[975] Mo Mo Mo

I need to spend some time thinking about my motivation. In no way will I be able to synthesize the thoughts before now because I’ve passed up at least 3 times I probably should have started writing.

I do things, often enough, after being backed into a corner. I create debt for myself so I can get a “real job” and provide the justification to submit myself to the pain that entails. I might physically exhaust myself on some task so I can shake off the “I’m not doing enough” feeling. I create these kind of high-stakes social dynamics that pit your sense of cordial duty against my righteous indignation, so by the time we’ve disassociated, I don’t have to pretend there’s a bridge worth repairing.

I had a lot of energy when I was in high school, college, and right after college, to push an incredibly strong notion of “excelling.” It could be attached to anything. I could take pride in the sheer amount of TV I was able to watch, or the efficiency with which I made money doing drug studies. Academically, the designation of “A” had lost its muster, so I tested how A/B-ish I could be with the least amount of effort possible, and I decided to get really good at partying. I was pumping a certain kind of psychologically gratifying, albeit arbitrary, stats. Who cares if I can go from zero to coffee shop in 4 months? Just me.

I seem to do things in a disproportionate way, just not precisely the things I’d really rather be doing. When I get the chance to do what I’d rather be doing, the rules of life are still at play. This speaks to an underlying motivation at play at all times. I want to exist in a way that renders those life circumstances mute. I want to always have the money, the time, or the help. I can’t change the weather, but I can build a considerable amount indoors. If there’s a rule that would stop me, I want to have the means to undermine or circumvent it. This could also be a complicated way of describing the drive towards creative self-expression.

The desire to accomplish “small” things plays by more viscerally practical rules. I almost never leave trash laying around. Shit’s in the way. I don’t have a lot of space, and I don’t want shit in the way. I may dawdle on doing dishes because until they’re in the way of me eating or making food, they’re where dirty dishes belong. When you own a house, something’s always broken or missing, but it gets ridiculous to think that you’ll account for it all in every moment you notice that the milk is low or bugs’ nest isn’t easily accessible. There’s less “do it now” with those things, and they get grouped for weekends or those days where you’re just really into getting things done.

I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast, and he brought up how we’re always looking for the next thing, living in this illusion that obtaining it will make us happy. I was watching a Louis Theroux documentary as a compulsive millionaire gambler blew through hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a few days. I’ve noticed the eyes of the bewitched with their hollow desperate and craving emptiness for recognition of their suffering when their persona wears thin. I suppose I’m lucky to have maintained a kind of motivation to not end up perpetually in that state.

I don’t like to feel bad. This may seem like a weird thing to have to state so plainly. I think it’s important to do so though. It’s more than obvious. I don’t like to feel bad so much, that I will write for years until I feel a little bit better. I don’t like to feel bad to such a degree, that I will work myself to death to ensure the thoughts in my head align with a decent-to-exceptional conception of myself. I might habitually bite off more than I can chew, but I took the bite, and I’m still chewing. The moment I felt what rolfing could do for my physical well-being, that money was gone. My food budget is so high because the shittiest I tend to feel is when I haven’t eaten enough. Again, we could describe this as being up against a kind of pain-threshold wall.

When I think about how we evolve, it’s selection pressure. What is the environment selecting for? What genes are being activated under the current constraints? If we talk about different “classes” and the cultures they entail, is it down to the biology that iterating obnoxious selfishness plays out in superficially different ways? You can complain about black-on-black violence as a loud example, but how many people suffer and die as a result of greed? Why is greed good in rich culture? The environment dictates the conditions for remaining in said environment. You might not consider yourself rich, certainly not Bezos-rich, so the nature of your greed, familiar, common, is hardly noticed. You’ve got an HOA to answer to, and you earned your privacy fence.

I’ve removed a lot of the walls in my journey through this shed-life thing. It’s sweltering outside, and cool in here. I’m still inconvenienced in my bathroom and kitchen setups, but I’m not flinging shit out the window nor going hungry. All of my effort to build more is in service to creating new corners to get backed into. I have the tools, now they need a home. If they’re not running, why did I buy the tools? Indefinite hobby and selective guilt await. If I think someone is special or unique, well, surely, they deserve my effort to create something cool! I get to take it a step further. If I don’t dictate, complicate, or imbue my work into a larger context, I just sit and wait for things to happen. I refresh facebook and reddit. I marathon TV and don’t think too hard about the gross juxtaposition of “marathon” and “TV.”

