This is a followup to a July 11, 2024, post entitled, “No!”
As I write, athletes representing over 200 nations — competitors in 329 different sporting events — are gathering in Paris to begin a colorful procession of boats on the River Seine that will mark the official opening of the XXXIII Olympiad. This is a big deal and certainly worthy of attention, but my true motivation for penning this post is that I just stumbled across an article about — I am not making this up — competitive chair sitting.
If you didn’t realize that competitive chair sitting was a thing, then you may be unaware of its precursor, competitive pole sitting (paalzitten). Or a host of other interesting human-manufactured contests, such as lion dancing, grits rolling, kiiking (competitive swinging), underwater hockey, fierljeppen (kind of like pole vaulting across a canal), and Inuit ear pulling.
And, if you’ve ever imagined that human beings were rational, then surely you’ve not thought through the vast amounts of time and energy that people devote to achieving new extremes of competence and competitive advantage in chair sitting, fierljeppen, and ear pulling.
For instance, the guy featured in the chair sitting article that I linked above has been honing his craft for almost 30 years, and he recently traveled all the way to Antarctica’s “dark, rocky” Cuverville Island to complete a lengthy sit on its barren beach.
In a recent post on how we get seduced by overcommitment, I described professional life as a kind of extreme sport. By this I mean it shares certain features with “real” sports, including that it requires enduring unnatural amounts of discomfort in service of commitments that may bring limited personal benefit. We start by committing to our venerated discipline (I don’t want to make too much of this, but there are some interesting behavioral parallels between going to graduate school and joining a cult). Thereafter we find ourselves working insane hours on things that are held to contribute to “the good of the discipline” (or of the agency, or of the department, or whatever). As I wrote in that post, this pathology holds that:
Every professional should engage in behaviors that boost our discipline, and those who don’t will be regarded poorly by other professionals. This sounds innocent enough until you consider that, amongst the varied pathologically destructive verbal rules that Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was created to combat, some of the most pernicious incorporate the precise components just mentioned: (a) they specify what an individual “should” do, (b) in order to avoid rejection by the peer group. Because humans are inherently social animals, group acceptance and belonging are powerful motivators. People will do most anything to avoid exclusion from the “tribe,” including what cultural conditioning says they SHOULD, even if that distances them from other reinforcers.
You might almost boil this down to the belief that the more we suffer, the better a professional we are. Sport is a very high profile manifestation of this insanity. Take Inuit ear pulling, for example. This indigenous sport is contested at the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics and, according to Wikipedia:
The ear pull … tests the competitors’ ability to endure pain… Two competitors sit facing each other, their legs straddled and interlocked. A two-foot-long loop of string, similar to a thick, waxed dental floss, is looped behind their ears, connecting right ear to right ear, or left ear to left ear. The competitors then pull upon the opposing ear using their own ear until the cord comes free or the opponent quits from the pain…. The event can cause bleeding and competitors sometimes require stitches.
This may sound 100% nuts to you, because the discomfort is deviously devised, and its only real reward is the esteem of other people who are nuts enough to be enthused about ear pulling. The sport can’t make you rich, won’t transform you ino a better person, and probably won’t convince your teenagers to like you.
But before you judge, however, remember: To other people, what YOU do for a living probably seems nuts too, because it also involves a lot of discomfort mainly in exchange for the approval of people with the same pathology as you.
For example, in my previous post I mentioned some of what I routinely do professionally. This includes: reviewing often dreadful journal manuscripts for often ungrateful authors; slogging through neuron-exterminating meetings of professional boards and committees; spending thousands of dollars to give conference presentations that cost me my vacation opportunities and mostly just make me anxious; and spending countless hours at night, on weekends, and during university breaks preparing instructionally-sound classes for students who mostly believe that “Cs make degrees.”
And don’t forget writing ABAI blog posts that few people will read.
This is, of course, all stuff that “good professionals” should do, and how we become acculturated to insidious should rules is something I’ll leave to the previous post to explain. What matters is that, once rule control is established, the lengths to which we will go to accomplish things that other people might not care about is, well… rather than try to capture that in words, I offer you this difficult-to-view clip of a runner fighting, at all costs, to cross the finish line of the 2015 Austin Marathon, even as her body fails her.
