Motivation

I have a long-standing issue with motivation in my life. There's very little (outside of food and shelter) that pushes on my very hard.

Most of my life efforts have generally been motivated by avoidance of discomfort, not seeking something for its own worth to me.

Otherwise I've done things in service of the needs, desires, demands of others (or, at least, what I perceived those to be).

In my early life, the Other that I served this way was my mother. As I became an adult, I started to focus on whoever I was intimate with.

This ties into my earlier posting regarding Futility. I don't think of myself (and in particular, my needs and desires) to have any real worth; everyone else comes first (even my dogs). As a result I don't find much enduring motivational value in my personal needs/desires. It all seems pretty much pointless.

I long for something that matters enough to me to get out of bed for (other than going to work to earn enough to put food on the table and a roof over my head).

On recurring theme in these feelings is the imperative that anything I do be "productive" (something I think I picked up from my mom).

I really can't do anything for its own sake or purely for enjoyment without feeling like I'm slacking. Reading for pleasure, at least in certain contexts (bedtime mostly), feels exempt from this.

This means that most of my preferred leisure activities come with a burden of guilt and shame over not doing other things that I "ought" to be doing (housework, yard work, repairs, remodeling, or anything that will earn well-defined, more or less immediate monetary benefits).

It's a "business before pleasure" imperative (which feels like my Grandpa, my mom's father). The problem is that "business" in this context is basically never-ending, there's always something else practical, "productive" that I could be doing; so there's little room for genuine pleasure.

It feels like anything I find enjoyable is at least slightly tainted.

I think this is at least part of why I struggle to get a head of steam going about my writing. There's a part of  me that shames me that it's a waste of time.

Realizations

I've had a couple of revelations over the last few days.

The First I'm recognizing right now (not for the first time really) is that I need to write down my revelations pretty damn quick or I'll forget them.

The Second I came across last week, having to do with how I don't finish things or generally allow myself to get too deeply involved in anything.

School and work are exceptions to that, they trump that impulse (though I did go through some periods where school took a back seat)

The Third I came upon this morning while driving to work. I had a whole train of thought I wanted to blog about and now I can't recall what it was. God, I hate that.

Perhaps it will come back to me as I write.

Later...

It did come back to me. It was about reason and spirituality. I was asking myself whether I think (believe?) there's something bigger than reason and logic.

Clearly there are things other than that; but I ask myself whether there's something that encompasses them, but goes beyond. How would I know what that is? How do I trust it if it's not amenable to the intellectual tools I have?

Another Annoyance

What is it with web site registrations that insist you supply a "Title"?

I'm Stephen Posey, I don't generally go by "Mister" Stephen Posey and I don't care to be addressed that way, yet when registering for some sites, I'm forced to pick a title or I can't complete the registration.

Thinking about this, I speculate some sites may use this as a proxy for asking for people's gender, which I suppose is not PC (if not, in fact, of questionable legality).

The problem is not all the titles offered on most sites are gender specific ("Dr." in particular), so the result is imperfect.

For most sites, I'd suggest asking themselves why they think they need to know a person's gender, and why they think they can't ask for it directly.

If there is insufficient reason (and better targeting advertising is not a good enough reason, IMNSHO, YMMV), then don't ask and don't try to do an end run by demanding some proxy factoid.

Sites with legitimate "need to know" (e.g. health, financial, certain kinds of surveys) are logically exempt from this.

Otherwise they should be up front about what it is they want to know (and why); and allow that the registrant may not want to provide the information.

Futility and Passion

Yet again I read something about how to live a fulfilled, happy human life by finding something larger, something more important that oneself to pursue (latest was in the New York Times this past Sunday).

To me, it's not that I can't decide which is most important, rather that all of them seem pretty equally unimportant.

I've been told a few times to "just pick one", but that eliminates precisely the sense of purpose and passion that seems part and parcel of the whole notion.

It's far from clear to me that anything any of us do is of any consequence in the scheme of the long unfolding of the universe. Humans are relative upstarts on planet Earth, and will one day be no more (possibly sooner rather than later given our current proclivities to foul our living space).

Eventually the Earth itself, then our sun will be gone; and (if current physics has it more or less right) ultimately all matter in the universe will disappear into a steadily cooling fog of subatomic particles.

