Soft targets

For the first few years, there’s nothing that relieves stress quite like punching a pillow. Ask any therapist who’s willing to go on the record and they'll agree. You wake up well-rested and rearing to meet the day – positive initially. Your optimism rising with the morning sun. That changes quickly when you come in contact with an poorly-worded email, piece of bad news or a rotten pear. The same pillow that helped you sleep has turned heel, now the object of your uncontrollable anger, a plush target for your flailing fist. Or maybe you pick a random couch pillow instead. But everyone knows that pillows talk. You hit one, you might as well hit them all.

And we both know that this relationship can’t go on forever. I have to eventually deal with root causes. There's that pear again. The first few thousand times you land a perfect punch are simply divine. It’s a religious experience to hit a pillow right in the sweet spot, or what Teddy Ballgame referred to as “the Joy Zone.” You might not feel better right away about whatever problem you’re dealing with, but you will feel a sense of accomplishment. Laying on that very same pillow at the end of a long, hate-fueled day requires the sort of cognitive dissonance typically reserved for heads of state when accepting the realities of collateral damage. How can the same pillow do so much? 

The truth is, it can’t. Something has to give. There are plenty of pillows deserving abuse, but not all. Some are trying to support us in our goal of a solid 7, while others lose their will to live over time. 

The problem with punching pillows is that it spares every other inanimate object in your home from a righteous smacking. You might be under the false impression that kicking a glass coffee table, knocking over a bookcase or slapping a rolled-up rug against a bannister can never inspire the same joy as pillow punching, but you’d be wrong. Those are far less socially acceptable acts but ones that produce a transgressive pleasure. Let others take out their failures on pillows, while you look at the whole world of objects as your vast canvas. Pillows are limiting. If punching one is the equivalent of a black and white silent movie, then throwing your stove out your window is full technicolor. 

Pillows are soft targets. You’re punching down, which in our current climate is no longer acceptable. Punch a laptop or smartphone instead - something that stands a chance and can fight back. When’s the last time you read about a pillow exploding in a sleeper's face? 

If Chuckie Darwin taught us anything it’s that we must evolve. But evolution doesn’t just happen. It takes practice, commitment and a little dumb luck. Kind of like growing a great mustache, it takes a while to get the hang of it. When the first ape decided to pick up a Webster’s dictionary and learn English once and for all, it changed the course of everything. He didn’t need to do that. Not really. He knew that language would bring heartache and chit chat, but he did it anyway. He expanded his life and ours in ways not possible for the primates that came before him. Punching pillows worked in the 90s, but we’re two decades into the twenty first century. 

Put that pillow down. Pillows are for sleepers only.