A Fair Trade Book
Title: Life Is Not a Stress Rehearsal
Author:
Loretta LaRoche
Author's web page: http://www.lorettalaroche.com/
Date:
2001
Publisher:
Broadway / Random House
ISBN:
0-7679-0665-9
Length:
219 pages plus 3 pages endnotes
Quote: “We
wake up, probably in a room that has some sort of electronic climate control and enclosed windows, because who would dare take the risk that we might get an
unscheduled breeze?”
Loretta
LaRoche was blessed with good timing. She was a counsellor during the Age of
Therapy. When the “health management” racket decided to replace counselling
with instant prescriptions for feel-good pills (that unfortunately happen to
induce violent insanity in three to ten percent of users), LaRoche had the
credentials and the grandmotherly image she needed to shift into comedy,
helping people fight the emotional effect of stress by laughing at it. Hence
the jacket photo, in which her combat vest sports a phone, computer mouse,
calculator, calendar, stopwatch, correction fluid, Swiss Army knife, assortment
of writing tools, tube of sunblock, and
everything else she could stick onto it.
While the
gadgets LaRoche wore for the jacket photo have gone out of style, the frantic
pace with which some people approach life has not. If anything it’s become worse.
I blame this
frazzle effect on the craze for increasing population density in the cities,
where some people think everything needs to be happening. Normal people
reflexively react to crowding by stepping away from other people. When stepping
away from one person only puts us too close to another person, normal adults
can tell ourselves to behave rationally, but we can’t be really comfortable
until a healthy level of interpersonal distance has been achieved. While
detaching our attention from our sense of stress, telling ourselves that the
crowded situation is acceptable, helps us cope with crowded conditions, at the
same time our reptilian brains continue to prepare to fight or flee. Often this
preparedness generates flashes of emotion that we may rationalize in one way or
another, but that are really about the fact that too many bodies are occupying
too little space.
I think most
of the “road rage” and miscellaneous frenzy we observe these days is the result
of crowded conditions. It’s not natural for
humans to stand still, or sit still, as long as they’re within touching
distance of people they're not trying to touch. “Office building
managers say that the reason windows don’t open is to protect people from
jumping out…Maybe they should look at what’s going on inside that makes people
feel that they want to jump out a window,” LaRoche says. She’s thinking of the
obvious verbal abuse and backstabbing that go on in many corporate offices. I
wonder, though, whether even that overt hostility toward co-workers is just
another symptom of the same basic problem: too many people working in one
building. Maybe Jack falsely claims credit for Joe’s idea and Jane deliberately
delays the report Mary needs because they don’t like working in a “bullpen” or
cubicle maze with those people; but maybe, too, when Joe and Mary aren’t in the
office, the sensation of being trapped in between strangers upstairs and
downstairs and out on the street still pushes Jack and Jane to want to jump out
of windows.(Extroversion, a tendency to cope with chronic internal emotional
conflicts by constantly, aggressively seeking to control others, is present in
some extremely sick minds.)
LaRoche
not only doesn’t reach this insight in Life
Is Not a Stress Rehearsal; she deliberately clutches at “solutions” that,
toward the end of this book, are dead
wrong for at least half of humankind. The result is a very witty
description of a problem that ends with an incredibly unhelpful attempt at a
solution.
For much
of the book, while she’s skewering the stunata
or meshuggeneh or just plain duh in turn-of-the-new-century U.S.
culture, she’s right on. Trying to be or seem just like other people
(camouflage, for safety in a crowded environment) is a source of stress. Trying
to convince ourselves that we’re important to a corporation (to which we’re not
important, anyway) by dragging out jobs so that we can make sixteen hours a day
“billable” is a source of stress. Paying three times as much for the
fashionable brand of something (when the cheaper version may be better) is a
source of stress. Trying to be available to everybody all the time by leaving
cell phones connected and then programming them to go to voice mail is a source
of stress…and mutual annoyance. Watching inane television instead of actually
having fun is a source of stress. LaRoche is observing efficiently, in this
part of her book, and reporting wisely and wittily. She doesn’t understand why
so many of the people she sees are doing such stupid things, but she can’t miss
the fact that they’re doing them, and she does a good job of channelling the
grandmother who, she convinces us, would have told them just to stop the
stupidity.
