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The BOZO FaCTOr
The  world  is  full  of  bozos,  and  you’re  one  of  them.  Don’t  get 
offended. I’m another one. We can’t help it. We just keep getting 
in each other’s way.

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219
Put us into cars and we become particularly caustic. The guy 
who cuts you off in traffic stresses you. When you honk your horn 
at the offender, you stress the driver next to you.
Holidays, with their own sets of stressors, compound the high-
way insanity. “Driving probably will become even wilder now that 
Christmas  (in  P.  G.  Wodehouse’s  words)  has  us  by  the  throat,” 
George Will noted in a call for civility in the 
Washington Post.
 
“Holidays and homicide go together like eggnog and nutmeg, so 
’tis the season to study the wildness in the streets.”
Relationship—or  lack  of  relationship—inherently  causes 
stress. Divorce is stressful (91 on the scale), but so are marriage 
(85), marital reconciliation (57), remarriage (worth 89 big ones on 
Witkin’s revised scale), and—are you ready for this?—something 
Witkin calls “singlehood” (77).
Son or daughter leaves home and you get 41 nicks to the paren-
tal psyche. But according to Witkin, you get 61 points if your little 
darling moves back in.
You  can’t  win. Enter  into  a  relationship  with another human 
being, get out of one, or avoid a relationship all together—you open 
yourself to increased stress no matter what you do or don’t do.
List a few of the everyday things that people do to bother you, 
things like:
•  cutting you off in traffic,
•  emptying their car ashtrays in the parking lot,
•  butting in line at the market,
•  trying to buy more than twelve items in the twelve-items-or-
fewer line,
•  talking loudly during the movie,
•  chewing with their mouths open,
•  and on and on.
Petty  stuff?  Probably.  But  still  annoying  and  stressful—
and unavoidable.
T H E   WA R   O N   S T R E S S

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T I M E   M A N AG E M E N T
220
STreSS happenS
One more plunge into the stress scale to pick up another insight 
into stress:
•  Change of financial status (61)
•  Spouse begins or ends work (58)
•  Change of line of work (51)
•  Change in residence (47)
•  Change in number of arguments with spouse (46)
•  Change in eating habits (29)
•  Change in sleeping habits (27)
•  Change in recreation (26)
Lose  your  job  or  get  evicted  from  your  apartment?  Highly 
stressful. But so is winning the lottery or moving into your dream 
home. The one constant here is change—
regardless of the nature 
of the change. 
All change is stressful.
Which  means,  of  course,  that  living  is  inherently  stressful. 
Stress is inevitable.
You  can’t  even  buy  your  way  out  of  stress.  Psychologist  Ed 
Diener’s recent study indicates that higher personal incomes often 
bring their own set of stresses.
Little wonder, then, that a recent 
U.S. News & World Report
 
cover  story  announced,  “Stressed  Out?  You’ve  got  lots  of  com-
pany. But there are ways to fight back.”