What motivates you?
Increasingly, I've been thinking about incentives. When you move away from the idea that everyone is immediately and personally culpable for "the way things are," it opens space to investigate their environment. Indeed a major portion of my counsel to people is to spend a considerable amount of time examining who and what they are plugged into. If you have no context or underestimate its influence, you can take on unnecessary guilt and stress. You also fail to frame whatever your problem may be in a way that allows for it to be fixed or a real solution to be discovered.
Money appears to be one of the biggest incentives for an array of questionable, if not downright abhorrent, behavior. In fantasy, how many plots are motivated by the antagonist's greed? Cash wildly flying through the air as a masked bad guy flees a scene with a giant duffle bag are ubiquitous whether or not you've seen that actual scene somewhere. It's not a secret. It's not hard to understand. They want money, so whether it's fashion a complicated Ocean's 11-esc plot, or put a gun in someone's face, they go in and get it.
A deeper-layered story starts to unpack that antagonist's relationship to power. They often have money. A supervillain will be super smart, or maybe have a super team, and none of them can put their heads together to figure out how to live well and leave things alone. What's their motivation? "Power," in and of itself, is incomplete. Even the ones that do manage to take over the world or achieve their goals, are they ever depicted as "happy?" Was it "enough?" Thanos didn't keep fighting to preserve his "perfect balance."
The story you tell yourself is the foundational incentive. The ability to maintain a familiar, predictable, and, even if it's self-destructive, reliable self-conception. There's so many things built into the formation of that story, and almost zero cultural cues to attend to them, that you maintain the unhelpful habit of pretending "that's just who you are."
I'm someone who has been told his whole life he's smart, good looking, talented, yada yada. That's certainly a story I wish to keep. Who wouldn't? Younger me felt very alienated by any commentary related to my looks. I cut off my hair. I never wanted to be in pictures and definitely wasn't smiling when I had to. I've never been a particularly "cut" or in-shape person, so even a little fat made me think I was "too." I resented the narrative otherwise until it started manifesting as success with girls. I didn't start growing my hair out until college. It took a while to realize I wasn't fat so much as surrounding myself with runners and rock climbers.
There's a running story we have to maintain. At least, it feels that way. The nature of your sacrifices. The goal at the top of the hill. The things about you that mirror your loved ones or echo what you want to believe deeper about yourself, but might struggle to. The closer your behavior and your words match that story, the more you carve out a "safe" psychological home to live in. Whether or not the nature of that story is more or less true doesn't even enter into the discussion foundationally.
What disrupts the story? I observe the consequences of chronic punishing conditioning. I have a friend who's so stressed, he can't lift his left arm above the shoulder. He can't sleep. He ruminates and repeats stressful events dating back years and takes on new things he can't get organized and achieved. I have a friend who habitually takes on more work than she has to. (That's the most common thread I see across friends and clients.) They say, "I wish I had time for…" or "It'll be fine if I can get to next week/month/August" or "They're counting on me! I have to!"
The lie is built into the foundation. You don't "have to" do anything. It's instantaneous the moment you go from the language of potential agency to helplessness. The presumption when you tell someone you "have to" is that they'll nod along knowingly and throw up their arms in concert, because we all know what we have to do. Of course, we don't. We don't know shit about shit. We don't spend any time trying to. And when someone comes along pointing that out, we seek to punish or silence them.
So, I ask again. What's your motivation? What incentivizes you?
They aren't the same question, and each is their own big bag of words the closer you look.
I'm motivated by the idea of scaling up things that have worked for me. I know the visceral experience of less stress and more freedom, and the conscious long-term deliberate acts to get there. I know what I had to focus on. I know why I chose to focus on those things over others. I know what I'd like to enjoy as a result of seeing the efforts and practices carried forward and manifested through others' interpretations. I'm curious about what that looks like, and I don't think it happens often. I like believing I have both the capacity and awareness to achieve something many find it hard to even conceive. I feel good about that story. I can draw practical steps along the road.
I'm incentivized by feeling understood and being communicated with. Those things generate positive emotion and a feeling of being engaged. Even if I'm feeling "unmotivated," when you have something to communicate to me, or you are making a genuine effort to understand something I'm saying, I can engage in that exchange almost indefinitely. If I'm in an environment that's force-feeding me bullshit, I need to leave, like so many past jobs. If I make a genuine effort to articulate and seek empathy, and you ignore me, I keep my distance. I'm, by default, a major turn-off to those, and this includes friends, who are "too tired" or disinterested or distracted to genuinely communicate and seek mutual understanding.
Thus, "friendship," by itself, isn't the incentive nor is it necessarily a "motivator."
You can frame any relationship this way, be it to your child or romantic partners. If you're unclear with yourself and are unduly motivated by superficial things, you'll find the deep dissatisfaction of introducing as many of those unhealthy relationships into your experience as you can find. You'll spend a lifetime developing apologetic language to justify the abuses. "Hell is just a fun way God shows us he loves you!" "Well, he pays the bills and I get fancy vacations, what's a backhand and shout now and then?" "My friends and parents tell me how lucky I am; surely I'm just confused about how much I really love my child, boyfriend, job, circumstances…" etc.
