O₂
It started out as a punch line, when our ten-year old daughter called us out for a petty argument. It became a mantra, once we realized the power it held to help us overcome our baser insecurities.
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Out of the blue one day while driving with my wife Deb and our younger daughter, my mind turned randomly to oxygen. As a scuba diver, I suddenly blurted out—naively—that the cost to fill a tank must be the reason that the sport is so expensive, since it’s the only thing “used up” apart from boat fuel. Deb, who runs a large hospital, countered that oxygen is super-cheap. “$3 a tank,” she threw out, also naively. “No way. It’s got to be at least $30.”
An argument about the cost of oxygen—O₂—escalated quickly, with her insisting on its bargain price, as the voice of medical authority, and me belligerently defending its “clear preciousness”, as a seasoned diver.
In truth, neither of us had any clue.
Suddenly, a thin voice from the back of the car asked, “What are you arguing about?”
“The price of oxygen!” my wife and I cried out.
“That’s just stupid.”
The car fell silent while my wife and I absorbed her words.
Impulsively, I looked at my wife, thumped my fist twice against my chest, then thrust two fingers up in the air, belting out, “O₂, baby!”
We all burst into laughter. Argument over.
The Serious Side of O₂
While Deb and I were fighting about the cost of oxygen [Note: depending on where you source it, we were both right] we were simultaneously failing to breathe before launching into a diatribe about things that:
- were the result of feelings, not facts
- weren’t worth the distance our argument created between us
- were mistakenly perceived as challenges to our respective native intelligence, rather than open-ended musings
- were thus helping to point out inherent insecurities
No one argues without feeling threatened in some way.
“Breathe.”
That’s the mantra that countless modern-day life coaches, therapists, marriage counselors, yogis and breathwork facilitators all teach, in an attempt to help us mitigate stress, anxiety and depression.
This is important, because the rate for all of those clinical disorders is rising sharply, as humans continue to make living and thriving increasingly complex, and as traditional forms of sense-making continue being assaulted, leading us to feel less sure our ourselves and our place in the world, and even to whom—or where—to turn, for advice, truth and succor.
Daniel Schmachtenberger, a brilliant human, does a great job of explaining this growing existential crisis, in his series The War on Sensemaking.
“Breathe.”
The Real Cause of Arguments
As I mentioned a minute ago, we argue when we feel threatened. We now understand that the fight or flight response is an evolutionary survival tool we employ regularly. Part of our “defense cascade” as it’s known now, perceived threats can be as benign as arguments about the price of oxygen, or as life-or-death as being held at gunpoint. In both instances, the hormone adrenaline (aka epinephrine) leads us to dig in for the fight, or get out of dodge.
In Deb’s and my case, both of us hang a fair bit of our feelings of self-worth on our intelligence and effectiveness: on our ability to understand complexity, distill it for others, and create positive impact. We’ve each become quite good at it. Perhaps fueling this, each of us is also driven by a similar demon: that nagging thought, however unfounded, that maybe we’re wrong about ourselves. That maybe, if our conclusions about any given thing prove to be incorrect, then our entire construct of self must be flawed. Maybe we just think we’re smart, resourceful and insightful, when in fact we are of no special value to others. Meaning, maybe we are naïve to our own purpose. Because of the fact that our egos are seemingly wrapped up in how often we are “right”, we both react too often out of fear to the threat of being “wrong” or “uninformed”, and thus, as our daughter intuited, we treat “stupid” arguments as existential crises.
And so, we go to the mat for them.
I’ll get to how we have decided to handle this in a minute.
Deb and I are not alone. In general our fears find their outward expression in arguments, exclusion, ostracism, laws, libel, violence, wars and genocides. These are all forms of expressed fear: the fear of loss; fear of being under attack; fear of being wrong [ahem]; fear of uncertainty; fear of one’s own incapacity to handle what’s thrown at us.
Most of us are typically so invested in our “truths” that we increasingly see disagreements as existential threats.
Have you seen what’s going on outside, in the political, religious, educational, international, economic, sociological and ideological spheres?
It’s all out war.
And for what, exactly?
For our fears.
As the famed French Renaissance philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, famously said:
“My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.”
We have killed one another over fictions—that’s that’s what most of our fears are—for as long as we have judged life in terms of human productivity, because our self-worth has become wrapped up in whatever it is that we decide is our core value to the world—our purpose. Sadly, the more complex our lives grow (and the less we can agree on shared truths), the more virulent that violence has become.