But
then…tragically, LaRoche wants to stop where her grandmother stopped. She
doesn’t raise the question whether, if her grandmother had been young in 2001,
the influences that produced the stupidity of my generation would have made her
grandmother stupid too. Or would Grandma Fran have defied those influences and,
in 2001, actually been happy? LaRoche is funny, but she does not sound funny in
a happy way. She sounds frazzled by other people’s frazzlement.
One part
of her evident confusion seems to be the “Mars and Venus” blather with which
our pop culture burdened itself in the 1990s. Human
beings are not built in identical gender-types like Barbie and Ken dolls. We
are individuals. Somewhere out there are a man whose nurturing underside is
warmer and fuzzier than mine, and a man whose hunter-type skills are further
below mine than his nurturer-type talents are—and I’m still a Real Woman,
Strictly a Female Female, and both of them are still Real Men too.
But the
media gave us, just in case it might have been news to somebody somewhere,
these reports that some people did not feel sexy
when they were doing their jobs. Well, unless you’re a porn star, you’re
not supposed to feel sexy on the job.
You’re supposed to be sexy in your own private bedroom, and the rest of society
is not obligated to listen to any further details. If some baby-boomers were
not feeling sexy in their bedrooms, either, this might have been because, in
2001, people born in 1946 were reaching an age at which many people are
postsexual.
Need it be mentioned that, although I’ve not
been a great success at making money, I was more successful at making money
than at making babies, and although my husband was very good at making money
(and even at shooting targets) he was also very good at bonding with children. It’s
probably true that HSPs compensate for being more shy as teenagers by having
more fun in bed, longer, as adults. Left to ourselves HSPs would probably never
have wanted to torture non-HSPs with this information but, whenever I’ve met an
eighty-year-old who still had any noticeable sexuality, it was always a fellow
HSP. What attracts me to people, as people, is being able to work with them as
synergistic partners, which is what C.S. Lewis described as philia love. Gender polarity is involved
in what Lewis called eros love, which
is also interesting but which, in the absence of philia, I’ve always managed to ignore.
I can imagine a few things
that might be less sexy than John Gray’s descriptions of a “Mars and Venus”
marriage...stomach flu? Root canals? Suffice it to say that, ridiculous as
“Sensitive New Age Guys” used to be, and I say this as a woman who once waited
six hours for a whiny little boy trapped in a 250-pound, 35-year-old body to
turn up crying real tears because he’d failed to allow enough time for the usual volume of traffic, guys who think “I’m so different from you that I can’t possibly be
your friend” is going to make a favorable impression are even worse. If you’re
all that different from me, please
find a member of your own species with which to mate.
But
crowded living conditions are not helping anything. In animal populations, an early effect
of overcrowding may be hyperfertility and hypersexuality, as individuals react
to high doses of other individuals’ sex pheromones. Next, a more reliable effect
is the appearance of behavior that tends to lower the birth rate: more
sterility in individuals that mate normally, more asexuality, homosexuality,
transference of sexual impulses toward anything and everything but reproducing
more of the species.
If you
are a reasonably humane animal raiser, the appearance of genuine homosexuality
should indicate that it’s time to thin the herd now. Animals have a limited range of behavior displays that humans
are able to recognize, so same-gender "courtship displays" that aren't really sexual are normal in some social animal
species. Forced homosexuality, in which two animals forced to live celibate lives
in the same space set up something resembling a “couple” relationship, is sometimes
found in very social species. Real homosexuality
is a natural animal reaction to conditions that are unsafe for the whole
colony. That we currently have a loud, noisy minority of “gay” activists, in
the human population, need not cause fear or hate toward the “gays” themselves
but it should cause concern about our society.
Now that
the baby-boomers are indisputably aging and a lot of young people are coming
out as asexual, we need to think about what happens next when animals continue
to live in crowded conditions, when sexual aberrations fail to thin the
population fast enough. Two further developments are possible, and not mutually exclusive. Viciousness, violence, especially attacks by
adults on the very young, and cannibalism are one possibility. Plagues and mass
deaths are the other.
