Why in our world is annoyance the first emotion?

As people we’re not a very understanding lot. For beings that have the most developed communication skills on the planet we don’t use them to very good effect.

The emotion simmering just under the surface for most people is annoyance. It’s like the quick fire response, the instant reaction, the built in reflex. 

People get annoyed on the way to work, people get annoyed when they can’t to where they want to go, and people get annoyed by other people.

If you ever get in the way of a business man who’s not only going to work but has been stuck on a tube that has made him late for work, and you happen to step in front of him, you’d better prepare yourself for an almighty attack of the tuts and a grilling from his eyes right through the back of your head.

Is this really going to make him get to where he needs to be any quicker? I don’t think so. Is he going to arrive happy and with a smile on his face? I don’t think so. Is he going to blame you for getting in his way, making him late and whatever else might happen to befall him that day? I think so.

Annoyance is one of those universal emotions that everyone can identify with, but seems to have no real use or benefit. It starts with a tightening of the brow, grows into a slight clenching of the fists, and can escalate quickly into a sigh or a sulk, and sometimes even an argument. But to what end? I doubt the object of your annoyance actually meant to annoy you. We’re all just trying to get where we need to be and do the things we need to do. 

My mum used to say be careful what face you pull, because the wind might change and you’ll be stuck like that. Unfortunately, the world (or maybe it’s just London) seems to be full of people who’s wind is already blowing in the opposite direction.

At the end of the day, it does seem that all this annoyance is only really annoying the person who is annoyed, so come on London, give us a smile, you might even learn to like it!

Footnote. There are some people who deserve a whole heap of annoyance dropped on their head, namely cyclists who who don’t obey the rules of the road, never mind the pavement. So if you ever see a cyclist jump a red light and cycle through a green man, stop in front of them and wave your arms around, shouting ‘Get back on your tricycle an learn some manners’ (or some other witty put down).

Really? This was a headline in the Metro this morning… It’s time we stop insinuating that someone else is to blame for our problems, that someone else is behind all our decisions and we need to stop finding someone to blame for everything we do. Yes advertising has it’s influence, and yes we may buy more chocolate if it’s cheap, but we ultimately make the final decision. 

Want to eat 5 bars of chocolate in one sitting? Want to stuff your face with McDonalds all day long? Fine, but it’s going to make you fat. And when you’re sitting at home because you can’t go outside, don’t blame the government or the shops or even your mum (although parents are definitely to blame for childhood obesity) but blame yourself. You made the decision to buy all the chocolate, you made the decision to eat all the chocolate and even though you didn’t ‘decide’ to get fat, you certainly didn’t decide to stop at the first sign of chubbiness. 

It’s time we face the truth and take responsibility for our own decisions and not try to find someone else to blame but ourselves.

If reality is what we make of it, we’re not doing a very good job. 

Who made the decision our reality had to be shaped as it is? Decisions about our own reality are often out of our hands and we get told so often what to do. It’s no wonder young people don’t have any direction and expect to be given a living rather than earn one, when every paper we read, on every channel we watch and everything we hear, we are told how to live our lives. 

It’s a cacophony of noise. Do this at that time. Eat that at this time. Drink a specific number of those. Don’t drink any number of them. Don’t sleep too little. Don’t sleep too much. Feed your baby here, but definitely not here. We hardly even need to think for ourselves.

In the past there wasn’t this amount of information - they passed the knowledge down from generation to generation, mothers teaching their children, and the children teaching their children.

These days the only knowledge passed down is how to rinse the government and how to do a good spray tan - and that’s if you’re lucky. 

But did this lack of communication come before the deluge of information, or have people stopped talking because they can ask the computer instead? Maybe the breakdown of society has come because young people no longer need their parents to impart advice - they can get everything they need from the world wide web. Apart from a lesson in manners obviously. Or a good whipping (and we all know what the people in charge think of that).

The government is just as bad. They spend so much money on studies that everyone knows the answer to already, like ‘How many seconds is the ideal dunking of a biscuit’ (they tested it out on HobNobs. HobNobs! Not only has it got a weird intercap, but everyone knows the only biscuit worth dunking is a Rich Tea, and maybe a Bourbon or two as a treat) ‘Taller people get cancer more’ (apparently everyone over 5 foot has a higher chance of cancer the taller they are - why do we need to know this? There’s nothing we can do about it anyway, apart from chop yourself in half below the knees) and the most recent survey ‘Why it feels quicker on the way back than on the way there’.

Scientists came to the conclusion it was because people underestimated the time to get wherever they were going, so overestimated the time back from wherever they’d been. Surely it’s because if you’re going somewhere you’ve never been before, you have to concentrate on the journey and you probably have a specific hour to arrive so you are aware of the time. 

On the way back, you’re returning to familiar ground and have done whatever tasks you had to do that day, so your brain can switch to auto-pilot and the journey seems quicker as you have no end point apart from arriving home in one piece.