We have largely lost our traditional ability to engage in civil debate about anything. The founder of formal logic and dialectics, Aristotle invented civil discourse. He also created the field of biology, botany, chemistry, ethics, history, logic, metaphysics, rhetoric, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, physics, poetics, political theory, psychology, and zoology… just saying.
Aristotle is turning over in his grave right now.
A Global Epidemic
More worrisome than two A-type executives nattering on about O₂ is the fact that, according to psychologytools.com, “many patients suffering from anxiety disorders or other conditions may have threat systems which have become over-active, or which are insufficiently counterbalanced by activity in the parasympathetic nervous system.”
Aka: breathing.
Nearly half of all Americans—43%—currently suffer from one form or another of mental illness. It’s astounding, and a symptom of a society mired in existential crisis. At the same time, nearly two thirds of us—63%—aged 18–24 are reporting symptoms of anxiety or depression. And this year, suicide has replaced homicide as the second leading cause of death among teens.
Which is to say, we now present more of a threat to our own lives than the rest of the world does.
People are crying out for help, and so far, our response has fallen short.
Our increasing digital oblivion, the hidden impacts of our pandemic response, and the dissolution of truth and sense-making have all conspired to vanquish us—no group more than our young.
It’s beyond tragic.
The Mantras
For years, when anything conspired to upset her, my mother would say to herself out loud, “It’s better than a brain tumor.”
That morbid bit of self-talk came from the fact that her son—my brother, Jordan—had in fact barely survived an especially deadly one [a pineoblastoma] at the age of 26. It was an event, to paraphrase Jordan, “that had suddenly thrust perspective in all of our faces”.
Nothing was as bad as what Jordan had gone through, mom reassured herself. That was before any of us knew that just twelve years later, he would succumb to his fifth cancer. Her mantra is used often, these days.
As a mantra, hers represents one mother’s way of moving forward, without succumbing to the deep depression that could quite easily have accompanied the death of her firstborn.
Jordan’s and my grandparents—ridiculously healthy in their late 90’s at the time of his death—all finally slipped away within three years of his passing.
“It’s the wrong order of things,” I’d head them mutter under their breath, more than once, when their thoughts turned to him in my presence.
O₂ features heavily in Deb’s and my lives, as a mantra that reminds us of our love for one another. It helps us be mindful of our need to pick our battles, that disagreements are far from existential challenges, that our snits don’t belong on the same shelf as brain tumors or terminal illness (her own first husband, also named Jordan, died of cancer), and that our native intelligence and self-worth aren’t truly wrapped up in being right.
On this last point, another thing my mother has said for years is, “Would you rather be right, or be happy?”
Indelible Imprint
After three years of spousal imploring, during which I resisted what I felt would desecrate the body that I’d kept unbesmirched for 52 years while everyone else seemed to “tatt up”, I surprised Deb with a visit to a tattoo parlor for her birthday just last month.
The symbol O₂ became a small self-reminder to breathe. The idea was that every time we looked at it—thanks to a ten year-old’s insight—we would be reminded of the larger context of our lives. The epigram we had chosen was something inscrutable enough to be an “inside joke”, and located such that in places we felt inclined to, we could hide it under a wristwatch.
Like “pick your battles,” “would you rather be right or happy,” and “it’s better than a brain tumor,” “O₂” now provides the two of us with several reminders:
- We are loved for who we are—not what we say, or know
- We are accepted by one another in full, without aster*sks
- We are entitled to make mistakes, like every other human
- Our views are no more than that—perceptions
- There are many ways of seeing a single thing, and the more ways we can, the richer our perspective becomes
- Our arguments are failures of communication, not character
- We are not under threat, and will realize this just as soon as our parasympathetic nervous systems re-engage
- Just breathe
Final Thoughts
I offer this story for one primary reason. Under stress, we are all biologically primed to release the hormone adrenaline/epinephrine when exposed to a perceived threat, no matter now benign.
When the “fight or flight” response is activated chronically, particularly in situations in which neither outcome is practical, it can lead to digestive problems, increased risk of heart disease and the other known effects of chronic stress, like depression, anxiety and even suicide.
But as countless books, gurus, practices and philosophies attest, it doesn’t have to take over. O₂ is the path—both literally and figuratively—back to baseline.
All we need to remember to do is breathe.
