As someone who suffers with OCD, the disorder has taught me a valuable skill, to question strong emotions.
Emotions aren’t wrong or bad, and I do not advise suppressing them, but when you read, watch or listen to something that raises your blood-pressure, it’s important to take a beat.
In the age of global social media warfare and government sponsored trolling, the internet is more than ever a huge minefield of misinformation, spread with the intent of creating divisions, and anger.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Anti-science / Anti-mask movement in the US has its roots in either the Chinese or Russian Government’s efforts to undermine the western world.
But this goes beyond the pandemic, in life, people will tap into your primary emotions in order to manipulate your decisions, your wallet, or your ballot.
The key to not being blustered about via the emotional whims is to practice mindfulness. When you are confronted with an emotionally charged “fact” or headline, take a moment, and question, what is this person, passage or quote trying to get from me.
You won’t be able to do this immediately, and it takes practice but eventually, you might be able to avoid being so upset all the time.
Jungian philosophy is complex and multifaceted, but one of the primary ideas behind it is the confrontation and channeling of the shadow.
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
― Carl Jung
The shadow of man dives down to hell, and yet so many people walk around as if they don’t have a choice to be good.
I read about this idea and decided to try and embrace the capacity in myself to do great evil, and focus on the choice not to do evil.
I logically understood the ideas, and yet part of me resisted truely embracing it.
Then on a chance, I watched Beastars. In the story the Main character struggles with this percise Jungian problem. Most of the show he acts as if he has no capacity to do evil, and as such is weak, and not truely a good man (wolf). However, when presented with his dark side, he confronts it, and eventually is able to channel his darkness to save those he loves.
Suddenly for me the philosophy clicked, some part of my brain was able to wholly embrace the ideas.
This is my long winded way of saying that even if you logically want to change, you will struggle to unless you have a story to attach to that logic.
Humans are Firstly Emotion Based
The old adage you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink, is rightfully translated, you can teach a man anything but you can’t make him belive it.
Because there is a part of our brain that attaches information to stories. The shaman, the lore master, the priest, all of them teach through stories. What is any religious text but a story that teaches lessons?
So, my advice is if you want to truly internalize things you have to find a story that teaches it, or you might struggle.
In my life there have been plenty of times where I was actively bored. At work during a lull, at school in a mandatory class, or maybe just on a summer day when it’s too hot to ride my bike.
However, there seems to be a second type of boredom that tends to come in during otherwise pleasant parts of life, emotional boredom.
I think media, of all sorts, paints life with bright colors, vivid greens that make our trees seem dead in comparison, beautiful tans that make our own bodies seem pale, and bright blues that shame the real sky. But more sinister, media, traditional and social, posits that reality is a constant melodrama.
In writing, we learn to ask a question when writing, “is this the most exciting part of the character’s life? If not, then write about that instead.” And all media mimics this formula. It’s why we never see characters go to the bathroom, brush their teeth, eat corn flakes, or go in for a routine physical where the results are all just OK.
This is fine, as what I just described sounds like a horrible form of entertainment. The problem becomes when we stop actively reminding ourselves that all media, from Instagram posts to blockbusters is the most exciting slices of a person’s life cultivated and designed to provoke an emotion. We begin to look at our own life subconsciously as lesser, and more sisterly begin to seek drama.
This emotional boredom becomes the basis of dissatisfaction. Comparison leads the person to stimulate their lives, and many and young man has fallen prey to this.
The man might seek out partners who are not healthy, but are exciting. He might reject all sensible jobs to do something risky, not because he actually believes in it, but because the idea of his life being ordinary, happy, contented or mostly ok bores him.
Be wary of creating or joining drama.
Not that you shouldn’t get involved with things your a geuninely passionate about, what I am saying is don’t invent or seek out problems that aren’t yours.
Sometimes we hang out with our friends and they vent to us, and suddenly we find ourselves as stressed out as the person actually experiencing the situation. We might day dream solutions, or even follow the situation with bated breath. But in the end, that’s not our business.
Being a human is boring sometimes. Learn to sit with that, be ok with it, and be wary. Sometimes things are worth fighting for, but more often than not you just might be bored.
(PS: If EVERYTHING is boring, go see someone if you can, that’s a symptom of depression)
So, today, and for the past week or so I’ve been drained. My OCD has been really acting up, and I’ve been having to deal with that.
I have been putting in the work but my heart isn’t it.
But that’s ok. You are allowed to, especially in stressful situations, lose motivation, and not want to do anything.
The key is to show up, and try your best, but don’t be to harsh. Focus on your responsibilities to others and yourself, but don’t worry if you lost all your motivation, it will recharge, it just needs time. You aren’t a machine.
There is a strange ethic that runs through the culture like a common cold, or maybe a better comparison would be Mono. You know that disease that all the teens gave each-other when Stacy would make out with Jack and Jack with John, and John with Jill, ect. It would make you lethargic, and not want to do much of anything.
