Wellbeing, Jargon

 In the past year British newspapers have reported on the mental health benefits of activities including but not limited to: having a dog, having a cat, having houseplants, keeping chickens, keeping bees, keeping a sourdough yeast going, digging flowerbeds, mowing the lawn, tending an allotment, watching birds, looking at trees, walking, jogging, swimming, horse riding, yoga, cold showers, hot saunas, afternoon naps, knitting, painting, cooking, baking, decluttering and just quietly pottering about the place. They missed some of my favourites: sharpening pencils,ironing handkerchiefs into triangles and sweating an onion to the Six O'Clock News. If these seem basic or trivial endeavours, I mention them only to illustrate how any pursuit, however minor, can be corralled into the campaign to improve our collective mental health...

Patients waiting to see the Doctor with Figures Representing  Their Fears
Rosemary Carson (b. 1962)
Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [CC BY]

I worry, though, that by framing every domestic task, every pastime, every twitch of the cross-stitcher's thread in terms of mental health, we aren't so much soothing the problem as stoking it.

Not so long ago, we needed to talk about mental health. We needed to get it out into the open, shine a light, stop the stigma. Now I wonder if we should stop talking about it. Or at any rate stop talking about it in every context... I am troubled by an increasing tendency to treat mental health as a sort of capricious god to be petted and fretted over, appeased and attended to, offered libations of chamomile tea and sacrifices of darkest dark chocolate. Daily activities are to be undertaken only in the service of the great spirit deity Mental Wellbeing. Light a candle, say a prayer or affirmation...

This isn't turning the compost heap, this is mindfully turning the compost heap. This isn't a swim in the sea on a sunny day, this is a shot of pure psychological resilience. And what you're doing right now? Reading The Times with the cat on your lap? That's disrupting the toxic cycle of stress and emotional burnout...

Maybe we need a bit more art for art's sake, walking for walking's sake, baking for baking's sake.

Far from alleviating stresses, we might be aggravating them. If I tell you to walk around the block to ease the twinge in your back, you'll think about the twinge. If I tell you to roll pastry because it's therapeutic, you'll dwell on the therapy when you might otherwise have dreamt of the tart. When it comes to mental health, we're in danger of becoming obsessed with benefits and outcomes. Where's the pleasure in just being and doing?

(Laura Freeman, The Times, 2021)

Thank God for a much needed spoonful of good old common sense.

Wellbeing Obsession

An English teacher called Dawn Wilson-North was interviewed on Radio 4's PM last Thursday... She was fed up with hearing how children weren't learning anything: her pupils were learning just fine, and online attendance was at 90 per cent, not much lower than normal.

"When you look at them as young people going out into the big, wide-world, particularly year 11s, they're going to have gained so many skills from what they're doing. They're learning self-reliance: they have to be there, work the technology, use the technology that adults are using. They help each other in the chat; they copy links if people can't quite get on. They're learning resilience. These are all employability skills that they're going to be well up to speed on in a way that perhaps other students wouldn't be." Her pupils, she said, were sitting in virtual classrooms for six hours a day, doing their lessons, doing their homework, participating, engaging. What they found demoralising was the narrative from adults that this all added up to a giant failure.

Anxiety, Head of a Girl
Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805)
Photo Credit: Victoria Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

On Friday morning's Today programme the presenter talked to some students about how they were feeling. "We're calling them the Covid Generation," he said sadly, as though their granny had just died... enough misery chat about how Covid is affecting young people's education and future prospects! What happened to the idea of parents putting on a brave face and being can-do-ish and upbeat? No wonder teenagers are depressed: things are weird enough without adults feeling perfectly OK about going, "Poor you - this is an absolute disaster. You're part of a lost generation - it is the most tragic waste."

Of course everyone feels very sorry that some teenagers' mental health is suffering, but I don't know that endlessly telling them how awful things are for them is helping...

Any parent should be wary of encouraging a child to think of themselves as an external victim, a thing with no agency: these are not good foundations for emotional wellbeing... And what has happened to the idea of promoting resilience? It is the most discredited of qualities, because it has wrongly become equated with a sort of emotionally disengaged, dead-eyed, stiff-upper-lip kind of attitude to life, and no one wants that. But resilience is good. It's what gets you through stuff...

Mixed in with all this is the unhelpful fact that the phrase "mental health" has become close to meaningless because of our obsessive desire to pathologise every possible emotional state, especially when it applies to children and young people. We should really row back a bit from medicalising feeling anxious, bored, lonely, worried, cross, annoyed, confused. Everyone cycles through these feelings - along with some jollier ones - for the whole of their lives. They are not indicative of poor mental health...Feeling worried, sad or hacked off is not mental illness, any more than a headache is a brain tumour...