Postsexuality
is normal for the generation that’s now between the ages of 50 and 75.
Asexuality and homosexuality in the young are the non-species-specific
reflections of the kind of stress whose human-specific reactions LaRoche has
been describing and expressing in Life Is Not a Stress Rehearsal. If
differences of temperament allow us to overlook the human-specific,
individual-emotion-shaped reactions, my interpretation of the data is that wide-scale sexual aberrations should be
ramming it into our brains by now: We need to reduce population density by
every ethical means necessary, and we need to do it fast.
Young
couples should be taking a pledge: One child or none. (If you want a big
family, you can always adopt.)
Cities
should be banning the construction of office buildings more than three storeys
high or houses on lots smaller than one acre.
Immigration
should be…not so much forbidden by laws that are expensive and dangerous
to enforce, but intensely, unrelentingly
discouraged by all communities with
any noticeable incidence of unemployment, road rage, suicide, abortion, or
“sexual minorities.”
People
should be abandoning cities, pulling down surplus buildings, living in houses
with generous private green space and well-maintained fences that block out the
sight and sound of their neighbors.
Business
should be conducted primarily from home, taking advantage of technology to
limit face-to-face meetings to once a week, or maybe once a month.
International
organizations that have published “agenda” documents calling for an increase of
population density, in any part of the United States, should be recognized as
having committed subtle acts of war, and treated like the enemies these acts
have shown them to be.
Why do I
say that these are obvious solutions to the problems LaRoche has described so
well in Life Is Not a Stress Rehearsal?
Because I tried them, because in Washington a whole lot of us Bobos tried them,
and to the extent individuals can do them, they work. You don’t even have to
agree with them to feel them working. If you’re feeling stressed, spend more
time alone, and you’ll feel less stressed. (Sometimes telling my coevals this
is exactly like telling teenagers
that, if they’re showing every possible symptom of sleep deprivation after
sitting up late last night, they need just to lie down and relax, and they’ll
feel less angry / restless / spacey / depressed / anxious / whatever.)
Nevertheless,
LaRoche closes her book with a big display of active resistance to insight. “[A]mong
many of the groups that tout spirituality…we are told…that we have to look
inward, we have to heal ourselves, we have to become more self-aware and
self-actualized. We’re told ‘you can’t love another until you learn to love
yourself.’ I think…[t]he truth is often just the opposite: You can learn to love yourself by loving other people!” LaRoche rants on page 206. (Most psychologists would say that we learn to practice love by observing other people practice love.)
On page
208, in denial of actual scientific data, “It’s been proven that married people
live longer than single people.” (Actually, the numbers proved that married men live longer than single men. Single women who don’t have a few
specific diseases live not only longer, but healthier, lives than married
women—on average. Older women who’ve been married only once are more likely to survive a first heart
attack longer than older women who are single or divorced, but complications of
childbirth, domestic abuse, and sexually transmitted diseases make celibacy
seem obligatory for younger women to
maintain good health…if they go by statistics.)
“[P]atients
who are socially isolated are twice as likely to die than (sic) those with
social interactions.” (It’s true that,
for almost any group of sick patients, the ones who receive and enjoy visitors
are likely to live longer than the ones who don’t. This is a correlation, not a
causation. While it’s hard to study this in any large-scale objective way,
anyone who visits sick patients notices that the ones in the worst physical
condition tend to be less interested in social interactions.)
“We’re
missing real human connection…It seems to us that the way our grandparents
lived lacked privacy,” LaRoche says on page 209. “Doors open all the time;
people running in and out…” (She’s describing her grandparents, not mine. One
thing that stands out when I consider the way my grandparents lived is how they
balanced family intimacy with privacy. They had a whole set of rules of
etiquette to offset the fact that they had more children than bedrooms.)
“But the
fact that they had people around them all the time made their lives saner,”
Laroche continues on page 210. Did it really?
In the 1990s we all heard a lot about how much warmer and chummier
Latin-American subcultures were, relative to Anglo-American subcultures.