The ethic I am so haphazardly talking about is, well the idea of making up for yesterday.
“i didn’t eat well yesterday, best eat extra good today.”
“I didn’t workout hard enough yesterday and so I’d better do double today.”
and So on.
But the problem with this mentality is that it is a self replicating problem, and discourages what I think is the ultimate virtue that being Habit.
Habit, and true habit, is kind. Now some will say you must be firm, and kindness is weakness, and trivial kindness can be a sort of weakness.
After all, is it truly kind to simply let yourself become fat? No, it’s not, and it’s a trivial sort of kindness, a short term sort of kindness that is confused with genuine kindness.
Genuine Kindness is to forgive the mistakes of the past and to simply resolve to show up, and do your best today.
Notice I said, forgive, not to forget, it’s important to remove stumbling blocks in the road, and to make the journey as easy as possible.
But the key, the ultimate key is to simply show up, and frankly that’s what most people need anyhow. Many a job or task simply needs a touch of human attention to run properly.
The world you see is quite boring in it’s growth. Even the most exciting events , avalanches, birth, and volcanic eruptions, are actually the final culmination of a million, million little actions taken over a period of time.
So, the key is to simply show up, and peruse that greater kindness. Each day take note of the past, and your failings and then put them aside.
If you ate poorly yesterday, eat well today, but just as well as you intended to yesterday, no more.
If you quit early exercising, exercise as much as you intended the day before and no more.
If you do force yourself to do more, your mind will inevitably, and quite subtly begin to see the task you want it to do as a punishment, and like all punishment will seek to avoid it.
If you further push yourself with negativity, you will catch your mind between two bad options, and well that is a very bad place for a mind to be. Learned helplessness is one hell of a drug.
So, to vastly simplify complex ideas, treat yourself as you’d want a kind father, mother, coach or authority figure to treat you. You can hold yourself to high standards, but when you fail, this kind figure steps in.
He or she says, “now, listen here, you failed to meet X goal, and that’s ok, but I know you can do it. So let’s just try our best today.”
While this is simple, if you’ve been negative to yourself, it can take a long time. That’s alright, keep trying, keep forgiving yourself, and keep showing up.
We are raised into a world, if we are lucky we are taught love, only to come finally to the realization that everything, even your body will be torn from you.
This is the first half of most existentialists’ arguments, and where many a young person stumbles. They read this and tossing aside the difficult, and often cryptic words of a philosopher decry “NOTHING MATTERS!” and so they slink into the realm of the NEET.
Ultimately this is a mistake, because it is a false wisdom predicated not on life experience but the experience told to them by a far away authority figure. (many of which are hopelessly misunderstood, and in the second half of the work that is so casually tossed away find logic to refute Nihilism.)
The truth is Nihilism is most often unearned. “Nothing matters , god is dead, there is no point to anything”, goes the Nihilist, but go to any of those saying these things, and ask, “what have you done to prove or disprove this?”
ideas you see are sticky things, and people forget that at our core we are a very advanced animal that came from a much less advanced iteration. This iteration favors laziness and ease to all things, and Nihilism fits this bill perfectly.
“If Nothing matters? Well then I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to have any responsibilities. It’s not my fault, the world is inherently meaningless so I have no motivation.” is the line of logic, and it is a terribly convenient one too.
It is much more difficult to go out and test these “truths” than it is to simple accept them, and moreover it is a vast over estimation of the cognitive power of the self.
Can anyone really know if nothing matters? Do we know without a shadow of a doubt that the heat death of the universe will happen? OR that in that strange place after it there may be some change, some dissonance that starts everything? Or that there might not be some interaction from dimensions above?
We do not. To reject Nihilism, and for that matter all dogmas is to assert one’s own humility in the face of the unknown.
To paraphrase Socrates ” all I know is that I know nothing.” And there is some beauty in that.
Some of you don’t take care of yourself. You might argue that you are too busy helping others or maybe you imagine yourself not worthy, but there a few simple, yet difficult things to do every day.
The key is to form the habit. It sounds silly, but more than results you want to create a consistent habit of doing things and build from there .
When I started exercising, I wanted to run full out for 3 hours, but instead I started by just putting on my running shoes and walking 10 minutes around the block. Sounds weak right?
I Just kept showing up. I made it so ridiculously easy that I’d have no excuse not to show up, and I kept showing up.
Eventually, my body was like, well if were already here, and extended the walk time to 20 minutes, 30 minutes, Then it became run time, then it slowly added in body muscle and so on.
This is how i’ve gotten anything done in my life, slowly, but surely.
There will be days you will fail, that’s normal. The key is to simply pretend like it never happened. If you try and “make it up” you foster resentment.
