for paid subscribers: everything I could write about the Beach Boys and artistic production in one workday (~1100 words).

In other news, my Kafka-inspired short story, “The Board” (from this book), is going to be part of a Selected Shorts program called “Classics With a Twist,” to be performed live on April 30 at Symphony Space, tickets here.

Thanks for reading!