Latinos touched more often, stood close enough to smell each other’s breath,
etc. etc. Hello? Was that really a point anyone wanted to emphasize if they
wanted more touching and chumminess? Anglo-Americans consistently average
longer healthier lives, higher test scores, and higher incomes…so we should be
more like the demographic group that score lower?
??? The lifestyle of “The Sopranos” is saner than…what?
“We need
to fill our lives with untidy, invasive, knock-on-the-door-unexpected
relationships that help prove to us, every minute of the day, that we are cared
for,” LaRoche gushes on page 212. (Thus showing that she’s never experienced an
orderly, mutually respectful relationship that not only proved to her that she
was cared for but also enriched her life. I have, and I’m not going back: that’s
the only kind of relationship I want.)
On page
213 she vents the frustrations of an undisciplined, mentally-undiapered
extrovert. “I…run into people who talk about ‘loving everyone
unconditionally’—but never stop to say good morning!...I know of a major figure
of new-age thinking, someone who preaches love and understanding, who has it
written into his speaking contracts that the limo driver who picks him up at the
airport is restricted from speaking to him.” (Yes, LaRoche…a way we build love and understanding is that we learn
not to disturb others, to understand that the speaker needs time to focus on
the speech he’s about to make, to recognize that the people at the convention
need to reflect on what they just learned at the seminar more than they need to
comfort your screaming inner infant.)
On page
214 LaRoche tries to add “Say ‘hello’ whenever you see someone you know. And if
you dare, even when you see someone you don’t know” to a list of “basic rules
of civility” that include things like “Wait your turn,” “be punctual,” and “If
you take the last cup of coffee, make a fresh pot.” (This is so deeply
wrong…the older rule of civility was, in fact, “Speak when you’re spoken to and
not before,” and specific details included things like “In public places,
unless it is really necessary to scream something like ‘Fire!’ or ‘Thief!’ that
the whole town needs to hear, speak softly,
don’t mention anyone’s name or discuss any personal matter, and don’t stop
moving unless and until you agree to move to some place more suitable for
conversation.” It is rude to
interrupt anyone’s thoughts, much less an actual conversation, just to
parrot-squawk “Hello” when you have nothing to say, merely because you need reassurance that you exist.)
So is
LaRoche really that rarity, a natural-born extrovert whose brain has developed
enough to be able to communicate with healthy, mature introvert minds? It’s hard to say. Many of those who joined the
effort to normalize extroversion, in the twentieth century, were in fact
self-hating introverts whose extrovert act was a classic Freudian coping
mechanism used to suppress grief or other intense “problem” emotions.
On page
217, LaRoche says, “Fight the urge toward privacy. It’s overrated! Privacy
leads to isolation, and isolation leads to loneliness.” On pages 217-218, she
expands, “[W]hen you get a group of people together…[y]ou see laughter, you see
boisterous behavior, you see people having fun.” When people are so unhappy as
to be incapable of having fun, they can mistake “boisterous behavior” for
having fun. Probably only about one-third of humankind, and even within that
group only the biggest and strongest individual involved in any given act of
“boisterous behavior,” actually experience “boisterous behavior” as fun. Most
of us, given the chance, would rather be doing something calmer, quieter, more
orderly, more useful, and more beautiful. Genuine cases of extroversion—which
the data suggests with increasing clarity is a form of brain damage—are not given the chance.
Self-hating introverts have stopped giving the chance to themselves.
Solitude
is a good thing. The loneliness of
bereavement is not pleasant, but there is something worse…the compulsive
attempt some people make to replace the person they’ve lost with any old body
they can find. Widows who’ve imagined that any husband would be better than
none, especially, have learned otherwise—sometimes when they’ve acquired AIDS,
sometimes when they’ve been murdered outright.
So I’m
willing to sell Life Is Not a Stress
Rehearsal, but only with a warning: If you consider yourself “lonely,”
recognize LaRoche’s final chapter as channelling Where Grandma Went Wrong and
Created All Those Other Problems. Pity poor old Loretta LaRoche, cut off from
happiness with her real self by hoarding all that social clutter of
unsatisfactory relationships, and don’t let yourself end up like her.
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