What is Good for You
On remote control batteries and accommodating our little bad habits
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Dear Bolu,
On forgettable evenings like this one, it's easy to give in to many temptations. The endearing allure to yield to your vices in such circumstances could be chalked up to your ability to write a day off. Oh, it's just one of those days. Oh, it's just my off day. You can, pretty effortlessly, reject the memory of the day and, along with it, everything you did or did not do. So just for today, you allow yourself to be lazy. It's just a day. So you say. So you think. And so it goes.
You're not interested in what's on the TV because your phone is doing an excellent job of distracting you. Who are you texting? A Nigerian prince, perhaps. What are you reading? The Book of Longings or a letter? What are you watching? Seinfeld or One Piece? Although your attention is wholly spent on your phone, you don't like what's on TV. Perhaps it's the sound; perhaps it's just a natural dislike for the programme. In any case, you decide to change the channel in hopes that you'd find a show that's a bit more encouraging to watch. You'd like another distraction as if one is not enough.
You grab the remote control and aim it at the TV. You push a button, but nothing changes. You're still looking at the same channel. Ah, perhaps your aim isn't precise enough. You accept the challenge to improve your aim, but nothing changes still. Perhaps you're not pushing hard enough on the button. Perhaps the button has atrophied. You push harder on it and other buttons. Nothing works. Now you're getting frustrated. You know what the fix is, of course. You've known for a long time because it's a recurring issue. It's the batteries—they're gone. But you've been too lazy to change them. You've always found a way to bring them back from the dead, and that has sufficed in your times of need.Â
Sometimes hitting the remote hard does enough to jolt it back to life. It's as though you used a defibrillator on it. Other times, however, that doesn't cut it, and you need to take more extreme measures if the remote is to breathe again. You need to perform surgery. Of course, you're not a surgeon, but this is an emergency, and you're the only person on duty. You pop out the battery door, and it betrays the aged and perhaps dead cells that were once full of life. You realise their time has come, and you take them out. However, rather than replace them, you simply put them back in. What is dead may never die, right? You close the battery compartment, and sure enough, the remote comes back to life. It's full of energy, and without much force or preciseness, you're able to change the TV channel. Ah, there’s something about near-death experiences that renews our desire to live fuller lives. The remote will live for now, but tomorrow it will frustrate you more bitingly. While what is dead may never die, it is still dead.
Oh well.
There's this phrase we say that goes along the lines of, "If you know what is good for you, you'll do this or do that". It's a funny phrase because it implies that all it takes for us to do what's good for us is to know what's good for us. If you've lived long enough, you'd agree that there's more to doing a thing than knowing it should be done. There are lots of reasons why that is the case. We may want to defy an authority or rebel against a norm. We may be too lazy to get it done or unbothered about the consequences of not doing it. We may be deterred by an emotional attachment or lack the courage to see it through.
We don't always act in our best interests, even if we know full well what those interests are. We are not always our own best friends when it comes down to doing what we know is good for us. And this happens on different scales, some big (say stealing from the office) and some small (say returning a message or a missed call). I refer more to issues on the smaller scale, where we will primarily feel the effect of the decision.
We may be aware of one of our bad habits or tendencies. We know we'd be better off doing away with it, but we may decide to stick with it because it doesn't really hurt us. We'd keep it up as long as we can find a way around it. Snoozing our alarms, taking our phones to the loo, and not keeping our car keys in an easy-to-access-and-remember location are possible examples of these habits. We know we should get rid of them, but we're not eager to because we can live with them. So what if we snooze our alarms? Getting to the office a little late is not the worst thing in the world. So what if we're in the loo for 30 minutes? Twitter is an enjoyable place, and we're only carrying out a biological function. So what if we're always missing our keys? Spending two frustrating minutes searching for them every day won't make us miss any appointments.Â
Our ability to manage the effects of these habits encourages us to continue with them. These habits don't break us, so we see no need to break them. We know we'd be better off without them, but we see no pressing need to fix them. Like the dead batteries of a remote control, we continue to find a way to live with them. They'd frustrate us now and then, but the situation will always be redeemable until it's not. We'd be happier if we changed them, for sure. We'd be much better off. But we'd rather live with them instead.
Certain things needn't be broken for us to fix them, dear friend. If they are bent well enough, they might be as good as broken. We can all make optimisations to improve our lives, and I think we should actively make them. It could be something as little as not taking our phones to bed or keeping our socks in places we can easily find them. It could even be changing our old remote control batteries, dear friend.
Fin.
P.S.
Why are tiny frustrations often the most frustrating? Failing to thread a needle can be really frustrating, for instance. I'd say there are two reasons why these little things bother us a great deal. First, the feedback for such activities comes pretty quick. You can attempt to thread a needle five times in 20 seconds. That's five rounds of "Arrgh!" in as many breaths. It's pretty tough to endure. The second is that such tasks are usually a minor part of a grand goal we want to achieve. We see this little part as "easy-to-overcome" tasks or low-hanging fruits compared to our primary objective. Threading a needle, for example, is not the most challenging part of sewing so it frustrates us because we're just starting on the process of sewing and hitting a roadblock. We have this notion that there are more significant issues to deal with than threading the needle, and it pains us that we're stuck here. By the way, did you know that a needle is an inanimate Cyclops? Do you know why?
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Write you soon, merci!
- Wolemercy
The prose style 🥺🥺🥺.