True, this outcome (if accurate) remains billions of years in the future, and it's a fair question of why that should matter to my individual life or be a consideration of the current sweep of human history/existence; but I also ask why shouldn't it?

They say that operating within the context of awareness of one's own mortality can be a great motivator, but everyone dies; species become extinct; eventually the Earth will become uninhabitable in some fashion, and even stars burn out or explode.

The prospect of my Death holds no great terror for me, in fact there's some appeal, it's the opportunity to leave behind all this foolishness and to find out what actually happens (I suspect nothingness).

So why does anything anybody does matter?

I feel compassion for those who proceed in ignorance of -- and hold a certain admiration for those I see around me who feel compelled to do something anyway, in spite of -- this Truth.

That admiration that doesn't affect my own feelings of demotivation to put out any great effort toward any temporary purpose; and it appears to me, in human terms, all purposes are temporary, in the more or less short-term, and assuredly in the long-term.

So, why am I still hanging around on Planet Earth? You may well ask.

I don't have a good answer for you, there was a time I postponed doing anything about it because I'd committed myself to certain people, and I didn't want to abandon them or cause the distress that my leaving would produce.

That's particular people, particular commitments, not the sort of grand purpose that's supposed to underlie a worthwhile life.

I feel stuck. Like I'm just marking time and "Just waiting on the pier til Charon comes." as Klaatu put it in "A Routine Day".

My main motivator is avoidance of discomfort, mixed with some hedonic search for minor pleasures (food, knowledge, intellectual challenge, love, sex, dreams).

I search for something that inspires true passion in me and come up empty-handed.

Can I turn this problem on its head and make my it my passion to search for something that's really worth being passionate about?

What are the candidates for that? More later.

Worth

Starting to write about my writing has gotten me to think about worth and value. In particular my worth and value.

I say I want to write and I want it to be so important and compelling to me that I can't not write (as I've heard is true for some artists and craftspeople about their mediums).

But the voices in my head (normal mental "tapes", old "shoulds" and "don'ts", nothing psychotic, at least not yet ;-)) tell me that I have to do something "productive", and outside of the writing that I do for my work and a few technical articles I wrote years ago, I don't have much to show for my writing (I did have a story published in my high school newspaper and I did win that literary essay contest in college).

Does "productive" only equate to financial remuneration? If it doesn't contribute directly to the "bottom line" of daily living, is it worthless?

I hear the voice of my grandfather (my mother's father, who grew up during the Great Depression). He impressed upon me the necessity of doing something worthwhile; which to him meant putting food on the table and a roof over your family's head. Personal preference and desires were of little importance.

He was a very practical man, he appreciated art and literature (at least that produced prior to his birth) but seemed to look askance at the lifestyles followed by many artistic types; I think he felt that someone who made their living doing something so "frivolous" was somehow cheating.

If I genuinely want to do this with my life, then I need to get past these old preconceptions.

Atheism

So, from some of my earlier writings this you might infer that I am an Atheist; but I have to say I'm not sure what I am, I'd be all too pleased to feel differently, but to me the evidence is pretty strongly against any being like the classical interpretation of "God". I don't pretend to know for certain one way or the other.

While I'm dubious about God, in my life I've personally encountered some things that lead me to believe/suspect that the purely physical universe of Logical Positivist reductionism is not the whole picture; but again I don't pretend to know precisely what those things imply about the true nature of reality.

Our brains seem wired to attribute "agency" to the processes of the natural world, this can be sensibly traced to our evolutionary history and so such attribution is suspect at best.

I'm not a solipsist; I'm convinced that something other than my consciousness and sensorium exists.

It seems highly unlikely that all the other wildly and wonderfully exotic beings I encounter in my experience (animals, other people) are merely internal constructions.

Nonetheless, it remains unclear to me how I can be certain that anything I perceive is necessarily real.

So, where does this leave me?

I find myself in a bit of a quandary. I badly want there to be something other than/beyond mere physical existence; but I'm also very determined not to allow myself to be deluded by hope and wishful thinking. I'm all too well aware of the human proclivity for self-deception.

