The Muchness: Naming The Avalanche

Thought Cookie: Edition 24, Vol. 23

May 10, 2022

For a few years now, I’ve been referring to the hulkingly, overwhelming, constant, pressure-filled, demand-packed, connection-craving, alert-issuing, FOMO-wielding beast of modern life as The Muchness.

The Muchness.

A friend will divulge, usually in a mournful frenzy, about the pressures of life today, and not in a general way, but in pain, detailing their own private, bloody, internal wrestling match.

The configuration of the Muchness is different for everyone, at every time. But is held together by its ubiquity.

Few escape. Some are able to reduce it, but it inevitably rears up and extracts its pound of emotional flesh from all of us.

The Muchness is characterized by an ironclad relationship between constant demands, ever-increasing expectations and immutability.

It is made of unending urgency. Its individual elements include, but are not limited to:

finding and enjoying healthy work, staying in contact with individual members of your family, keeping up with parenting or caring for loved ones, staying in shape, staying healthy, access to ever-increasing medical care, mental health needs of themselves or children or spouse, getting food on the table, and clothes on the backs and dog hairballs swept away and dog shoes on feet in hot summer months, relationship woes, pressure to do more, more, more, meal planning, carb counting, veganism, solar flares, the destruction of our environment, the inequities in our society and in our workplaces, the violence against people of color, TikTok, vitamin consuming, fund management, NFTs, WTFs, political fractures between family members, MLMs and cults, Netflix login and queue management

– all done, to some degree in the fishbowl of the modern world.

(And again, this is not an inclusive list.)

The Muchness is made crisper and more piercing by the constant information, the constant demand, the built-in judging omnipresent and impressed upon us by the technology we created, became addicted to and alternately hate and love.

“Yes,” I say to friends when they describe their current overload, “I call it The Muchness. And it’s a lot.”

The Muchness has been growing since the late 1990s and early 2000s, when we began to open the box in which we’d invented an entire other world and within that, another dimension of living.

We thought this world would bring us escape, efficiency, happiness only. (Oh, our wicked American obsession with happiness.) Instead, it has brought a blend of connection and constriction, pressure and pleasure, unlimited opportunities for vice and darkness, and acres and acres of distraction from the vibrant world right in front of us.

I’m sure the Muchness was there before, it’s just that it was a slow-rolling snowball catching pace with our growth as a society. And then, in a relatively short period of time, it became a blizzard.

And now it’s an avalanche.

I think it’s important to name it. Has anyone ever looked at an avalanche and said, “I got this”?

I think it’s vital that by naming it, we can consider it. “This is really too much. Is it normal to feel like I’m muddling through with middling success?”

The answer is, yes.

It is normal.

You are normal.

The Muchness is not what we were made for. Not really.

We weren’t built for this. But we built this.

And now we’re, to some degree, flailing within it.

The last two years added to the already overflowing experience of The Muchness. It added to it by subtracting things for people.

Some people realized they wanted to subtract certain aspects of their lives, driven by The Muchness.

Like their jobs, their relationships, their homes, where they lived, how they lived and who they lived among.

While millions of people have made those decisions, the wave of change coming from this collective shift is just beginning.

Yes, we are changing. And this change is only just now barely, barely, beginning.

While there is no going back, right now going forward is a confusing mess.

Particularly when we don’t know who we are, what we value or how to cope within the world of constant demands for our attention and action.

For many years, I was living so close to The Muchness, I fancied myself within it, taming it from within with all of my effort and my attention and my creativity.

But I gave that up.

Sorting Through The Muchness

When I feel The Muchness rumbling down the slope and closing its cold hands around my throat now, I do what can sort of feel like a capitulation.

I step back. Way back.

I set my phone down. I take long breaks from anything performative – like social media, one of The Muchness’ most talented temptresses. I sit with me, my problems, my feelings, my exhaustion. I listen to it all with as much self-compassion as I can. I try to make a real, in-person connection to a human I love or like or don’t even know. Look deeply into the eyes, feel the soul, tune into the spirit.

I go back to the idea I’ve shared before, that I am a leaf on the river, and I am constantly moving and changing by the floating and not because of my own efforting at all.

The feeling of The Muchness is a reminder to me to get real, to dive into what I really need on a soul level. It’s an alert to breathe, to move, to notice.

It’s a recalling to the choice made years ago: that I would rather live in this broken world than in another constructed reality rising quickly, for as long as I am able.

I’m fully aware that choice may change as life here continues to evolve. But for now, for me, it is long walks and flowers and the way the sky looks when the sun rises and holding hands with my daughter as long as she’ll let me.

That’s the cozy snow cave within the avalanche of The Muchness.

For those experiencing The Muchness without the language to name it, try calling it this. Try seeing what that does. Try pushing hard against its magnetic force.

And know on the other side of the icy overwhelm of it all, there are others. And there is love.

Hi you! Did you feel this one?

Did this edition touch something in your soul? If it did, will you share it? I would love to have more of you reading, and feeling heartened, seen and touched. My intention is to grow Thought Cookie to a readership of about 100 this year. I’m around 50 right now, exactly halfway there. (Yay and thank you!) If you know someone who is a deep thinker and feeler, or in need of some deep thoughts and love, send them this little soul note and encourage them to Subscribe.

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