It’s been insufferably hot lately. You think I’m building my workshop in that? I already barely drink enough water or eat right, let alone wear sunscreen or generally go about things that would suggest to you I don’t like to feel bad. If I feel faint upon opening the door, game over for that idea. Are there things that need to be done indoors? Kinda, but no, not really. If I choose to rearrange the furniture again, it’s hard to say what’s been accomplished beyond it feeling good to pretend exercise and experience the different room flow.

This is a restatement that the vast majority of my “problems” are, not. I’m not a jaded and broken millionaire feeding machines hundred-dollar bills, but I’m also not a millionaire. I’m not cripplingly sick or in mental turmoil, but I don’t have health insurance. I know how to swim, I’m not drowning, but the only race I’m in is against death, which serious as it might sound, I can’t win.

I really do feel like I have made a concerted effort over time to be okay with whatever “this” moment is. I affirm my health, wealth, comfort, kitties, conveniences, computers, and capacity for compartmentalizing my competing conceptions. It doesn’t take away from my desire to proverbially “take over the world,” but it does mean I don’t suffer the anxiousness or depressive guilt by not “excelling” via being busy or “above” in my concerns for how I’m spending my time. If I had millions of dollars right now, you know what I’d probably still be? Alone. It might be with someone(s) happy to spend my money with me in the next room of fancier architecture in a distant locale, but people I consign to my larger goals would be just that, paid for.

Part of me feels like that’s an incredibly real scenario because of how hard it’s been to get people to join, with weeks or months-notice or otherwise, what I’ve been up to. I do have friends and my dad who are down, it’s not a desert in spite of what the weather suggests. But I’ve had people kind of flirt with the idea of spending time together or doing stuff. I’m not their priority, which is perfectly fine, it just naturally translates that will continue to hold whether I’m inviting you to Fiji or a comedy show. You’ll have a life and obligations that I’m supposed to what? Pay you to put aside like any good capitalist?

It feels like I’m talking about that sneaking suspicion we all might have that there really is no “our” page, goal, or reality. That doesn’t mean reality won’t kill us all the same or that we don’t rhyme, but it does heartily explain the appeal of religion. You don’t want to go through a series of thoughtful, accountable, and painful evolutions in thought or behavior? Check out this brand-new forgiveness for sale! Just give it up to God! You can be as free as Sam Harris in his disposing of free will! Good is good, evil is evil, and we’re all just along for the circularly-reasoned ride! Yee-haw! I still believe “consciousness” is the “what” that makes the indeterminate determinate, so I struggle, or futilely refuse, to be a happy cog. I didn’t will myself into existence, but if I maintain my faculties and shoot myself in the head anyway, you’re gonna get an attestation of the nature of my will, messily depicted and ironically incomplete in its finality.

The last time I used “motivation” in the title of a blog was in January 2013. A few lines from that blog stick out to me, but as I started to mine them, it seems inadequate to the task. You should read it after this one. What’s clear, is that at least 9 years ago, I still hated the idea of getting a normal job, knew no one would respect me or my time like I might, and I acknowledge the conditional nature of my being. I was aware of the clarity that having a goal provides. I was suspicious of the form my potential impact on the world could take. I lamented people who couldn’t pair their best ideas with any practical actions.

Do I even remember what I was doing in 2013? 2 years after college I was probably failing at the mobile coffee van and circling the pillow of the loner-in-the-basement status I was about to adopt. A month later I was speaking to the comfort I felt thinking Kristen and I were in the same kind of relationship and I was understood lol. Maybe we were at that point, who knows, I only have one-sided small and garbled snapshots.