You’ve got to be your own coach, firm but kind, who pushes you not under duress but out of the belief that you can, and will do better. Moreover, the belief that you deserve to be healthy, happy and accomplish your goals.
It’s a cliche, but showing up is the main hurdle, and once you’ve done that and established the habit you can build off that working model and make it better.
Whats the worst that can happen? You can always go back to nothing.
Roar as the dawn rises, in the stench of blood and rot. we dwell in cities iced in luxury but the core is soured, old milk on hot pavement, the carton looks fresh and new, but chunky truth hides in the middle.
So many rage. I see it. I feel it. Every time a shooting happens, each time a man’s neck is kneeled upon, each time a polotical scandal breaches the surface.
“Has the world ever been this bad?” Utter lips, their question rhetorical, they know in their heart it’s never been this bad.
Or has it?
I am going to say something controversial, the world is better than ever.
The world was much much worse in the past, but we didn’t know about it. If you wanted to learn about the atrocities that a black man in the south lived through you might have to actually track him down and ask him, or more likely his surviving relatives.
If you wanted to know about political corruption you had to hope the newspaper told you about it.
Now everyone is a whistle-blower, and the hot steaming truth of the horrors of the world once hidden from us is at our pocket level each day, and each night.
Moreover, we are fed this horrible info, because capitalistic systems have figured out that the best way to monetize us is to make us upset.
And so we walk around in a state of low level upsetness, each horror we consume adding to our guild and existential debts.
I ask, what value have we derived from the overflow of knowledge? What do we glean from this consistent impotent rage, checked by flare ups?
Nothing.
And why? Because Citizens of the United States are constantly allowing themselves to be distracted by the next outrage. They eschew dialog in favor of looking good to their peers, and they push agendas lazily from behind a keyboard.
This is not an indictment, Real, Long Lasting change, is difficult, messy, unsatisfactory, and slow.
The kind of change being demanded by various protest movements is one of systemic policy making, and requires organization and an effective organization requires a unified ideal.
Part of the reason many left leaning movements in the united states have fallen apart can be see in the disparate elements of the party.
Not that this is a particularly good thing, but the right wing of the united states was quick to back the president. While seemingly spineless this sort of rallying can be no means dismissed as ineffective.
Most protest movements fall apart simply because they have no unification. Factions within the movement draw lines, and preform social signaling to prove they are the most worthy.
Without a clear structure, clear goals, and a unified long-term strategy, people who want to enact change will either burn out their rage impotent or potentially more dangerously flock to utopian ideals.
One needs only look at the 20th century’s death camps, famines, wars, and police states to know how dangerous utopia can be.
Compassion is not weakness, even though we culturally associate it with weakness.
The reason is that so much of compassion is inauthentic, and comes from a place of compulsion.
Many people are not compassionate because they choose to be compassionate, but instead they feel they must be compassionate.
Who do they this debt to? If you nailed them down and asked them to explain who they were preforming for they’d shrug. The collective default is to be compassionate, but many have never consciously chosen to be compassionate, and calculated what they are giving up .
Now there are some who will ague this is not the true spirit of compassion. That compassion should be selfless and thoughtless, but that in and of itself seems worthless.
Sacrifice is not worth anything if it is compulsive.
True compassion is the strength to think about a situation, and see the benefit in being unkind to others, and there is a benefit if you are willing to pay the cost, noting that cost, and then deciding to be compassionate anyhow.
When you choose to be compassionate not because you feel you must, but because you feel you want to, you are no longer a slave to culture, and instead are kind from a position of strength. Thus kindness stops being compulsory weakness, but instead becomes conscious strength.
Rick and Morty is a great show. It’s a rather fun ride that pokes fun at our culture. However, there stands a problem in that Rick is hardly to be admired but I see many young men thinking he’s the best character in the show.
While I’ll agree that Rick is the most entertaining part of the show, but I’ll also argue he’s the least healthy member of the cast.
This is a common trope and attraction to the trope. Young men gravitate towards figures like the Joker, Dead-pool, Rick Sanchez , Bill the Butcher, and Walter White, just to name a few. These characters while fun to watch are ultimately failures in the real world, and without the constraints of fantasy are dysfunctional and deeply flawed.
Now, you might say, it’s only a show, I know it’s not real.
I agree, most people can tell reality from fiction, however, the stories we tell ourselves are important.
Humans are thinking animals however, we are also deeply emotional. This is why we can logically understand what is good for us and do something else anyway. We know eating Twinkies is bad, but we emotionally attach comfort to the food. We know dating X person is bad for us, but we are emotionally attached to them.
Thus, when we become emotionally attached , and even admire fictional characters, we risk emulating them, and the messes they are.
The truth is, you can like someone without admiring their behavior. The key is to consciously admit the parts you admire, yet keep within your mind the truth that this character is ultimately a dysfunctional real human.
It sounds silly, but the conscious choice really can have an impact.
Max W Beaulieu 