(India Knight, The Sunday Times, 2021)

 Thank God for a reflective, perceptive and pertinent piece of writing. Coping with the  challenges, problems and setbacks you will inevitably meet during the course of your life, including this pandemic is essential. It's called resilience.

(See Anxiety, November 24, 2020, Shyness as Social Phobia, October 16, 2020 and Anxiety Nonsense, August 25, 2020) 

 Jargon

...When exactly was it that people started telling us they would revert rather than get back to us? When did things start being done at pace, rather than quickly? Buy-in? Core competency? What was policy based on before it was evidence-based? To search companies' mission statements is to take a tour of Planet Cringe. My favourite so far is McKinsey's. The promise here is to help organisations create the "Change that Matters". The capital letters are McKinsey's. In order to effect this Change that Matters, the consultancy explains, it partners with clients "from the C-suite to the front line". C-suite? What does the C stand for? It turns out the C stands for chief, as in chief executive officer, chief financial officer etc. Oh please...

Alison, a former senior employee of a bank, said that, in her experience, "jargon was the gift of the person desperate to get on without having any more talent than their peers".

Another message unsettled me. A man in Wiltshire who had worked in several big corporations said: "The introduction of a new language, buzzwords, is a form of control. If you can get people to talk like you, you can get them to think like you."

This is so true, and I for one have been guilty of it. Back in the day, as soon as I had learned a new bit of jargon, I would be using it at every opportunity. It was a way of showing I was grown up and one step above whichever befuddled work experience kid came along behind me. It's a brave and brilliant person indeed who dares to use only the simplest language possible to make themselves clear.

(Adrian Chiles, The Guardian, 2021) 

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(From a Linkedin profile, in Private Eye, No 1549)

*We are excited to announce an evolution of the company's global marketing strategy: humaning. Humaning is a unique, consumer-centric approach to marketing that creates real, human connection with purpose...Humaning is a natural fit for a company that creates the snacks that form the basis for connections with people all over the world...Humaning is when storytelling becomes storydoing.

(Press release from Mondelez, makers of Ritz biscuits, Toblerone etc, Private Eye, No 1536)

Can you work out the meaning?

(A) Upright striding vertical bipedality on horizontal terrestrial substrates.

(B) Disintermediating existing physical retail channels.

(C) Elucidates the antecedents of consequences.

(D) The preceding dialectic provides a metacontextualisation of the academic linguistic gestalt.

Answers

(A) Walking on the ground

(B) Not selling in shops

(C) Talks about causes and effects

(D) Often, big words are a load of tosh.

(Tom Whipple, The Times, 2020) 

*Sir, I am obliged to Tom Whipple and the Columbia Business School for easing my mind about the use of complex language in academic work.

In the early 1980's I submitted my PhD only to be told to rewrite it or I would only be eligible for a lower degree. After eight years of hard work, while holding down a full time job, this was a blow. I asked my supervisor the reason and was told "it's too readable." It was suggested that I obtain a thesaurus, pick every fifth word and find a more complicated version to substitute. After another six months I resubmitted my unreadable text and was duly awarded my degree. All was not lost, as the original, with very little tweaking, became a moderately successful text book from which I still receive a small royalty.

(Dr Michael A Fopp, Soulbury, Bucks, The Times, 2020)

*

The Merry-Go- Round, Mark Gertler (1891-1939)

Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]

Do you pounce like a ninja? Are you a laser-focused self-starter who can hit the ground running?

If this jargon leaves you confused and bewildered you may be one of the young graduates put off by meaningless language in job descriptions.

… The worst culprits were public relations, IT, sales, marketing and engineering companies. The terms used included on-boarding (being enrolled in a business), C-suite (most senior executive), ninja (desirable employee) and open the kimono (reveal a project’s inner workings).

The legal industry, property, administration, insurance and banking were also accused of using too much jargon.

… The most off-putting descriptions included ninja, laser-focused, action-orientated and proven track record. The most misunderstood phrases included growth-hacking (acquire customers while spending as little as possible), thought-shower (brain storming session) and low-hanging fruit (easily achieved goals).

Nearly one in 12 people said that they had used jargon to appear in the know, even though they had no idea what the term meant. The most common phrases bandied about were second-line and front-to-back…

(The Times, 2019)

Jargon and Cliché Bingo
Card to be taken to meetings.

Ninja	Laser-focused	On-boarding	C-suite	Open the kimono
Action-orientated	Proven track record	Growth hacking	Thought shower	Low hanging fruit
Second line	Front to back	Blue screen	Ballpark figure	No I in team
Pushing the envelope	Think outside the box	Mission critical	Core competencies	Knowledge base
At the end of the day	Like	24/7	I hear what you’re saying	Touch base

Five buzzwords in any row, column or diagonal is “BINGO!”

Only mark off buzz words uttered by others.