28 January 2016
Achieving Inner Peace the HMRC way
by Lynda Goetz
It is that time of year – by which I mean the time of year when the final deadline for getting in the previous year’s tax return looms large. Why on earth is it that some of us seem incapable of getting it in earlier? I did start last April or May, but somehow information was missing and the garden beckoned, so I left it. There was, after all, plenty of time. Had I submitted it by 31st October, HMRC would have calculated the tax. Now that would have been useful. And yet… and yet… I for one never seem to be able to do this. I always end up towards the end of January frantically searching through assorted pink, blue, green and yellow cardboard files trying to locate invoices I know I should be able to offset against the amount I owe Her Majesty’s tax collectors, if only I could find them. Meanwhile my patient and long-suffering accountant is sending his fourth or fifth politely-worded email suggesting that I really should be getting the information to him in fairly short order if I do not want to risk overrunning the end-of-the-month deadline.
Meanwhile in the Underground and on the radio and television there are ads suggesting that others have managed to organise themselves rather better and are now enjoying the fruits of that organisation in the form of ‘inner peace’ or even ‘silver foxiness’ rather than ‘grey hares’. Posters show an individual in a Hi-Viz jacket sitting in a cross-legged yoga position (where, for heaven’s sake – on a railway line or a roof?!) apparently in a state of inner peace achieved by having completed and filed his tax return some while before those of us who are still stressing about it.
Now that raises another thought, the idea of ‘stress’. I have actually heard the argument made that stress is a modern ‘invention’, a state peculiar to the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Can this be right? There is, it is true, a very prevalent contemporary use of the word itself which is perhaps peculiar to our time. In the past, words used might have been ‘anxious’, ‘depressed’, ‘suffering from nerves’, ‘the vapours’, ‘over-tired’, ‘over-worked’, ‘exhausted’, ‘worried’ or even ‘concerned’. None of these quite cover the gamut of emotions that ‘stressed’ seems to encompass. The use of the word in its modern guise is relatively recent. Although there were psychology papers from much earlier decades which used the term, it was not really until the 1990s that it seemed to become the ubiquitous descriptive word it now is. Is this really because the state of mind didn’t exist prior to that, or that it did but wasn’t really identified?
Stress is, in some ways, born out of our modern lifestyle, which is demanding in different ways from that of our predecessors’ lives. If one goes back to the end of the 19th/ beginning of the 20th century, then life may indeed have been harder for many, but it may not have been more stressful. Working hours were longer and, for the majority, money was tighter, expectations and possibilities were lower. Examinations and organised competitions were fewer. Life was less unpredictable and more pre-ordained. Your position and status were what they were. Generally, in Europe at least, with a few exceptions, you moved amongst people of your own class and social status. What other groups did or had was less visible, there was no TV or Social Media. The demands society placed upon you were more ordered and predictable. Overwork might make you exhausted; your lack of prospects might make you angry or despairing; but I doubt the word stress ever entered the vocabulary or discussion. Stress was something you put on a piece of metal or rope, not a state of mind experienced by people. That is not to say, of course, that it was not experienced, just that the word was not used in that context.
A survey out last year showed, not for the first time, that those in higher-paid jobs showed less signs of stress than those whose jobs gave them little or no control. Since the mid-70s it has been claimed by industrial psychologists that control over job-related decisions affects health, morale and the ability of people to handle their workload. Although efforts have been made to address this, control is what fewer and fewer of us have in modern-day life. External demands are ever-present, whether in the form of parents, schools, those above us in the job hierarchy, social hierarchy or political hierarchy. Even someone as senior as our Prime Minister can hardly be said to have complete control, although his stress levels may well come down if we regain some of our sovereignty from Europe. Years ago artisans worked for themselves: they were responsible for the production of things from beginning to end. How many people nowadays can say that? Most jobs require the involvement of teams of people. Teamwork and people skills are an integral part of many jobs, so not only is there the stress of the job being within our abilities, there is the added stress of having to get on with the other members of the team required to produce whatever the end product may be, from cars to films through aid packages, town planning and health care.
At the time of writing I have certainly not achieved a state of inner peace. Will I achieve this by tomorrow when I have finally submitted all the bits of paper required? Am I in control of this or is it in control of me? Will it really make any difference when I have finished or will some other externally-imposed task appear, so that I will continue to feel stressed long after my tax return has been filed? I am not sure, but I do know that those poor people working in accountants offices and at HMRC must be a long way from achieving inner peace when they are clearly not in control, but at the mercy of numbers of idiots like me who leave everything to the last minute and cause their workload to be completely out of kilter at this time of year. But – a final thought – what about those who created those ads? There was clearly the brainstorming teamwork and the artistic teamwork , but who was in control of the deadlines?
