Does this sound like anyone you know?
August 6, 2008
Do you have “Preparing to Live Syndrome”?
It’s something that afflicts lots of lawyers, says James Dolan (not this James Dolan, or this one), a therapist who specializes in lawyers and doctors. It involves working like crazy and making yourself miserable in the hope that one day, you’ll be able to retire and do every wonderful thing you wish you had the time to do now. (Dolan acknowledges that this isn’t a real diagnosis, by the way, if you were about to complain about the mental health field’s pathologization of everyday life.)
Obviously, Dolan advises against Preparing to Live Syndrome. He writes:
How would today’s lawyer, living and working in an environment whose very promises and foundations are in many ways built on PTLS, begin to step away from that line of thinking and more fully into the life he is living?
He can begin with this, a promise to himself: “Today is the only day that belongs to me; I will live it the best way I know how.”
How would your days be different if you adopted this mantra?
CARYN TAMBER, Legal Affairs Writer
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Each day would be five seconds less interesting, enjoyable, and productive (the time it took me to repeat the mantra). Admittedly, that is not a major cost; the real objection to the repititon of a mindless mantra is that is is silly. Emile Coue turned the use of a platitudinous soporific into a therapeutic method in the nineteenth century and called it auto-suggestion. (”Every day and in every way I am becoming better and better.”) It was a massive failure (and scam). Dolan should read more about the history of his own profession before giving advice to others. There is nothing new in his method. In fact, there is much less. Coue’s mantra at least was lyrical.