Don't sweat the small stuff - there's too much of it!

 I felt like I needed a traditional Christmas rant, so here it is:

 I’ve been despairing again about the news. 

    Yes, the stories of war atrocities, injustice, political unrest, the cost of living crisis, strikes by public sector workers, the increase in food banks and homelessness, the Tories’ latest debacle, the economy, etc etc etc are all deeply depressing. However, what really annoys me is the banality and pointless exaggeration of much of the news I read online. Apparently, this country has been gripped by a Big Freeze over the past few weeks, when in reality it has been a normal seasonal chill – the real story is the fact that my geraniums were still in flower in my garden at the end of November. In Yorkshire. Yes, we’ve had frost and a bit of snow, recently, but this isn’t abnormal in Winter, is it?

    And then there are the non-stories. Here’s one I just read on the Huffington Post. Apparently, a man in Derbyshire ordered an expensive Macbook Pro laptop for his daughter for Christmas, from Amazon, and was instead sent two boxes of Pedigree Chum.

Ok, this is mildly amusing, unless it happens to you, but even if it does happen to you, it’s a relatively trivial blip in life’s rich tapestry, I would have thought.

The man in the story explained how Amazon’s initial response was to refuse to refund his money, which seems unlikely to me and suggests they had misunderstood or that there was more to the story than the news item suggested. Anyway, they subsequently apologised and promised to repay him, so presumably all is now well.

The aspect of this story that struck me was how varied human personalities are in their responses to what are in reality minor inconveniences, but how the responses that are reported in the media are always the ‘outraged’ type. These stories would have no readworthy aspect at all if the protagonist wasn’t presented as being an ‘outraged victim’ of something or other, and we weren’t all invited, and expected, to become outraged on thie behalf.

According to the media, the population of this country are in a permanent state of outrage, or at least they ought to be. Everything from the gender pay-gap to Autumn leaves falling on their lawns seems to make people apoplectic with fury. There doesn’t seem to be any nuance, and the media seems to expect us all to ratchet up our own emotional responses when we read these stories too. As far as I’m concerned, a man being sent the wrong item by Amazon is a complete non-story, barely an anecdote in fact. It might evoke a small smile, but outrage? Surely outrage is an emotion best kept in reserve for things that really deserve it, such as people voting to leave the EU or a homeless Polish man being beaten to death by a British racist.

 

The man who received the dog food by mistake had, tragically for him, been recently diagnosed with a serious health condition, and this was used in the article as a supposed reason to view Amazon’s blunder as being somehow more significant than it was and the man’s experience somehow more upsetting than it would have been for someone else. But, much as I believe that companies like Amazon are run by the Devil’s Disciples, it isn’t as if the CEO called the warehouse and said ‘Make sure you send dog-food instead of an Apple laptop to Mr X because we’ve just found out he’s suffering from XXX’, is it? It’s terrible for this poor man to have been diagnosed with a serious illness, but I’m sure that, of Amazon’s many erroneous deliveries (they’re a huge company so they’re bound to make many errors), there will obviously be a proportion that are misdelivered to people with serious health conditions. This doesn’t make the error somehow more heinous than if they were delivered to the super-fit, does it? Looking at it another way, you might argue that this particular man must be wealthier than many people in this country as he can afford to spend £1200 on his daughter’s Christmas present. I can’t afford a Macbook Pro, for example. But this doesn’t mean that Amazon’s error is less difficult for him to deal with. It’s just an error, and errors happen because people make mistakes now and then, particularly massive companies employing huge numbers of staff and underpaying most of them. That’s what we should be outraged about.

It is also the lack of logic that makes me despair. I’m as guilty as anyone of this. We all ‘instinctively’ feel that if we’ve thrown two sixes in a row, the next throw is less likely to be another six. Or if we use a different lottery number from the one we’ve used for the past five years, this will be the week those numbers come up. The ‘victim’ of this ‘terrible tragedy’ suffered from a different kind of logical fallacy. He was quoted as saying he had bought things from Amazon for twenty years with no problems, but he was no longer going to shop with them, which seems a weirdly illogical thing to do. If they have been reliable for two decades but make one minor blip which they put right, even if they annoy their customer by initially being unhelpful and even rude, isn’t this like cutting off your nose to spite your face? Surely, shopping on the High Street or even online shopping in various different stores is going to be more inconvenient and stressful, particularly for someone with a serious health condition, than continuing to use a company that has been reliable for twenty years? It’s like saying ‘Well, my friend has supported me through thick and thin since we were children, but she accidentally broke my lamp last week so I’m never going to speak to her again’.

I am not supporting Amazon here. Like most people, I find the company a very convenient way to buy things, and I love my Kindle. However, I still have misgivings about many of its business practices. And I’m not knocking poor Mr X in Derbyshire who received two boxes of dog food when he’d ordered a computer – most of us would be at the very least a bit miffed by this.

But please let’s get things into perspective. Let’s think about what really is news and what isn’t. Let’s try not to let the everyday problems we all experience now and again overwhelm us or seem much bigger than they really are. Let’s focus our anger on people who really deserve it – say, Elon Musk.

One thing that I’ve learned since I reached my fifties is that time goes past ever more quickly – tempus fugit indeed! – and even the important stuff passes by in a blur. Your car needs a new tyre, you have to cancel a get-together due to Covid, you’re worried about going to the dentist for a filling, the train is delayed, you haven’t bought sis’s Christmas present yet, they’ve run out of satsumas at your local supermarket, you’ve put on a few pounds, you ordered a copy of ‘A Christmas Carol’ from Amazon and they sent you a pound of sausages instead. These things will pass. You’ll deal with them, one way or another, and they’ll be replaced by some other trivial problem.

So don’t get outraged. It’s bad for your physical and mental health. Don’t let the media wind you up. Just deal with the problem and move on. Do something worthwhile to fill your memory bank with joy instead. Join a choir. Go to an Art Gallery. Go on a protest march. Become a Samaritan. Drop some groceries into a food bank collection point. Organise a Christmas party for your elderly neighbours. Phone your parents. Take in a stray cat.

On your deathbed, you don’t want to waste your time regretting not decking the delivery person who brought you the wrong item from Amazon.