Back in August I read an interesting piece in The Independent about Sasha Cagen, someone who collects other people’s ‘to do’ lists or ‘notes to self’ ………and finds the results therapeutic! I found this interesting because part of the modern condition is the way we build walls around ourselves and our problems, assuming that nobody suffers quite like us – a (mis)perception that can be the source of untold stress. And that’s because we’re wrong – there’s hardly a problem out there that has not been encountered by someone else before.
Cagen’s compilation of lists is like an informal benchmarking system that provides a voyeuristic insight into the private worlds of others…without betraying their confidentiality. In the article Cagen describes reading the lists as being like…
“the guilty pleasure of looking in someone’s medicine cabinet, refrigerator, or iPod. It’s everyday voyeurism, but it’s also therapeutic. We all wonder, ‘Am I normal? Am I the only one who doesn’t have it all figured out?’ When we see other people’s polished exteriors, it feels as though they have some secret we don’t. When we look at other people’s lists, we see that functional adulthood doesn’t come naturally to everyone else either.”
That phrase ‘functional adulthood’ caught my attention – like there’s a mode of being that is ‘the answer’. Well, it’s easy to see why some people are led to believe that by the media and cult of celebrity, but these lists are a useful reminder that everyone has their problems and what’s more, many of them are no different to those we face on a daily basis.
Much of modern day stress comes from striving to reach unrealistic standards – we’re sold these standards by the media, TV and films, but we often forget that it’s not real. The people we see portraying perfect lives are fictional, they just don’t exist and we shouldn’t feel guilty about not achieving what they seem to have achieved effortlessly. Setting yourself stretching targets in life is healthy, but setting truly impossible goals always ends in disappointment.
On a lighter note, I liked the observation that both lifelong hopes and daily tasks mix together indiscriminately in the lists – for example ‘Organise sock drawer’ is on a par with ‘Get teaching credential’ which, as Cagen wryly remarks, “is sometimes how life feels.”
You can read the full article from The Independent at: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/healthy-living/note-to-self-the-therapeutic-effects-of-reading-other-peoples-todo-lists-881190.html
And read a selection of the ‘to do’ lists at
www.todolistblog.blogspot.com