If you don't know that you're motivated by confusion and fear significantly more than a desire to own and understand, you'll grow the plants of confusing and terrifying consequences instead of taking pride in or capitalizing on your garden. If you engage the narratives around the nobility and utility of money, fancy products, and fantasy posture, you might be well-consumed by the idea that you give a fuck what strangers on the internet think. You might align your morals to an imperative to post, lie, and curtail a raw opinion, if you bothered to form one at all.
I, always, feel the pull of "normalcy." Every day I spend consumed by media, I think "I could be…" What? Answer the question. Driving to work? Wearing down my car? Sitting around waiting for a meeting to start? Resenting getting paid half or less of what I'm worth? Spending time taking direction or instruction from someone wholly captured by corrupted systems, obligations, and narratives that bleed into your awareness and make it hard to believe in anything? What could or should I really be doing that isn't patiently waiting for the narratives I truly believe in to get their time in the sun? I think you should be bored more often. I think when you work, it should feel meaningful and useful, not obligatory. I think you should write songs, and talk with me all day about TV or who's left that can reliably report on the world. I think we should be building something together.
But, I know my motivations and what incentivizes me. I don't trust that you do. I mainly don't trust that you do because you all sound the same. And if everyone is saying the same shit, where are "you?" Is it where you belong, or where you've stuck yourself? Are you fighting the correct fight? Are you fighting at all? Or are you laboring under a narrative of your victimization and circumstance? Are you suffering the delusion that tomorrow is guaranteed? Are you pretending you don't matter?
I've started to go overboard in my TV consumption having mildly shifted my approach to it. For how many hours I've spent sorting and separating things, it dawned on me that I don't want to sit for hours and just watch cartoons or sitcoms. Each story or style registers in approximate lanes of intrigue or interest, and my motivation for engaging heavily depends on what my environment is otherwise incentivizing.
If I need to "kill time," it's a stream of shows I have either a passing familiarity with, or ones that have been popular that I never cared for at the time or don't interest me anymore than a random painting might at a gallery. I'm not anticipating an episode of NCIS or Law & Order is going to put me in a particularly thoughtful place about compelling narratives. They're safe and familiar, that's why they never die, and are wholly uninteresting.
If I want to challenge myself to think deeper about why something is catching my attention or what makes it different, I put on a different set of shows. Maybe it's cast chemistry, the joke timing, the way it's shot, drawn, or paced. Maybe it's having a compelling heartbeat and message. Maybe it's an individual's kick-ass ability to sell what's otherwise unsellable. Maybe I'm delusional and certain works just click with those delusions. I think shows like Legion and Scavengers Reign flirt with transcending the medium entirely. I'd feel absolutely brilliant if I could achieve the humor of Shameless, The Great, or Airplane!. If I could transport you like I've been transported to Cinema Paradiso and Dogville, I'd feel I've put in the right kind of work.
I think I connect with creators who tap into the incentive space that can barely pronounce "money" or the words "I don't have enough." I think there's a craving and unyielding desire to connect and be understood at a transcendent level. It's a level that exists only when you start from the right place and weave together all of the pieces that inform the message. That's the music, the glances, and other gritty details that are both absolutely necessary and hopelessly insufficient on their own. "I would have made a better movie, but the budget!…" "I would have called you for dinner, but I've been so busy!…" 100 million dollar movies have been made for $15,000. I can eat in 10 minutes, if that's what you really need from me.
I separate my desire to feel useful and needed from what the evidence needs to look like in order for me to claim I actually am. I'm not a good counselor when I can juggle 150-200 people on my caseload. I'm a good counselor when a plurality of those people say something like, "When I started practicing what you said, I felt better, people noticed, and now I'm able to do this next thing." I'm not a "good person" through merely refraining from going out of my way to cause harm or a few bucks I might toss to a charity. I define "good person" as a useless concept first, and focus on being comfortable existing altogether in whatever manner my personhood brings forth. I then try to notice when what I do or say makes me feel good or seems to result in what I deem good generating from others.
Christians think it's good to indoctrinate contradictions and capitalize on mental weakness. Muslims think it's good to ignore the consequences of normalizing radical hateful mantras. Conservatives think it's good to control women and enshrine greed and grift. Liberals think it's good to pretend they don't have their own totalitarian compulsions that have destroyed important pillars of speech and science. Most people think it's appropriate to use as broad and incoherent ever-changing labels like "Christian" "Muslim" "conservative" and "liberal" to race away from any real discussion about how any given individual abuses the terms to their self-serving narrative ends.
Every layer of your life incentivizes you to speak and operate in a manner that protects you from crashing too hard against normative practices. Right or wrong, good or bad, true or false, useful or useless, constructive or destructive…familiar binaries that arrest our capacity to investigate what's underneath or beyond the traps they set. It's a place of your subjective and yet removed observation of your experience operating under their spells.
The more "normal" I try to be, the angrier I feel. The more I've tried to be like the "friend" people wanted, the more alienated and like a liar I felt. The more I was begged to "love" as others professed to love, the harder things crashed when the truth was finally allowed to be spoken. The "work" I took so much pride in was never recognized or rewarded. The things I was "afraid" of had nothing to do with their actual consequences or my deep understanding of their nature. The people I thought I looked up to were brief ideals painted upon the infinitely fallible. The expectations I built for myself were bred from spite, naivety, and insecurity. The story I was telling myself was stuck, and I was pretending I wasn't obligated to continue writing it every time I needed to.
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