So Mr Scientit*, next time you get asked to do an expensive survey by the government, just give me the money and I’ll tell you the answer. Then we can all go home in time to get the allocated 6-8 hours of sleep you have told us we should have.

Night everybody. 

*This typo is deliberate

It’s weird when words become so ubiquitous that they almost lose their meaning, like looking at a word too long and it starts to look like it’s spelt wrong.

Take conscience. We know it’s pronounced ‘con-shunce’ and means the little voices in our head that tell us when the thing we’re thinking of doing is very bad. Although annoyingly it seems to always run a little behind, so you do the bad thing then your conscience finally catches up, just in time to make you feel guilty afterwards. Maybe there’s only one conscience and it has to hop between brains, watching what we’re doing but only being able to help one person at a time (my version of a conscience is starting to sound a bit like God, apart from the un-omnipotent aspect) …but I digress.

So ‘con-shunce’ is spelt conscience, which is actually con-science if you look at it. So is having a conscience a big con if you believe in science? Religions way of having a laugh at those who believe in evolution and the big bang, but also believe they have a soul and a little person sitting inside their head (or on their shoulder if they believe what the films tell them as well) telling them what’s good and bad.

Surely if we believe in science, we believe in logic and coming to conclusions based on logic- weighing up the pros and the cons and deciding on the right decision based on facts, i.e. if you want to sleep with your best friend’s husband, you weigh up whether his dick is big enough to be worth ruining a 10 year friendship (the ratio of inches to years of friendship may need to be explored in its own blog post!). But it’s still based on a rational decision. Science. If you decide to sleep with him because the little voice inside your head didn’t tell you not to as he was off trying to persuade some other sucker to jump off a bridge because the world is a better place without him, then you’re conning yourself and your own logical mind into not having to make a decision, so con-science.

Was conscience thought up as a way for the church to trick people into doing the right thing? Who knows, maybe the pope, or Answer Me This. I might ask them…

I’ve probably stretched some sort of meta-physical string theory that can’t bend that way, but basically what I’m trying to say is when you break words down, it’s interesting to think of their origins.

People who take up more than their allotted room on the tube annoy me. A lot. Is it really that difficult for men to sit with their legs closed for more than 10 minutes? Do they really have to straddle the tube seat, encroaching over the clear boundaries set out by knowledgable tube seat makers?

Oh yes, I remember now - the distance between the knees is in direct proportion to the size of their balls. As in the wider the legs, the tinier they are.

That is all for today.  

Right, time to pull the proverbial head out of the arse and down from the clouds and get back on with life as we know it. For now at least.

My sister commented on my FB today that she had been browsing through my previous profile pictures - happily pointing out how different I looked but not quantifying whether it was a good different or bad different. (I’m going to go with good different until she tells me otherwise).

It got me thinking about our digital lives. We record so much more of ourselves now and just lay it all out there for people to look at any time they get the urge to do a bit of friendly stalking. It used to be the only time you had to look back at your life in pictures was when your mum cajoled everyone into sitting round the sofa, oooing and ahhhing at baby pictures. Or if you made it onto This Is Your Life.

Maybe in the future This Is Your Life will be filled with all this information and pictures - will everyone we’ve ever liked, retweeted, blogged about, commented on, poked, put in a circle or IM’d with be there? Some people would need a whole football stadium! Can you imagine Michael Aspel sitting there, going “And here, flown all the way in from Timbuctoo, is the guy who wrote the article entitled ‘How to live in London and not be miserable’ that you commented on and shared with 5 of your friends… it’s Mike Green!’

Maybe we would need to have a This Is Your Life every 2 years just so there is not information overload?

You’ve reached aged 16, This Is Your Life!

You’ve reached aged 18, This Is Your Life!

You’ve reached aged 20, This Is Your Life!

Maybe our digital lives are mere half lives of our ‘real’ ones and deserve to be celebrated each time we are ‘reborn’ and transcend through the digital sphere until we return, enlightened, onto a new social platform!

(Enlightening picture will be inserted here but pen currently nowhere to be found) 

Escalators are funny things aren’t they. Fundamentally they’re moving stairs, but we all seem to treat them like stannah stairlifts - as soon as we get on we can’t get off until we’ve been unceremoniously dumped off either end.

And don’t get me started on travelators. They’re just moving bits of floor, put there to quicken our journeys (and most probably to unconsciously herd us like sheep to their chosen destination). These inventions are meant to make our lives quicker and easier but people seem to have taught their brains to switch off when they come into contact with one of these machines and let it take over. Like our brains power down as they power up. If there’s no reason to exert ourselves, we’d rather just switch off.

Watching people walking beside a travelator or choose to take the old fashioned way up the escalator (the stairs…) is the funniest thing in the world as they’re moving at the same speed as those standing on the machines. And I’m not laughing at the ones putting in the effort.

