Why work hard?
Do I lack for motivation, or for faith? Or am I just too tired?
I can’t sleep any more than I do. I still think a lot. But I don’t concentrate on any one thing for long. I’d say I lack discipline, but I’ve never lacked it before, when it came to doing something I cared about. I just don’t care any more. There’s no payoff. I earn enough money at my job to survive and enjoy some simple luxuries.
And yet, if it isn’t obvious by now from my writing, I am very unsatisfied.
I’ve smashed or had smashed too many of my illusions, and nothing has leapt in to fill the void they have left behind in my self-image, and in my sense of my relationship to the rest of the world: to people and to society. I’m just a tool. I’m not a leader, nor a visionary. There’s no where to go that I might lead people there. There’s no vision to change things; things are the way they are, and cannot be changed. I can still dream, but they are hollow dreams. Pipe dreams.
If I want anything, I want stimulation. Excitement. But as my girlfriend and I have agreed upon, excitement is predominantly a result of risk, and what is there to risk, and for what? My life is stable and things are reliable. The only other kinds of excitement are contrived, by deliberate self-sabotage, or imaginary, or downright delusional: the tendency to confuse events in your life and relationships with indicators of your self-worth. But self-worth is a given except for the neurotic or hopelessly confused.
Life as experienced by human beings can be reduced to the question of desire and its satisfaction, and fear and its avoidance. Something is lost in that reduction, admittedly, but mostly it’s just superfluous noise and illusion.
Mostly. I’m stuck on beauty. The cognitive mechanics of beauty—like its definition, like the very thing itself—are elusive. For myself, I cannot find beauty for merely seeking it. Beauty comes unbidden, erratically, frustratingly, and more and more rarely. True beauty is exceedingly rare.
Much of what people call beautiful are merely contorted reflections of their own confused beliefs. That is, much of supposed beauty is a kind of vanity. When the result of our own work seems beautiful to us, be it craft or child-rearing, we are often just congratulating ourselves indirectly. The need to indulge in self-satisfaction is a disease: a deformity of social relevance. Expressed at its worst in things like child beauty pageants and art exhibits. “Look what I did! Validate me!”
Ego drives us. Ego: a purely social construct. Humans are social animals, even the anti-social ones. People who say they hate people merely hate being judged by them, while they desperately long to be affirmed by them. They over-value people’s opinions of them, as a result of having twisted their own natural self-worth by necessity, in order to survive a damaging childhood. They denigrated themselves to please a dominating, insecure parent, and that self-denigration has become infused into their self-image, and they need perpetual assurance of their importance to others in order to keep it under control. Even the slightest confirmation of their deluded fear of their own worthlessness sends them spiralling into self-doubt and despair. But it’s all lies upon lies.
Just imagine if we were all emotionally stable. What a boring world. People would cause trouble just to keep it interesting. Because, yes, we are that superficial and self-absorbed.
Meanwhile, there’s an entire universe out there to explore. But we’re so weak and pathetic, we can’t even figure out how to get our lazy asses off this little speck of a planet on which we’re stuck. We’d rather spend our time worrying about our make-up or our cell phone plan, or trying to enforce democracy on backwards nations.
It’s my own fault. I could have been an engineer, but I was too fastidious to get my hands dirty. I wanted to stay safe in my imagination. But dreams turn to ashes if you don’t work to make them come true. No one else can do it for you. I try to salve my unhappiness with thoughts of somehow contributing, perhaps making software to control machines of exploration, or writing science fiction, but I can’t seem to find the conviction. I’ve given in to pessimism, a belief that the world doesn’t care, and that it’s out of my hands, that it’s too late.
What’s out there? Is there anything more than “carbon compounds and noble gases”? The size of the galaxy is incomprehensible in human terms, let alone the entire, possibly infinite universe. Could there really be nothing worth discovering? Are we that arrogant to think that we as human beings, as Earthlings, are the only part of it worth a damn? Or is there nothing to find but more planets with pretty rings or other visions suitable for computer desktops?
We must be honest and admit that the universe’s infinity of possibilities scares us, and threatens our self-importance, still. Centuries after Galileo, we still fear to lose our place at the pinnacle of importance in the universe. Still afraid for our fragile self-worth and its imaginary indicators.
How can you hate other human beings without hating yourself? We’re all the same, after all. We’re all lazy, self-centred, ignorant, deluded, appetite-driven eating-shitting-fucking machines. How we manage to think of ourselves as important in that context, I have no idea, because like the man said, we are no different than bacteria (although he said “virus” in self-conscious error). Following one’s genetic programming slavishly is nothing of which to be proud, nor is simply being self-conscious of it, nor even being conscious of some delusion that the circle of life is beautiful, when it’s mostly horrible and wasteful. It’s just more genetic programming, anyway.
What is human about human beings is not our genetic programming, but the possibility of our having developed the ability to transcend it. And that elusive possibility, that dream of a soul, if not the classical religious conception, is the only thing worth the trouble of all this effort and strife and disappointment.