It’s easy to get lost. I repeat myself a lot. In going through and scanning some old blogs I’ve like reignited the memory of the “stuck” and anxious place that I fairly-well grounded into the center of my being. 9 years ago? I was in a long-term relationship. I was just starting to do drug studies. I had a lot of ideas and energy to put behind my informal “retire by 30” plan. Was my motivation fundamentally different than it is today? In the greatest sense, no. I still want the same non-physical things. I don’t feel like I have any less “energy” than I did then, it’s just not sporadically involving itself with more than I can reasonably address in any given moment.

I think I feared that if I calmed down, I would start to “settle” and look and sound like all of the people I grew a severe distaste for. The ones who have every excuse not to move to the middle of nowhere and try to get out ahead of our modern fall of civilization. The ones who blow superficial smoke up every ass of interaction because that’s what polite society expects. The ones who just stay silent and suffer indefinitely and live vicariously through comedian commentary or the pleasant pictures whirring by. It was harder to recognize or accept my “alone” status because I was with someone. I wasn’t so far removed from college and there was still a fair amount of people left to drift away. My environment dictated, for as much as I was talking about it.

That I’m where I am in life now, I think speaks to how much I’ve maintained a sense of self and orientation in spite. My capacity, happiness, or direction isn’t fundamentally dictated nor rooted in “you.” I choose friends. I chose to suffer the discrepancies and loss. All these new babies hitting the scene are going to die. You knew that when you got into baby-making mode. They may even die before you, and isn’t that colloquially understood as the worst kind of tragedy? Surely it wasn’t thoughts like those that fed your motivation to have a child. I thought, probably incorrectly, that I envied people who found their deepest sense of purpose and drive to ensure their children grew up and passed those genes on. What a burden to carry if you don’t know why you’re doing it.

You can linguistically reduce all efforts to procreate or proliferate literature to the same nihilistic absurdity. You can ignore that it might just feel good. It doesn’t have to be deep. You may just exist to be personally gratified, at least the conscious part of you, for as long as you can. A kid gets wrapped up in that? All the more collateral damage. I mean, child brides are still a thing, and I don’t know if you know how many kids are molested growing up, but you’re not gonna find a statistic that won’t remind you how woefully under-reported the 25-30% of the known cases are speaking to.

Have you noticed the drift in this blog? How did I get to child molesting? Isn’t this about motivation? As I continue to describe my spite engine as moving me right along, it’s no wonder the sheer amount of atrocity that’s pressed right up against how I conceive of my effort and best conception of the world. To talk of “my motivation” or “spite engine” is just a personal understanding of the marriage and dance at the conflicted ever-changing heart of existence. I think about death constantly, and it makes me want to live a certain way. I still don’t know that the reasoning I apply for my own existence I would use in service to a new child, but I also don’t think early-abortion cells, or any persons, are going to an afterlife.

Motivation feels like a calculation. I want many things at once. I want them in perpetuity. I’ve both experienced intellectually and emotionally the reality and diminishing returns of the mere acquisition. You can’t just make a friend. You have to celebrate, and work with, and evolve together. You can’t just buy things or amass wealth; you have to put them to work. Things like Amazon and SpaceX are incidental giants who need to create giant corners to get backed into like I need to pile up a few dishes and turn 2x4s into adult building blocks.

We’re shaped by these unconscious desires to belong to something “more” and beyond ourselves. The endless irony being, we perpetuate circumstances that keep us isolated, angry, and feeling almost perfectly misunderstood. We keep up the façade that we can’t learn or connect, share in our goals and motivation, by staying silent unless it’s to say something disparaging or superficial. My motivation is inextricably tied to my awareness and the demonstration and repeatability of that awareness. I know I’m going to die not feeling really any more or less happy than I have for the last 9 if not 18 years since I started writing.

I don’t make it a secret that I want you to speak, or that I’m going to. I won’t be surprised if things turn out as bad as those who’ve been paying attention say they will. I won’t lose my motivation to fight or create or move the hell out of the way. There is no illusion about life I need to paint over how I actually feel and think, even if I didn’t “will” every impression I could extract. I will the words. I will the movement. I’m not at the mercy of my chaotic and contradictory heart. I dance with the chaos, and in so doing, create an order that suggests balanced direction. Who could get tired doing that?