Waiting Room Theory

 Hopefully, nobody reading this has too much experience with the waiting room in the hospital. It is not a fun place to spend any length of time. Anywhere from a few seconds to many hours ago, you saw your loved one being moved throuth the door, into a room down the hall, and you do not know if they come back, or how much of them comes back. It truly is a horrible feeling, a combination of fear and powerlessness. Both fear and powerlessness are bad feelings in their own right, but the hospital waiting room takes it to a whole new level of suck.

So why do people chase this feeling?

I am not kidding. People actually go out of their way to get into 'waiting room situations'. They try to be powerless yet emotionally invested, if not outright afraid. Consider politics for instance. People right now are losing sleep about whether or not the guy they believe left office will be impeached again. On the other side, people are losing sleep about electoral irregularities in a contest between two factions of the same status quo in a demographically doomed empire.

Granted, there is only one truth, one correct version of events, and one of the political perspectives will be closest to that, but that is not the point. The point is the 'losing sleep' part. In the entire United States, there are some number less than ten thousand people who have tangible, immediate influence in the federal political process, and three hundred million and then some who do not. Those not-even-ten-thousand are the only ones who have any right to worry about this stuff in the short term. The rest of the country does not. And here is the kicker: the rest of the country would not even know what to get worked up about this week if they did not watch the fake news all the time. They fire up their computers and effectively order the machine to make them angry and afraid by lying to them when they open some article, video, social media feed, et cetera ad nauseam. News junkies are junkies too, and they need to get clean like every other junkie.

But how does one get clean? How does one stop worrying about stuff that one does not control? Unfortunately, I have no idea. But I would like to help people, so if you know anything about stopping anxiety and undue worries, please do drop a comment. Much Love!