Afraid of 2012? You may be a drama queen.

Written by Stéphanie // September 9, 2010 // How to look smart at Happy Hour // 1 Comment

If I had a dollar for every mini-incident whipped into full-blown drama by some of my colleagues….

Surely, you also have one of those around you, one who lives in perpetual drama. Their moods go from happy-happy-joy-joy to full-blown depression. They start dating, get a new job, or a new car, and can’t shut up about it. At the slightest problem though, they ring all the alarms and border on the psychotic. They tippy-toe the fine line between neurosis and maniaco-depression with genuine enthusiasm while they suck the life out of everyone around, pumping out our energy. Only drama queens can do that. By the way, there are as many female drama queens as there are males!

The problem being that they exhaust themselves and they stress us out.

If only we could put a dollar value on the hours spent and the energy wasted listening and trying to reason with them, calming their nerves, handing out the Pepto-bismol and checking out weird facts…. Forget trying to put things into perspective for them. Whether it’s the latest internet hoax, their daughter’s cough or the crazy neighbor, nothing in their life is worth calling Fox News over but they can’t accept that.

Sure enough, mainstream media is powered by drama queens. Sex and blood sell, sure, but only if they’re embedded in good ol’ drama. That’s what makes the covers of the magazines and sells advertisement on TV.

Vonnegut and drama queens ( ¹ )

Kurt Vonnegut, during a conference a few years back, was talking about that need we have to see our relatively quiet lives as succeeding dramas. According to him, because we were fed fairy tales with knights and princesses rescued from dragon lairs when we were kids, we actually need our lives to resemble those dramas. We are taught to believe that life is like that.

He went on to show that if we plot our life events on a line with ecstasy at the top and misery at the bottom, our lives actually looke like this:

Cinderella, like all fairy tales, looks more like this:

News all over the world and popular culture, from rom-com series to action packed flicks are based on that.

Now, can we shut up drama queens using Vonnegut? That would be surprising. Actually, whenever you try to cool their jets off you hear that you just don’t get it. Perhaps. Meanwhile, all the prophecies we have been fed ended up flopping. They’re more like baloney created by drama queens in need of drama.

Collective baloneys

Our dramas happen on several levels. First locally, all developed countries worthy of the name have their reality TV shows where the drama happens regularly once a week and perfectly timed for distribution. We can then be live by Dancing with the Stars and Survivor’s drama diet .

But some of our collective baloneys are global. Remember the bug in 2000. The world had stopped turning, in any case the computers. I still have my sticker “I heart Y2K”. It was the first end of the world announced for our new millennium. In the end, it didn’t go that badly, right? Of course the drama queens will say that it went well because we all panicked and were prepared. It’s like the joke of the man who asks his neighbor why he planted small green flags around his home. ”To scare the crocodiles” – “But there’s no crocodiles Longeuil!” - “You see, it works!”

Same with the supposed swine flu pandemic! I won’t bore you with a list of all the scares. At the moment our little psychosis of the day is the end of the world for December 2012 … A real nice baloney.

In his course on intellectual self-defense, Normand Baillargeon teaches readers how to use the good ol’ Carl Sagan baloney detector (((For more details on the baloney detector, see the baloney detection kit))). In good French: how to detect bullshit!

If we follow the detector’s steps, we can dig a little, and find some very interesting info:

# 1 baloney: NASA has calculated an out of the ordinary alignment of planets that is going affect the Earth. In fact, NASA has taken the trouble to put the record straight²), clearly indicating that 2012 does not bring anything new. Not even an unfortunate Armageddon-type alignment of the planets. The famous 2012 planet alignment taken over by the tabloids actually happens every 36 years and the last time we got it was in 1998³). And no! For September 11, the planets were not responsible.

Baloney # 2: The Mayan calendar indicates clearly that the world will undergo an environmental disaster in 2012 because of the alignment of planets⁴). Can we stop with the alignment of the planets already!? Five minutes of internet research will easily show you how this argument is about as serious as the eponymous film, 2012, which seems to be the only real disaster of our time!

Baloney # 3: Quantum physics says that... Failing to find anything tangible to turn a date into a tragedy, we can always appeal to quantum physics. 2012 would be the scene of a change in magnetic fields (so put away all your compasses) that would have an impact on human consciousness: “There are proven relationships between the intensity and the variations fo the Earth’s magnetic field, and mood states and man state of mind/consciousness.⁵. Does that mean that bicyclists will be aware that riding on sidewalks is of profound stupidity? One can dream. Finally a theory that can not be validated (which is characteristic of quantum physics) and, therefore, can not be “unvalidated”! O’ happiness, we have our drama of the decade! I am ready to take bets that the only major event of 2012 will be that the month of February will have 29 days.

Of course, in 2013, there will be other fish to fry and other tragedies to be desperate about: Martin Rees, a prominent astronomer predicts the end of the world for a little later, like the end of the century⁶). I will be delighted to put my son in college and perhaps even to be a grandmother before it blows up in our faces.

On Monday I will offer 10 choices to reduce the drama in our lives. In the meantime I hope you survived the weekend.