In case that image isn’t enough to drive home my point, here are a few more examples of things athletes have endured for reasons that make sense to exactly nobody outside of their sport:
- Tumble inside a clothes dryer to sweat off extra pounds, in order to pass a weigh-in before a wrestling meet — because “the team needs me” [This was a kid I knew in high school; fyi wrestling is organized into weight classes and to compete you must weigh no more than the maximum poundage allowed in your class]
- Continue playing after a chunk of one ear was bitten off — because “the team needs me” [a rugby player I knew in college]
- Run 12 miles per day, every day, for 365 consecutive days, including with a 106 degree fever — because… well, just because [ABAI Blog Czar Andy Lattal; more on this shortly]
- Spend 6 hours a day, every day, all year, for at least 20 years, face down in the water [every competitive swimmer ever, and even swimmers can’t give you an explanation for this one]
- Pedal a bicycle 10 miles on a fractured hip following a crash — “in order to finish the ride” [me 😬]
The crux of the matter is not that certain people may do insane things, but why they do them. As I wrote in my previous post:
Everyone has different reinforcers. In every instance, it’s rational, not selfish, to acknowledge that time and response opportunities are finite, such that engaging in one behavior [precludes] engaging in others. If, in a given instance, your reinforcers align with [“should” rules], great. If not, think carefully about how you spend your time, no matter how other people think you should.
So, when we make sacrifices in service of a “greater cause,” there are two considerations: (1) Are you chasing your own reinforcers, or simply doing what some abstract rule says you should? and (2) What’s the cost of doing so?
Professional commitments can be problematic when should rules hold sway and cause unpleasant consequences. Do whatever you like, to whatever level of excess, if it’s fun and you have the time/energy/resources for it!
But if the motivation is mainly some should rule? I can verify, for instance, that the high school wrestler mentioned above did not enjoy bouncing around in a hot dryer, and would never, ever, ever have done this aside from his commitment to the team. It’s worth asking whether that’s sufficient reason to risk hyperthermia and head injury.
It would be bad enough if should rules were only socially mediated — that is, if we only fell victim to insane rules imposed on us by cultural conditioning. Unfortunately, humans are extremely adept at deriving their own rules. For example, my friend Andy Lattal loves two things almost as much as his family: running and data. He runs often and keeps a detailed log of his runs… which sometimes spawns insane streaks like the one described above. Streaks that, once conceived, Andy feels that he should, he must, complete.
Now, Andy doesn’t run for approval. He doesn’t care what you think of his routines or even if you know he’s a runner. And to reiterate, doing what you enjoy is mostly great. Except when a self-imposed should rule drives you to things like run 12 miles with a high fever in a snow storm, which I hope I needn’t point out is neither pleasant nor good for you.
One of my own pathologies concerns endurance cycling (see above), which has taught me, for better or worse, that no matter how miserable you are, you always finish the ride — even if you’re not in a competition, and even if you’re all by yourself with absolutely nobody to impress. Doing so gives me absurd satisfaction, I confess. However, did you know that mortality rates increase following a fractured hip (bone marrow released into the bloodstream can cause stroke and heart attack)? And that moving around on the injury seriously exacerbates this risk? Though my credibility in such matters clearly is questionable, even I am pretty sure that “finishing the ride,” no matter how gratifying in the context of a self-derived should rule, isn’t worth that.
Perhaps you will watch some of the XXXIII Olympiad. I know I will. And as you appreciate the grace and power and sculpted physiques these athletes bring to the field of competition, it’s okay, even healthy, to also contemplate the insane sacrifices they made to get where they are, like the family and social time they gave up, the injuries that could haunt them for life, and so on. Think too of how little most of them will receive in return — a medal, some applause, a bit of fleeting notoriety.
An athlete’s behavior topography might not be similar to yours, but when you look into the eyes of that runner in the video above, I know some of you will see your own reflection. And you’ll experience a theory-of-mind moment, because how that runner feels while crawling across the pavement… that’s how you have felt as you pressed to finish up that One More Client, or to write that One More Journal Manuscript, or meet whatever other insane commitment was pushing you to the brink.
Now consider what teetering on the brink actually earns you. At least that runner developed grace and power (under normal circumstances, anyway) and a sculpted physique, and by the way she got several thousand dollars for finishing third in the race. How often do any of those things flow from intense (over)commitment to your profession?
Postscripts
(1) Congratulations to World Eskimo-Indian Olympics Ear Pulling 2024 Gold Medalists Amanda Ahosgeak and Frank M. Lane!
Oh, and as a newly-minted fan, consider supporting the sport by purchasing a WEIO Ear Pull commemorative coin, or other swag, at the WEIO web site.
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(2) I probably should apologize to Andy Lattal for sharing his dark secrets, but he’s probably out for a long run and hasn’t seen this post anyway.
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(3) UPDATE (7/27/24) Shortly after this post went to press, it was reported that an Australian field hockey player had made a rather dramatic “take one for the team” decision. Or maybe I should say “give one for the team.”
Matt Dawson injured his finger about two weeks ago and faced a long recovery process that would have prevented his playing in the Paris Olympics. Dawson chose instead to amputate a portion of the finger and play with his diminished, but healing, digit. Said Dawson: “If taking the top of my finger was the price I had to pay, that’s what I would do. … [If] we get the gold in the end, it’s not a really big price to pay.” Folks, if the relevance of THAT to the present discussion isn’t obvious, then clearly you’re too tired from metaphorically lopping off fingertips to read carefully.