A stress of pressure

“One mouth cannot drink from two calabashes at the same time.” – Ugandan proverb

Our age has become accustomed to living life by pressing of buttons. We expect solutions at a touch and we want to exclude anything that resembles anything like waiting. We have become ‘instant’ oriented, to the point where we cannot even wait for tomorrow to come.

The irony is we live in an imperfect society, with fragmented attitudes that colour everything we come into contact with; yet we dare for life to be harmonious, prosperous and joyous. We demand life to be beautiful and brilliant; to be delightful and charming.

And to top it, we want to get the preparation aspect over and done with so that we can live the celebration phase. We think of these in our homes, whisper them around our workplaces, chat about them in social circles and pronounce them on daises and in the pulpits. There is no science that can reconcile these opposing realities, yet we want to translate this optimism into the moments of life.

The story is simple. We have been running for far too long; from what and to where, we know not. All we did was ran; and it has made us weary. Looking back, we realized we have missed a lot. We do not even remember what flowers smelled like during the harmattan, nor their looks when the rains come.

And so now we want to have everything, and we want to have them right here and now. We believe that we can and so we must. While our fathers used the phrase “play is right here,” to elicit the essence of hopefulness; we are using it to justify the cravings of our optimism.

Modernity has carved in us a belief of the possibility of the impossible. We have been raised with an optimism that cannot be waited for. It is a longing found in the expectation of and the desire for receiving anything and everything we aspire for when we want it. This has nurtured the concept of entitlements in us.

We now believe we are entitled to anything and everything. There is nothing privileged about anything any longer.  We are entitled to an education, and then a job afterwards. The job should come with pecks, which entitles us to a spouse and then a comfortable life. Challenges and difficulties are best captured by the caricature of a dancing couple asking life to let the music play on.

We all know life would be very claustrophobic without optimism. Nevertheless, when optimism evolves into entitlements, it cultivates a culture that pressurizes us to be successful in everything we do.

It is perhaps normal that the notion of ‘we can, therefore we must,’ has transformed living into the art and act of accomplishing and achieving. It started at the individual level, moved to the family circle, then it went into the schools, and then we courted it in our organisations until finally it entrapped the whole society. It has become a culture and we are always, by our words and actions reinforcing this notion.

What we are conveniently overlooking is the pressure that comes with accomplishing and achieving. It pressurizes us to become successful; to become model individuals; to become anything as long as what we become is deemed an accomplishment by society. Over time, the pressure to accomplish, has generated a lot of stress within individuals and groups.

For many of us, living has become a constant state of tension; because of the possibility that one might not really become accomplished. Our being good at something is no longer only centred on the necessity to be brilliant at it. The driving force is a mixture of the grandeur and accolades that would come with it. We are therefore pushing ourselves to dangerous heights, cutting corners and bending the rules in order to become accomplished.

In summary, living has become more of ‘who can I be,’ and ‘how far can I go,’ whatsoever the cost.’ Unconsciously, our efforts to succeed has tied our self-worth into how much we can accomplish. As such our physical well-being has topped our psychological well-being, and this is creating a lot more stress than usual for us. We have been swept us into the frenzy of ‘I must do more;’ otherwise we become unaccomplished; and we feel small and inadequate.

This constant state of pressure puts us in a state of anxiety. It is actually driving most of us to fail than to succeed. We are so stressed, we have become mechanical in our thoughts, sterile in our words and motorized in our actions. Whilst robots are evolving into beings, we are degenerating into zombies. Maybe, just maybe it is time to rethink “if we can, it must be done.”

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Kodwo Brumpon is an executive coach at Polygon Oval, a forward-thinking Pan African management consultancy and social impact firm driven by data analytics, with a focus on understanding the extraordinary potential and needs of organisations and businesses to help them cultivate synergies, that catapults into their strategic growth, and certifies their sustainability.

Comments, suggestions, and requests for talks and training should be sent to him at kodwo@polygonoval.com