These metal additions to our lives are meant to speed things up - the clue is in the name: to escalate is to increase rapidly and moving walkway. Names that conjure up images of doing, not standing still and letting the world walk past. They haven’t been nicknamed ‘flat wheelchair’ or ‘moving footrest’ because they’re not there to do the work for us.

No wonder we’re all fat.

We’d rather let our minds wander or switch off altogether as we exit the miserable sphere that is our lives. Why not add some get-up-and-go, some pizazz, a little bit of oomph, some zingy, zangy, zongy to our lives?

It’s not going to change your life if you walk up some stairs, but it may get you to work feeling a little less like a walking zombie than you did the day before.  You can push all the stationary sods out the way for a change and tut as their massive bags get in your way. Take the higher ground, take control of your legs and walk up some stairs. You’ll soon get the hang of it, you do it every day in your house.

Social media has given the collective a voice that can strike quickly, loudly and more effectively than we’ve ever had before.

Yes there have always been protests but they took weeks to organise and only really disrupted a small area.

Now we have Twitter and when the assembled voices get a bee in their collective bonnet, the damage done is incredible. To use a word much bandied around today, the general ill feeling has been AMPLIFIED further than we could have dreamed of 5 years ago, even if we had been holding a loud speaker and actually dreaming.

NOTW has closed, although many are already crying conspiracy theory, especially as they have now bought the rights to the sunonsunday URL… but it is still a major coup for what is normally the unedited thought stream of millions of people (a bit like this blog only on a larger, shorter scale). Rebecca Brooks seems to be clinging on but I’m placing my bets on the day people actually start egging her in the street if she doesn’t step down soon. 

Renault is the first brand to announce a boycott of all NI papers as revelations about the Queen start to emerge - that her private details were sold for money, not that she’s been hired by The Sun to give dirty details about Wills and Kate, although I wouldn’t put it past them to try.

But all this begs the question, just how long has this been going on without anyone realising?

We have so much information at the click of a button these days, that no-one notices a casual reference to the contents of private voicemail messages physically printed in the paper - the clues were there for all to see!

The worrying thing is that it is partly our fault that the NOTW went to these lengths to get these underhanded scoops - they’re driven by our apparent need to know every little detail about celebrities and people in the public eye. To keep selling papers they had to get their hands dirty.

No-one took any notice until it was ‘innocent’ people getting their phones hacked. (Inverted comma use here referencing the fact that celebrities are ‘innocent’ people too, not that murdered school girls aren’t…) Then there was chaos. People have learnt the power of their collective power, now we need to be careful we don’t abuse said power.

Just completing my journey home now and travelling down the escalator at Bethnal Green station I realised something was amiss - there weren’t any posters up on the escalators. I didn’t notice it because I normally go around staring intently at every poster I pass, I can switch into zombie mode when travelling as well as the rest of them, but this was so weird and out of place. The whole wall down both sides of the escalator was just silver. It felt so spacious and uncluttered, a little like the inside of my head first thing in the morning!

It made me realise that we constantly walk around not noticing the things put there specifically for us to notice. There are just so many of them that we’ve learnt to operate a visual advert dimmer within our brains that just fades them into the background.It’s only when they’re not there that our brains tell us there’s something wrong with the picture, something missing. Only then do we see the thing someone has paid lots of money to put somewhere they expect lots of people to look at - and it’s not even there any more.

Taking something expected away makes you more interested in the message. Or you could just shout alongside everyone else and see who listens.

How much brand is too much brand? Is there a maximum number of times a logo can appear, or the brand’s name be mentioned before consumers get bored and turn off or is it about the value of the content provided and how relevant it is to them that makes them watch?

I just went to a talk about branded content and we were shown 2 very different ways of going about it. One was an online video turned viral for the Sony X10 phone which was very funny, made us giggle and got the name of the brand and product out there without shoving it in our faces.

The other example was a blog about fashion sponsored by a bank. A bank? Yes a bank. The two things don’t seem to go together very well but this is a bank for rich people who like clothes… apparently. If you were searching around on the web for information about fashion, you might stumble across this blog and spend 4.7 minutes on the page without even noticing the bank’s logo or sponsors. 

It’s like watching an ad with cute babies or flying zebras - if the content is too interesting and overtakes the brand, the content is what you remember. Surely by definition for something to be branded content, you have to remember the brand and the content, otherwise it’s just another blip in the massive tsunami of content we are deluged with every day. 

This (branded) content could still be very useful and you may well pass it on to your friends and they may pass it onto their friends and the marketing people and the brand will get very excited about the ‘community’ interested in their brand or product, but these people aren’t necessarily noticing the brand, they’re just showing off to their friends that they’ve found some cool content.

People decide how they view and use content online, but often this doesn’t link with the way the people who make the content want you to view or use it. If you’re putting content out into the world wide wormhole, whether it’s branded or not, it’s those viewing it who decide what sticks and what stinks. And I think we forget that a lot of the time.