Writing

To put it simply: I want to be an author.

That said, I'm finding it very difficult to pursue that dream.

I know how to write, and I think I have some interesting things to say, but (always the but), I fret that it's not enough. Not interesting enough, not enough quantity, not enough "voice". And part of me wants assurance that it will be worth the effort ("worth it" meaning something like it pays the bills and puts food on the table).

So I create distractions for myself to avoid putting in the time and effort, and I've not submitted much of anything. I know rejections are a writer's stock in trade, and it would serve me better to acquire the "thick skin" recommended to any writer.

The Cool Whip Principle

My girlfriend and I were talking over lunch today about likes and dislikes.

We were eating a desert which she found less than satisfactory, because it had been made with "Cool Whip" (artifical whipped topping of some sort) rather than real whippped cream. She mentioned that she'd rather pay a bit more for quality ingredients, and generally would prefer not to eat artifical whipped topping.

During the course of our later conversation similar points about price vs. quantity vs. effort vs. quality led us to formulate something we decided to call the "Cool Whip Principle". We plan to refer to it whenever we encounter a situation where we have to chose among various competing impulses. We've decided we prefer to go with the quality angle for the most part and will seriously consider our options if that doesn't appear to be available.

For me this also brought to mind an equation that a former co-worker proposed, particular about work production:

Good, Fast, Cheap; pick two.

Humanity

I've been thinking about what it is that makes us human.

There's been a lot of ink spilled on the topic, and I'm not of the mindset that we're special in some fundamental/transcendent way, our differences from the rest of the animal kingdom are largely of degree rather than kind; nonetheless, it seems to me there's something about how we encounter the universe that warrants examination.

Language, culture, tool making, religion have all been posited as human activities that distinguish us; and all (with the possible exception of religion) have been found in some degree among other animal species.

What do all these things have in common? To my mind they all involve representation: the ability mentally to substitute one thing for another thing. This facility for abstraction is the foundation of most of our so called intelligence; including language, writing, mathematics, literature, art, philosophy, logic, science.

Of course, as the mystics warn, "The map is not the territory." Sometimes we get so caught up in manipulating our representations, that we forget that they are representations and forget that there was originally something that was represented.

This might be valuable in some disciplines (math comes to mind); but I think getting too far from experience creates many opportunities for self-delusion and waste.

Models/maps are always imperfect and incomplete, they fail to represent the reality entirely, which isn't a condemnation. Maps have "ends"; both in the sense of limits/edges as well as intended uses, it's when a model is pushed to serve beyond its ends that we can get into trouble.

Anybody out there?

It's a big leap into the unknown to start blogging like this. Is there anybody out there? I wonder whether anybody will read this (other than me obviously), why should anybody even care?

At the same time, I feel like making the time to do this and actually having something to say will be important for my writing going forward. Even if no one reads it.

I've often thought some of my observations might be interesting to others, pithy, or at least amusing. Where do I start?

Men's Rooms, part II

Something else I've noticed.  What is it with men picking their noses in the men's room and then smearing the result onto the wall behind the urinals or onto the walls of the stalls?

Give me a break, you're in a room with running water, toilet paper, hand towels, and trash receptacles; and the best (only?) thing you can think of to do with your nose goop is to smear it on the wall?

Back in college I used to graffiti when I saw this: "Free Boogers, Take One!" in the hope of drawing attention to this disgusting practice. I don't think anyone got it.

Men's Rooms

What is it with guys where they seem to need to mess up the place where they go to the bathroom?

Public men's rooms are some of the most disgusting places you'd never want to visit, they require constant upkeep, largely because the average man apparently feels little or no responsibility to keep the place even marginally clean.

I might attribute this to simple masculine laziness or carelessness (which I've been informed by women is pretty much endemic in the gender); but some of the things I've seen clearly were deliberate acts to damage or foul the space.

I recall from childhood young boys who'd do things like purposely overflow the toilets or stand in the middle of the room and spin around as they urinated.

Is that the level of behavior we're dealing with here?

Here we go again...

Well, I'm going to try this again. I've started blogs a couple of times before but never managed to keep it up.

With my newfound passion for writing, maybe it will be different this time. I'm hopeful.

We'll see what happens.