Review of The Survivors' Club: A Book on Modern Restlessness
Marc Schoen, clinical assistant professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, has devoted his life to research, clinical practice, and teaching in mind-body medicine, behavioral decision-making and performance under stress. He wrote a book specifically on modern restlessness: Your Survival Instinct Is Killing You. The Chinese edition was published by CITIC Press in 2014, and a free electronic version is available on WeChat Reading.
Restlessness is a widespread problem in modern people. At work I often encounter restless patients, and sometimes I myself show restlessness. For example, when I ask some patients to read my "Consultation Guidelines" patiently before consulting, about one third never read them at all.
Many patients consult in an extremely blunt way, asking me directly: "What medicine should be used to treat advanced lung cancer with bone metastases?" I remind them that I first need detailed medical records—age, sex, occupation, height, weight, underlying diseases, current symptoms, and various examination reports—before I can give an opinion. I cannot answer such vague questions; questions like "how to treat advanced lung cancer with bone metastases" cannot be covered in a whole book, how could they be explained in a few words? Every patient has their own specific situation, some even with underlying diseases requiring special attention; we cannot possibly tell a patient how to treat them based on a mere disease name.
Yet on such life-and-death matters, consulting patients and their families show extreme impatience. They think physicians should not make them provide this complex information; they only want the doctor to prescribe treatment directly and dislike wordiness. Physicians will of course not satisfy such unreasonable requests.
Many patients or their families urgently want the doctor to tell them whether he is confident of curing the cancer. No serious physician on Earth would gamble his life and career prospects by giving them a yes. Sometimes consulting family members scold doctors, telling them not to be doctors if they lack the skill. With such impatient and abusive seekers, how dare a physician treat them?
Physicians themselves are growing restless: there are too many patients, and many doctors have no time even to drink water or go to the toilet. Most doctors in tertiary Grade-A hospitals are overfatigued and can hardly communicate fully with patients, so patients' and families' experience of care is poor.
Why has this happened? Is it because patients and families are impatient and doctors too busy? Or are there other causes? Does this happen only in hospitals? Of course not: when traffic jams, many road-ragers shout abuse, sometimes coming to blows with drivers ahead; when it is crowded, diners queuing in restaurants wait with extreme impatience. Professor Marc Schoen explores the problem of modern impatience and anxiety in Your Survival Instinct Is Killing You, arguing that the root cause is that modern society has grown accustomed to the "instant gratification" mode, leaving many people with ever less patience.
The most typical instant-gratification phenomenon is what happens when we eat at fast-food restaurants: we no longer have the patience to wait; once we arrive, we want food immediately. When we want information, we no longer need, as in ancient times, to consult many sources; we only type keywords into search engines such as Google and Baidu and get answers instantly, though how valuable those answers are is unknown. The fast, efficient operating mode of modern society means we need not patiently wait for a meal or finish a book. People have grown used to fast food and to fast-food reading. High-traffic authors study this well: their articles are short and punchy, with viewpoints split into numbered one-two-three / A-B-C labels that readers grasp at a glance without much thinking.
Over time, once used to a fast pace, we can no longer adapt to a slow one; we easily lose patience with everything and no longer have good discrimination. We no longer have the patience to watch our children grow slowly, wanting them to show excellence immediately; we no longer have the patience for prolonged communication with our loved ones, wanting them to satisfy our wishes at once; we no longer have the patience to persist in long-term endeavors; most people have become short-term thinkers, preferring quick, easy wins and tiring of spending a lifetime honing themselves into experts in a field, so that the once-common craftsman's spirit has become a rarity; crash courses are wildly popular, and people no longer believe in slow accumulation. Impetuosity has become the social mainstream; people are restless under the influence of group emotion, feel discomfort in life, and can rarely be at ease.
In the end we are entangled by all kinds of epidemic psychological illnesses: anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias, insomnia; we are hypercritical with relatives, friends, and colleagues, unable to bear any words that displease us, so we are constantly in conflict.
In our age of fast food and fast-food culture, patience has become an extremely precious quality. When you have time, do read Your Survival Instinct Is Killing You by Professor Marc Schoen, reflect on whether these problems exist in yourself, and perhaps you will gain much wisdom and inner peace.