[913] Pot Committed

What are you committed to?

It's a question that can diverge dramatically. You can be committed to a psychiatric hospital. You can signal your commitment through marriage. The two first google definitions state: 1. the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, etc. and 2. an engagement or obligation that restricts freedom of action. These sound like definitions that beg infinitely large questions about “freedom” and the nature of your “cause” or “etc.”

For me, you could say I'm committed to spite. There are few things that will motivate me, make my brain race to the series of deliberate and methodical actions I need to take, or clear anxious fog than spite. If I did not know that about myself, and then went on to do something significant or showy, I might be deluded into thinking “I” measured up to the grandiosity or was responsible for the show. No, it was the spite. Without the spite, nothing gets off the ground. If you want to examine the spite you might find certain insights about how it operates or different ways to describe it that you find more palatable, but if you pretend it's not spite, you don't have a prayer of understanding me or whatever I've created that might be regarded as significant.

Never will a single word nor overly simplified sentiment encapsulate what's really going on though. Spite won't suffice in place of all the words it's taken to process or experiences which lend themselves to rounding out a perspective. Spite might keep the flame alive, but a controlled burn is certainly preferable and required if you wish to keep something worth sustaining. So, we return to the question, imagining a commitment like a sustained and tempered burn.

Large institutions and interpersonal relationships can inform how you understand longevity. Maybe everyone in your circles is selfish and chaotic, so you internalize that no one is stable and never worth the attachment. Ironically, you can develop the exact opposite sense for the same reason, relying on the stability and attachment of and for yourself in spite of the chaos around you. You know you exist, you're still here after all, but stable and attached can only be trusted or wielded as you see fit, never extended towards things fated to abuse.

You could blithely remark, and you hear it often, that you're committed to yourself. You don't trust anyone. You hate to ask for help or favors. The running narrative is almost perfectly devoid of the different contexts you exist in or memory of things that compelled your decision-making in the past. This is an exceptionally lonely and often disingenuous place to exist for very long. It's akin to the baseline animal drudging though their instinctive behavior I watch from my nature shows. There's no plan, intercepting of foreseeable patterns, nor idea that there's anything to be done but suffer or greedily indulge in whatever the present moment is offering.

Nothing you commit to will last. Even if you're opting to take the wild animal route, the suffering will either end in death, the march to the next watering hole, or the chance abundant meal and time to play. You can get stuck in thinking you've derived some kind of wisdom in throwing yourself at the fates and arresting your agency as life carries on ambivalently doing the work for you. Rest easy, you're gonna die anyway. No surprise, this idea does not seem to provide people any ease or capacity to rest.

Again, what keeps the fire burning? What are you holding a candle for? What Olympic tradition is worthy of being passed on? Why?

I think of the sunk-cost fallacy. Committed for the sake of it and because you've already spent so much time or money. You could find the easy answer if you can overcome the guilt for your folly or undermined wishes. This is why people in professions of presumed high-value, money or otherwise, kill themselves. They've literally couched their identity, very existence, in nominally communal or colloquial notions of what those jobs and titles are supposed to mean, not necessarily what those jobs mean to them as an individual. Nearly all soldiers come back with PTSD, regardless of their role, some dramatically more shocked, SHOCKED, by all of the death.

Most often, we seem to be committed to things that were insisted upon us. I tried to drop out of college. College was a joke. Whatever you may glean from modernity bemoaning safe spaces, the lack of critical thought, and general exploitation offered by the post-modern indifference to defining and fighting for life-sustaining values, it was a problem at least 15 years ago, and I've recently learned the first gripes were codified by conservative thinkers in the late 80s. Ew. We've also got arranged marriages, notions of “elite” preschools, and the catastrophic fascist destruction from those with an infinite appetite for obstruction, dishonesty, and suicide. The mental asylum zeitgeist rages on.

In some ways, once you acknowledge that depth of the depravity and chaos, it makes what you may choose to commit to easier. Well, I can't fix all that, so let me focus on my kids! Or crafts! Or volunteer hours! Here, a most pernicious pitfall must be attended to, and it's why people self-sabotage and surprise themselves with buried resentments. Are you committed to those things, or are you committed to the shame and guilt towards the chaos? Shame and guilt are shades of spite. They're dependent, a response or initial coping mechanism. People are quick to deny they are feeling guilty or ashamed of something as it might undermine their ability to keep working in service to their kids, crafts, or whatever else. You birthed kids who are often disappointing and who are definitely going to die one day. What the fuck are you supposed to do with those feelings? ::Religion rings its hands.::

Come on, what are you committed to? Denying the depth of your lonely feelings, regrets, and aimless stabs at marginal fulfillment? Are you a task-master who makes lists and crosses them off because you have to? Are you a cheerleader because you believe in the team, or because your tight outfit attracts useful distracting attention and the noise keeps you from thinking too hard?

If your ideas are, none, or handed to you, or incomplete, it's impossible to commit. No definition will announce itself. No meaning will spontaneously manifest. No work has been done to get oriented, let alone embodied, across the worlds you inhabit. You don't know who you are, or at least, feel remotely comfortable with the seemingly contradictory abstraction that you are, so you're paralyzed, or resentful, or ashamed, and written off by a world as ambivalent to you as you are to it.

I'm committed to this. I'm committed to working though my ideas and the attempt to pay attention to how the things I experience synthesize into things I do or do not wish to be a part of my and our world. I don't treat people nicely because I give a fuck about people. I do it because the ambivalent math says the more people who's problems I can generally alleviate, the less problems I'm going to have to deal with. At the very least, the nature of those problems will be considerably harder to generate guilty or shameful feelings about. I can cross my fingers people will “get it” and not behave like I don't want them to behave, but I'm not naive, and I'm confident in my spite. I attend to my experience that is significantly bolstered when I behave one way and painfully hindered when I succumb to many others. I know how to tie the abstract nature of those sentiments into sweat and patience and words that almost force themselves out of me.

Are you trapped, or committed? Are you the cause, or distracted by errant et cetera?