Annoyance is part of family life, so get over it

Last week, I wanted to concentrate on just one word. That word was “annoying”. Because it annoys me. Somehow, negative vocabulary has been compacted in our family — and a few others I’ve been around — to a single adjective. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon watching children being interviewed on, say, Marrying Mum and Dad or Young Apprentice. People aren’t crude or selfish or cruel or impolite any more. They are simply “annoying”.

I wonder if this is merely a quirk of language, or whether it has a deeper meaning. That, in fact, one of the most deep-rooted features of modern family life is giving and receiving annoyance.

It was the Buddha who said, “Life is dukkha — suffering”. A better translation is “life is frustration”, but perhaps better still, “life is annoying”. Why is life annoying? Because we can’t get what we want. Not because we aren’t looking hard enough or trying hard enough, but because our dissatisfaction is rooted in the essential double binds of the everyday world.

You want a partner who has enough money, but doesn’t care about material things. You want a child who thinks for themselves, but who won’t constantly contradict you. You want a parent who gives you firm boundaries, but won’t boss you about. You want a handsome partner who doesn’t care about looks. You want an intelligent partner who won’t make you feel stupid. You want someone who is dreamy and creative, but knows how to put up shelves and organise a timetable.

All these things tend towards the contradictory and therefore dukkha — or, if you prefer, the annoying. Because annoyingness is trying to square the circle, craning to look at your own head, chasing your own shadow. And this is what families are — the deluded in search of the seamless.

How can we get out of this trap? We can try meditating for 20 minutes a day, but I’m not convinced that it works for longer than — well, 20 minutes.

The best solution is to drop your standards — possibly precipitously. The most annoyed people are the most perfectionist, and perfectionism is dangerous because they make everyone else, as well as themselves, feel terrible. To put it in biblical terms, judge not that ye be not judged.

To really find peace, you need to train yourself not to mind about stuff. Not so much “mindfulness” as “I-don’t-mind-fulness”. It’s an internal, not an external, shift. This, it should be noted, is very different from not caring about stuff. Not caring has an element of suppressed hostility — as in “go ahead and smash the telly, see if I care”. To say “I don’t mind” is more accepting — and convincing. Try it out in your head. “I want to cut all my hair off/dye it green/have my nostrils pierced.”

“Sure. I don’t mind.”

The benevolent indifference of the response means the very thing that caused the rebellious behaviour — your controlling instinct — is liable to disappear. So maybe they won’t cut, dye or pierce because it clearly won’t have the desired effect — to annoy you.

I do agree with what the Buddha might have almost thought — that life is, at its root, annoying — but I’m not sure you’re going to get around it by chanting, zazen or the Noble Eightfold Path. I think the better way forward lies in Zen philosophy — there’s a saying: “Be dead, be thoroughly dead, then nothing can trouble you.”

Which may be a depressing way of putting it, but it’s a good point. Nothing is that important when life is finite and the outcome is the same for us all. So don’t mind — because it doesn’t matter, in the long run. Just love and hope for the best. Of course, if you refuse to get annoyed, then it will annoy everyone else. But that’s part of the fun of it.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Tim Lott is a journalist and author. His latest book is Under the Same Stars.